Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  The Church was also slow to insist that a priest had to officiate for marriages of the laity to be valid. In the mid-twelfth century Pope Alexander III considered issuing a ruling that a marriage was valid only if it had been solemnized in a church, but he ultimately decided the order was impractical. Marriage practices throughout Europe were still so diverse and so informal that such a declaration would, in the words of one European historian, “have rendered a massive proportion of marriages invalid.”4

  The Church was dealing with a population whose traditions considered mutual intent or the blessing of a parent sufficient to solemnize a marriage. If it had refused to accept these informal marriages as valid, how could it enforce its prohibitions against divorce and its strictures against “living in sin”? It wasn’t until the sixteenth century on the Continent—and not until 1753 in England—that governments and churches could enforce a rule requiring specific legal and public formalities to validate a marriage.

  Until the twelfth century the Church held that a marriage was valid if entered into by mutual consent and then sealed by sexual intercourse. This made nonconsummation grounds for annulment. Then, in the mid-twelfth century, Peter Lombard, Bishop of Paris, argued that if sex was necessary for a valid marriage, Mary and Joseph could not have been legally married. In Lombard’s view, a promise to wed (“words of the future”) did not create a marriage unless it was followed by sex, but he insisted that an exchange of consent in the present—“I take you as my husband” and “I take you as my wife”—made a marriage legally and sacramentally binding even if the couple did not engage in sex. Lombard’s views became official church teaching.

  This created a peculiar situation. If a couple claimed they were married by consent, no one could gainsay it, even if the parents could prove the two young people had never been alone long enough to have a ceremony or sleep together. But if only one of the pair claimed to have married by consent, and the Church believed it, the other was trapped for life, since nonconsummation was no longer grounds for divorce.

  The Church did not like being put in the awkward position of defending young couples who, by privately exchanging their vows, married in defiance of their parents’ wishes. In remedy, the Fourth Lateran Council declared in 1215 that “we absolutely prohibit clandestine marriages.” For a marriage to be valid, the council stated, three things were necessary: The bride had to have a dowry, which effectively undercut the independence of a young woman from her parents; banns had to be published beforehand; and the wedding had to take place in a church.

  As a result, a proper marriage became a long, drawn-out affair. It began with a formal betrothal negotiated by both sets of parents. This included a prenuptial marriage contract covering the property transactions that would occur at and after marriage, such as the amount of the dowry brought by the wife, the groom’s marriage gift to her, what arrangements would be made if the bride were widowed, and how property would be dispersed to children and grandchildren. If the man was expected to take over his parents’ farm or business, the marriage agreement might also stipulate the kind of support they could expect from the couple during their old age: a specific room in the house or in an adjacent home, with designated furnishings; a set amount of firewood each fall; a milk cow or a mule for personal use.

  Next came the reading of the banns at church for three consecutive weeks prior to the wedding. This was a way to inform the community about the impending marriage, so anyone could come forward if he or she knew of some reason (such as a prior marriage) that the wedding should not take place.

  Finally there was the formal exchange of vows at the church door, in front of witnesses and with the priest’s blessing. Friars, such as the one who agreed to marry the young lovers in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, were not under the authority of bishops and might be prevailed upon to conduct a secret or hasty wedding, but parish priests were subject to strict penalties if they married a couple in the absence of witnesses and posted banns.

  These provisions should have made secret weddings rare, and people who wanted to remain in everyone’s good graces took care to follow these procedures. But ultimately, the Lombard doctrine boiled down to this: A freely given consent to marry trumped all the other formalities that the Lateran Council had laid out so carefully. If a couple said, using the present tense, “I take thee as my husband” and “I take thee as my wife,” they were married, with or without witnesses, banns, blessings, or anything else, whether they said the words in a chapel, a kitchen, a field, or a barn, and whether or not they had ever had sex or taken up residence together.

  The Church viewed a clandestine marriage as disobedient, illicit, even reprehensible, but nonetheless valid. The basic principle of Christian marriage was that an unbreakable bond was created by the consent of the two parties. Consequently, although marriage was seldom a matter of free choice in any sense recognizable today, it was easier in medieval Western Europe to get married without the permission of parents and social superiors than it had been in the past or was in most other contemporary kingdoms or empires.

  But while there were now more ways to get into a legally recognized marriage, there were fewer ways to get out of it. By the twelfth century, when the Gregorian reformers really began to flex their muscles on the question of no marriage for the clergy and no divorce for the laity, Church law no longer made any provision for divorce at all. A husband or wife could get a judicial separation for only three reasons: adultery; a partner’s heresy, described as “spiritual fornication”; and extreme cruelty, although the cruelty had to be very extreme for a woman to initiate a separation. None of these reasons justified divorce. Even if a separation was granted, neither partner—not even the “innocent” one—could remarry.

  Only an annulment freed people to marry again. And even a woman’s failure to produce an heir was no longer sufficient grounds to annul a marriage. A man’s impotence was grounds for annulment, but to prove it, he had to submit to a humiliating ordeal designed to make sure he and his wife were not colluding to end their marriage. As one church legal expert laid out the procedure, “The man and woman are to be placed together in one bed and wise women are to be summoned around the bed for many nights. And if the man’s member is always found useless and as if dead, the couple are well able to be separated.”5

  In 1433, at York, England, the court recorded a case in which the “wise women” took the investigation into their own hands: “The . . . witness exposed her naked breasts and with her hands warmed at the said fire, she held and rubbed the penis and testicles of the said John. And she embraced and frequently kissed the said John, and stirred him up in so far as she could to show his virility and potency, admonishing him for shame that he should there and then prove and render himself a man. And she says, examined and diligently questioned, that the whole time aforesaid, the said penis was scarcely three inches long . . . remaining without any increase or decrease.”

  There were two other grounds for annulment. If the couple were too closely related, by blood or by the marriage of other relatives, their marriage could be dissolved. Annulment was also possible if one party had previously consented to marry someone else. Just as the church’s incest rules provided an escape hatch for many nobles and kings, the exchange of consent rule provided a useful way for commoners to claim that a marriage was invalid.

  In our day we can usually prove if a prior marriage existed by following a paper trail. But in the Middle Ages the court had only the doctrine of present consent for proof. The majority of disputes over marriage in the Middle Ages did not involve suits for divorce but were disagreements over whether a marriage had been contracted by consent. Imagine the possibilities for confusion, collusion, and outright fraud. A fortune hunter could claim that a rich woman had previously consented to a marriage and was therefore legally obliged to break off her engagement to another man. A woman in an unhappy marriage could belatedly “admit” that she had previously exchanged words of consent with another man, even though
she had never lived with him, so that she now had to leave her present spouse and go live with her “real” one.

  In 1337, Alice Palmer told the court that she had previously given Ralph Fouler five shillings to testify falsely that she had not agreed to marry Geoffrey Brown. Now, however, she regretted her denial and wanted the court to know that even though Geoffrey had subsequently married someone else, she had actually agreed to marry him first and was therefore his lawful wife. Was this a belated attack of conscience, or did she now believe he was a better prospect than she had first judged?6

  In the late thirteenth century, Edmund de Nastok received a handsome dowry from Richard de Brok for marrying Brok’s daughter Agnes. Then Elizabeth de Ludehale came to the court claiming a prior contract of marriage with Edmund. In this case, the court decided that Elizabeth and Edmund had cooked up the scheme beforehand, to set themselves up with the money Edmund received from Agnes’s father. They had to return the dowry, along with sixteen pounds in damages.

  It may surprise the modern reader to learn that until the seventeenth century the most typical prior consent suit was brought not by a deserted woman or unwed mother but by a man trying to force a woman into marriage after she had rejected him or had even married someone else. In 1470 a London court heard a case stemming from the competition of two rivals to marry a wealthy widow. One of the suitors, Robert Grene, asked a local lord of a manor to go to the home of the widow, Maude Knyff, to witness what would be said between Robert and Maude. The obliging lord testified that he looked through the window, saw the two embrace, and heard Maude pledge her troth to Robert and accept a ring from him. Maude vehemently denied this, claiming that Robert took a ring off her finger against her will.

  She also rebutted Robert’s testimony by calling a friend of hers to testify that she had seen Maude and Thomas Torald sitting together in the house and that Maude had told her, “Behold, here sits my husband,” to which Thomas responded: “For the greater and more evident notice of this matter, know that this Maude is my wife.”

  Most marriages did not involve such complications, of course. The power plays of royalty, the schemes of fortune hunters, and the stratagems of people trying to get around the prohibitions against divorce affected only a minority of couples. Moreover, despite the Church’s grudging acceptance of clandestine marriage, most people of the day did not believe marriage was meant to be a private decision. So although an enterprising young couple did have opportunities to defy their parents and neighbors, the marriage decisions of most commoners in Europe were as constrained in their own way as the marriage choices of the aristocracy.7

  Many European peasants in the Middle Ages were legally bound to a lord and his lands. Serfs owed their master a certain number of days of labor and a certain amount of produce each year, in addition to small monetary taxes. They also had to obey the lord’s will in many personal matters and submit themselves to his “justice.” The feudal lord’s “right of the first night,” whereby a nobleman had the right to deflower a peasant’s daughter upon her wedding, is a myth. But a lord typically did have a financial, if not a sexual, interest in his serfs’ daughters, and the Church rarely objected to the control he exercised over their marriages.

  In some regions the lord of an estate (or the abbot if a peasant worked on church lands) could prevent his serf from marrying a woman from another manor. In other regions, lords even had the right to choose husbands for their tenants’ daughters. As late as 1344 the lord of a manor in the Black Forest of Germany required that each of his male householders over the age of eighteen and every female fourteen or older had to marry someone of his choosing. The regulation applied even to widows and widowers. In other cases, peasants could pay fines that freed them to choose their own partners, but they were still required to marry somebody or pay even bigger penalties. In some places lords managed to make a profit even when their tenants didn’t marry. Women who were sexually active without being married had to pay leirwite—literally a fine for lying down, and another fine for each child born out of wedlock.8

  Landowners had a stake in their serfs’ marriages because the division of labor between husband and wife lay at the heart of rural economies. No individual, male or female, could run a farm single-handedly. The man focused on outdoor agricultural labor; indeed, a male peasant was usually called a plowman. In addition to plowing, he spread manure, dug peat for fuel, and harvested crops by hand, swinging heavy sickles or scythes. He threshed the grain, turned the hay, and sometimes hired himself out to work in the fields of larger landowners. His wife milked the cows, made butter and cheese, fed the chickens and ducks, cleaned and carded wool, prepared flax (a process that involved fifteen steps), brewed beer, and carried water. Women also took their surplus products to market, washed their clothes in the village stream, and had their grain ground at the mill. Both men and women helped with the harvest, gleaned the fields, and collected firewood. Women, like men, sometimes hired themselves out as agricultural laborers.

  Only rarely could a peasant man or woman carve out an independent life as a single person. The married couple peasant household was the basic unit of production. The dues this household owed to the lord were calculated on the basis of the work done by both the man and the woman. The yearly dues of chickens and eggs on the estates in medieval Germany, for example, were so explicitly considered the wife’s responsibility that a family was exempted from this payment when she was pregnant.9

  The importance of marriage in creating a viable household economic unit meant that even free peasants, who were not bound to a lord or an abbot, were very anxious to get themselves, and later their offspring, properly married. They were equally concerned that their neighbors marry appropriate spouses, because the very geography of village life and peasant farming made marriage a public matter. A family’s landholdings were often scattered into a number of separate long, narrow strips. A marriage that allowed for the amalgamation of side-by-side plots of land was considered particularly advantageous. But the regular rotation of crops and the proximity of landholdings required the whole village to decide what to plant where and when to plow and harvest. Even people with no direct economic interest in the outcome of a marriage had a stake in who married whom and whether the new husband or wife would be an asset to the neighborhood.

  Family farms in the medieval European countryside could not survive without networks of mutual aid and communal accountability. Many villages had customs like those recorded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries for Brigstock, England. There all the men were divided up into tithing groups of ten or more who took responsibility for one another’s behavior. If one committed a theft, for example, the others would have to produce him at court or be liable for punishment themselves.10 So for social as well as economic reasons, there was pressure on villagers to choose mates and in-laws who would pull their own weight in communal enterprises.

  Neighbors had many ways to prevent or punish matches they considered inappropriate. The threat of disapproval and ostracism was no small matter when you shared planting and plowing with your neighbors, did your wash together, and used a neighbor’s oven to bake your bread. Villagers might also engage in ritual harassment of the offending couple. These rituals, called charivaris, or “rough music,” were boisterous, obscene, humiliating, and sometimes painful ways to punish people who violated community norms. Neighbors surrounded the house, singing rude songs and burning effigies. They might even break in, pull the offenders out, and humiliate them by forcing them to ride backward on a mule or dunking them in a nearby pond.

  Such community demonstrations were often directed at a couple that seemed ill matched in age or status, thereby removing an eligible single person from an already uncomfortably small pool. Marriage outside the community was also frowned upon. Sometimes the young men or women of a neighborhood would physically confront a stranger who came courting, calling out rude names and pelting him or her with rocks and vegetables.

  Parents were anxious t
hat their children marry into the “right” families. Titles and kingdoms might not be at stake in village life, but having an in-law with a cousin in the bishop’s court or an uncle who was the lord’s bailiff could be a big asset in mediating disputes. The wealthier peasants were usually linked through marriage alliances, although a village might split into factions along lines of kinship, patronage, and intermarriage. Here again marriage was far too central to village life to be a couple’s private business.

  As a result, marriages in peasant villages could involve as many interested parties as those of minor nobles. Take the case of the fourteenth-century widow Raymonde d’Argelliers, who lived in the village of Montaillou, near what is now the border of France and Spain. Her second marriage, Raymonde told a court investigating heresy in the village, was “a result of the negotiations by the brothers Guillaume, Bernard, and Jean Barbès of Niort, the brothers Bernard and Arnaud Marty of Montaillou, Pierre-Raymond Barbès, priest of Freychenet, and Bernadette Tavern and Guillemette Barbès of Niort.”11

  Although peasants zealously scrutinized who should marry whom, they tended to be cavalier about the order in which a couple engaged in childbirth and marriage. A letter written by the Bishop of Lincoln, in England, in the thirteenth century noted that the traditional custom during a wedding, if a couple had had a child born before the ceremony, was to stretch a “care-cloth” over the child as the couple knelt in front of the altar, so the child was legitimized. According to English common law, the subsequent marriage of a couple did not legitimize their previously born children, but peasants simply ignored that.