Historian Sally Dixon-Smith On Medieval Love & Marriage | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"The majority of the Christian population who did get married. I mean, this is a period that we particularly associate with monasticism. With monks and nuns, with not getting married, but for by far the majority of Christians, marriage is absolutely normal. It's part of their lives. It's what shapes how they live everyday, their households, who they live, with their social contacts, their networks. And it's sort of estimated that probably about, only about 15% of people in this period didn't get married. Marriage is also a really important tie that bound in medieval society. So it's a very important way of making social connections...
When looking at the Church's approach to love and marriage, it's to do with the spiritual connectedness of marriage, how it can create spiritual connections between man and God, between the people in actually in the marriage and between their families. And this idea of also that marriage can be used for peacemaking. And this actually has really quite important ramifications in terms of some of the rules about who and how you could get married as a Christian in the Middle Ages.
So one of the things that the church is very concerned about is that Christians should marry outside of the group of people they're already related to in various ways. And this is because marriage is a bond that can create love, friendship, compassion, and can be an incredibly valuable tool in peacemaking. So if you'd like it's a shame to waste it on people you're already bound to, that you already share interests with. And you can see that in the Middle Ages, you know, marriages are often part of peace treaties on a national scale, but also on a more local scale. There's a strong assumption by the church, that love, affection, caring for the other person, putting them first is something that will develop in marriage. Great if you've got it beforehand, but that this is something that that will grow through working together within the marriage...
‘This kind of freedom of choice is very important. So consent makes a marriage, how do you exchange consent? There are three ways, really.
The first is words of present consent. So if you like, the I dos. So this is literally saying, there's no set phrases, there doesn't have to be a specific set phrase, but it's something along the lines of either I marry you, or I take you as mine. And it was normal. And it was expected that parish priests would teach their parishioners something appropriate. Something that also shows that priests are not necessarily there and don't have to be there when you're getting married. This is something that you can do on your own. And so once you've exchanged those present, words of present consent, you are married. This is for life. This is indissoluble, this is an absolutely legally binding bond.
There's also a second way of getting, of exchanging consent, which seems to have been actually the most usual way to get married in the Middle Ages. And this is exchanging words of future consent, like I will marry you, yeah, let's get married, and then expressing your present consent to marriage by having sex. And so this idea of you agree to marry, then you have sex, the sex sort of means that, yes, you mean it here and now. You want to be married. Now you're married, it's indissoluble. That's for life. That's done. And you see this actually being used to sort of enforce within s-, within society as well. So there was often a feeling that, in fact, single people having sex with each other, wasn't a great problem, something that obviously the church did consider a big problem, fornication. And so what tends to happen later in this period is that, if you like, people who are living in sin, who are sort of notorious couples, who are having sex but not getting married, can be hauled up before church courts, and made to publicly get engaged, so that if they then decide to have sex, again, they are married, whether they like it or not, and it's called under pain of marriage, if you like. So this, marriage used as a kind of penalty if you like.
So besides being able to give consent, by verbally, and also verbally plus physically, there's a third way of showing control and exchange consent, that was far more gestural. And this is actually a gift exchange. And so it's normally when a man gives a woman something that represents the desire to marry or the agreement to marry, and the woman accepts it from the man. And so technically, this is called a suburation [sp?]. And it can be anything, as long as both parties understand what its symbolism is, but it was often a ring that was given by the man to the woman.'...
The fact that this also gesture is, is so powerful and can bind you for life means that there are actual warnings from the church, not to muck about with this. So the statutes of Salisbury in the early 13th century actually give a warning about this, that you shouldn't muck about with this incredibly potent symbolism of the wed, of the wedding. And it says, it says that young men should be really, really avoid putting anything vile or precious on a woman's hand, in case they accidentally bind themselves in marriage. Even though you might think that you're joking, that you've actually pledged yourselves to the burden of matrimony.
And you can see with these kind of ways of giving consent sort of verbally and gesturally and verbally plus sex, that there can be confusion, an actual, genuine confusion between couples about whether they are married or aren't married, or you know, disputes. One thinks they are and one thinks they're not. And you can see this reflected in some literature. So for instance, in Troilus and Cressida, Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida, there is a scene where it, and the word Chaucer uses is playing, they exchange their rings, and it's fairly clear that he thinks they're married or considers that they are married, and she doesn't...
There was a proper, if you like proper marriage ceremony available with a priest, but you didn't have to have that in order to be legally married. So as we can see, it's actually incredibly, possibly stupidly easy to get married. And these are normally described as impediments to marriage, that I think the easiest way to explain it is if you think of, you know, if you're either writing a job description or looking at a job description when you're applying for a job, and they have the sort of columns of essential and desirable.
So there are certain rules about marriage that are essential. So for instance, you have to marry another Christian. You have to marry somebody who is available to be married, they can't be married to somebody else, and they can't also be kind of bound to the church by a religious bow. And bigamy is actually used as a word in the Middle Ages for this kind of having two bonds at the same time, a bond to the church and trying to get married or, or, at the same time, and it's also used for what we would call today probably serial monogamy. And why this is seen as bigamy comes back to this idea of the symbolism, if you like, the symbol, the Christian spiritual symbolism of marriage, representing union of Christ and the church.
It's, the ideal and best marriage is just one person with one person. Of course, if that person dies, you are free to get married again. But that second marriage somehow is, if you like, less spiritually potent or doesn't have quite the perfect symbolism, because there's always this ghost of the previous relationship and the previous marriage in the background. However, having said this, though, you know, from the church’s point of view might not have been a spiritually wonderful, second and subsequent marriages were very, very common… That [first] marriage was seen as more correct. And, as I say, more symbolically perfect than the later and subsequent marriages...
Ideally, you shouldn't get married to someone who you've been committing adultery with, because that legitimizes or puts a sacred spin on something that's sinful...
Getting into a marriage is incredibly easy. Getting out of a marriage can be incredibly hard. Divorce in our sense of the word of ending a marriage that everyone accepts was absolutely fine. Just really doesn't exist. And this is another word a bit like wedding. That has quite a different meaning in the Middle Ages. So the word divorce or divorcem [sp?] is used, but it means either an annulment. So that means that say you did marry someone who was already, you know, married to the church, therefore that wasn't a marriage. So it's just, it's null and void. It's annulled….
It was also used for a type of legal separation that was granted incredibly rarely, and normally due to really extreme domestic violence and sort of threat to life. And that meant that there's sort of permission given for the man and wife to live separately. And this is the separation, this is the divorce if you like, but they're still married, they're not free to go off and marry anybody else. Because of this idea that that marriage is for life, and it's indissoluble.
The first contract you undertake is the binding one and this could have interesting outcomes in real life, particularly given what I've said about how easy it was to get married and how people could actually be mistaken. So for instance, to give a very high profile example, Joan of Kent, who was an aristocrat in the 14th century, she's granddaughter of Edward the First and she goes on to be the mother of Richard the Second. When she's 12 she enters into a completely secret marriage with a knight in her family's household. He then goes off on campaign. Then her family themselves organize a marriage to another aristocrat, big public in church, the whole business. And so she's married to him.
But her first husband, her secret husband comes back from compat, campaign and says: what about me, and is basically ignored. And so he saves up to press his court case. And he takes it to the papacy. And he manages to prove that, yes, he was married to her first. And so after about seven or eight years of her second husband, if you like, her public husband, her church husband, thinking they're legally married? Nope. She is ordered to return to her first husband...
People could also manipulate these rules. So as long as you're willing to commit perjury in court, you could say, well, you know, I'm not terribly happy with my marriage. But what if I decided to swap for my old boyfriend and if he’s up for it. And then we'll both, you know, declare that we previously did get married, but nobody really knew about it. And then I can get out of my current marriage and go back to a pre existing pre contract...
There are quite extended incest bars, much, much wider than is common today. So this is called the impediment of consanguinity, which means you're related by blood. And this is one of the big changes that the church actually makes to get round one of these loopholes that they think people are using. Because initially the rules are, you can't marry someone who's related to you by blood within seven degrees. So there were actually different ways of counting degrees in different parts of Europe, but potentially this, because it could mean you can't marry someone with great great great great great grandparents in common. There's one way of counting where you count up from one partner to the joint ancestor and then down again to the other partner. And one way where you just count up to the joint ancestor.
And so you could see that this could be used, and the church was obviously concerned that it was being used in the 12th century, and particularly by aristocrats to get out of marriages, or to marry so that they would be, so they could say that their first marriage was invalid, was annulled and that they're free to get married to somebody else. And so in 1215, at the fourth Lateran Council, massive Council of the church, one of the big changes that's made is that they sought out exactly how you're supposed to be counting degrees of blood relationship. And they also say it's within four degrees and you're only counting up to that joint ancestor…
Compaternity. So you can't get married to someone who's either your godparent or has stood as a godparent to your child. And again, it's all to do with this idea that you're already bound spiritually and in sort of Christian love with these people. So and there is a sort of an acceptance and you see this in in church discussions of it, that there's, if you like, real incest, and real lines that shouldn't be crossed. And then there are these sort of desirable wider ideas of incest and who you shouldn't marry…
One of the other essentials when you're getting married is about age of consent, and people being old enough in order to enter marriage. And because from the point of view of churchmen marriage was the only spiritually safe place for sex, it means that Christians have to be able to get married as soon as they might want to have sex. So in other words, from the age of puberty onwards, and this was normally regarded as about 12 for girls and 14 for boys, but depended on the individual. And it was also seen as a point at which you are mature enough to give your consent to a lifelong bond.
What happens in practice is that you're much much more likely to get engaged or married young if you are from a rich and powerful family. And so you can see this a great deal in royal marriages. So for instance, Isabella of Angouleme who's married to King John was about 12 when she got married...
However, as I say, if you're not in that top echelon of society, you would tend to get married old, at a older age, at the late teens or mid 20s. And this is seen, this has been described as a sort of European marriage model that applies for most of Western Europe. Tend to get married, as I say, so a bit later on, with the man being older. And why it's sort of correlated with wealth is it's to do with being able to be in a position to set up your own household, to be able to provide for the marriage... at almost every level of society, people had a prenup. And sort of things were put in place for what would happen if one partner died or when one partner died. And also what would happen or what would support the children of the marriage'"
Ironically for all the anti-"pedos" who like to invoke Crusader imagery, the age of consent in medieval times was so much lower than now
