Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London

Shannon McSheffrey

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812239386, 9780812239386
• eBook ISBN: 9780812203974
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Awarded honorable mention for the 2007 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize sponsored by the Canadian Historical AssociationHow were marital and sexual relationships woven into the fabric of late medieval society, and what form did these relationships take? Using extensive documentary evidence from both the ecclesiastical court system and the records of city and royal government, as well as advice manuals, chronicles, moral tales, and liturgical texts, Shannon McSheffrey focuses her study on England's largest city in the second half of the fifteenth century.Marriage was a religious union—one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church and imbued with deep spiritual significance—but the marital unit of husband and wife was also the fundamental domestic, social, political, and economic unit of medieval society. As such, marriage created political alliances at all levels, from the arena of international politics to local neighborhoods. Sexual relationships outside marriage were even more complicated. McSheffrey notes that medieval Londoners saw them as variously attributable to female seduction or to male lustfulness, as irrelevant or deeply damaging to society and to the body politic, as economically productive or wasteful of resources. Yet, like marriage, sexual relationships were also subject to control and influence from parents, relatives, neighbors, civic officials, parish priests, and ecclesiastical judges.Although by medieval canon law a marriage was irrevocable from the moment a man and a woman exchanged vows of consent before two witnesses, in practice marriage was usually a socially complicated process involving many people. McSheffrey looks more broadly at sex, governance, and civic morality to show how medieval patriarchy extended a far wider reach than a father's governance over his biological offspring. By focusing on a particular time and place, she not only elucidates the culture of England's metropolitan center but also contributes generally to our understanding of the social mechanisms through which premodern European people negotiated their lives.

PART I

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LAW AND SOCIAL PRACTICE IN THE MAKING OF MARRIAGE IN LATE MEDIEVAL LONDON

1

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Making a Marriage

Most English people in the late Middle Ages married at some point in their lives, although a sizable minority of adults had not, or had not yet, married.¹ The age at which late medieval London men and women married for the first time varied substantially, both according to gender and especially according to socioeconomic status. Our best data come from the highest reaches of late medieval English society, the aristocracy, where women first married while young, between thirteen and eighteen, and men often only in their mid twenties or later (although some men, especially orphaned heirs, married very young).² Elite urban women, daughters of the wealthiest merchants, often followed a pattern similar to that of their gentle and aristocratic counterparts (indeed, they participated in the same marriage market), marrying young to men much older than they. Below these rarefied socioeconomic levels, our evidence is, at best, impressionistic,³ but most scholars agree that marriage patterns among the nonelite in late medieval England conformed to the northwestern European marriage and household system, with both men and women marrying first in their early to mid twenties to partners of a similar age.⁴ At the same time that the age of first marriage was important, it must be remembered that many marriages—perhaps as many as half—were between those who had been married before. In an age of high mortality, marriages were often of short duration, perhaps as short as a decade on average, and both widows and widowers chose to, or needed to, remarry. Thus those seeking marriage could be fifteen—or they could be seventy.

These demographic patterns, especially those for first marriages, had important implications for the ways in which marriage was made. In turn, the demography of marriage affected, and was affected by, wider social, economic, and political factors. Most importantly, the later age of first marriages for men and women below elite levels both allowed for and necessitated a long period of adolescence, from the early teens until the early to mid twenties. This time was spent in apprenticeship by some young men and a very few young women destined for life in a craft or trade, and in domestic or agricultural service by young women and by men not lucky enough to be enrolled as apprentices. Apprentices and most servants “lived in”: young men and women moved away from their parents’ homes, indeed often to a different part of the country, and into the household of their employers. This has been termed “life-cycle servanthood”: for many, both rural and urban, the period between puberty and marriage was spent as a servant or apprentice, in a position of dependence on employers, but relative independence from family.⁵ Both men and women often ended this period of service or apprenticeship with marriage.

While employers were responsible for their young charges, and as we will see in many ways acted as substitute parents, it is significant that many people found their first marriage partners while living away from their families. They did not always make their marriage choices entirely independently, but they exercised more choice than those who married much younger and more closely under their parents’ supervision. Elite marriages—which carried with them the transfer of significant amounts of land, social prestige, and political connections—were, not surprisingly, much more closely controlled by the heads of families, especially in the case of the woman. An aristocratic woman’s husband was chosen for her by her family; at best she could exercise her right to refuse consent. For many men and women in late medieval England, marriage choices lay somewhere between arranged and completely free: balancing their own desires with the expectations of family, friends, and society was complicated, as I will discuss in more detail.

Did medieval people marry for love or for money? Moral treatises aimed at the fifteenth-century urban elite urged that marriage “ought to be had in great love,” but feared that instead “marriages be not duly made, but for money or other evil causes,” which in turn caused the “great abomination” of faithlessness and disloyalty.⁶ For modern commentators, the perceived materialism of medieval marriages has tended to induce derision rather than lamentation. It is sometimes hard not to be cynical when reading again and again of the “sale” of marriages in Chancery proceedings: Eileen Power’s quip “Let me not to the marriage of true fiefs admit impediments” comes seductively to mind.⁷ More recently other scholars have turned away from blaming money-grubbing parents and have given agency to the “material girls” themselves: Diana O’Hara has argued for the sixteenth century, for instance, that even if nonelite men and women exercised free choice in their marital partners, they nonetheless chose their mates according to economic rather than personal factors.⁸ Yet characterizing marriage one-dimensionally, as an economic partnership, is too limiting: below the levels of the aristocracy,⁹ at least, men and women made marriage decisions based on many criteria. Marriage certainly was an economic, political, and social alliance—at all social levels, as O’Hara argues, not just the aristocracy—but added to those factors were other potent human motivations, especially sexual attraction and emotional attachment. In a society where sexual relationships were to be confined to marriage, a sexual ethic that was taken seriously by many, erotic desire became an important aspect of marriage decisions, one that often ran counter to more rational economic or political calculations. Even marriages at the highest levels illustrated this: the young king Edward IV, against all protocol and to his distinct political disadvantage, took as his wife the beautiful widow Elizabeth Woodville, an aristocrat by birth and marriage but no match for a king, apparently precisely because she had denied him her bed unless he contracted marriage with her.¹⁰

This is not to say that people of middling or lower status in late medieval England entered into marriage in the same way that modern Westerners do: one obvious difference is that even lower-status people often had known one another only a short time before marrying, sometimes meeting only once or twice before beginning serious discussions about matrimony.¹¹ Decisions made on short acquaintance accentuated economic and socioeconomic factors, but they also accentuated initial sexual attraction. They could not, however, emphasize the kind of deep attachment of “soul mates” that has come to be seen in the contemporary West as foundational to a good marriage. It remains hard for us, given the kinds of sources to which we have access, to grasp the emotional nature of late medieval marriage, especially among those below the highest social levels. It would be anachronistic for us to impute modern expectations of marriage to medieval people, but at the same time it is also clear in the language of courtship that there were strong associations between marriage and something they called “love.” Its full flowering would take place within marriage, though, rather than preceding it. One common formula for making a contract of marriage—”May you find it in your heart to have me as your husband”—suggests that those making marriages hoped to choose marital partners in whom they could realize the potential for love. At the same time, the formula also suggested that the place in the marital partner’s heart had not yet been fully established.

The means by which possible marriage partners came to be acquainted with one another varied considerably by social class and depended particularly on the extent to which a marriage was arranged by family and friends or was freely chosen by the principals themselves. As I discuss in Chapter 3, the close supervision of young women of the civic and landed elite demanded the employment of networks of acquaintances and marriage brokers in order for marriageable men to become acquainted with suitable women and, at least as importantly, the women’s fathers or guardians. At less elevated social levels, introductions made by friends, family, and employers were also vitally important, but men and women identified potential wives and husbands in other ways as well. Where women’s everyday lives were far less subject to supervision, mates could be found through everyday interaction: as men and women went about their daily business, running errands and doing their work, they naturally came to know one another. Popular songs of the fifteenth century tell us that festivals—parish celebrations, fraternity feasts, Midsummer revels—could also serve as occasions for courting,¹² although they do not feature in narratives of courtship in witness testimony in marital litigation. If such depositions can be taken as representative, men and women were more apt to find marital partners through the more prosaic means of mutual acquaintance than through picturesque May dances.

Husbands were the heads of their households, and the economic functions of the household generally revolved around their work. Because men, especially household heads, controlled most economic resources, and other household members, including their wives, depended on the husband’s work, some historians have tended to assume that women had a greater economic stake in marriage than did men and that in general marriage was more attractive and important for women than for men.¹³ The economic relationship between husband and wife, especially in an artisanal household, was not as simple a matter as who could earn more, but a broader understanding that economic contribution to the household went beyond income or production of goods to include the maintenance of a household that allowed that income or those goods to be produced. Although the household head carried the tide of carpenter or tallowchandler, without the labor of all those in the household, especially the wife, he could not function.¹⁴ The difficulties of running a household without a mistress may account for the quick rates of remarriage for widowers as well as for widows. At the same time, we must not inflate the parity of late medieval husbands and wives: although the wife’s labor was essential to the household, there was no question that her husband’s work was deemed more valuable and that his authority over the others who lived in his household, including his wife, was (at least theoretically) clear.

Marriage and Church Law in Late Medieval England

By the late Middle Ages, marriage was firmly entrenched as one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. As such, it came under the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, which administered their jurisdiction through canon law.¹⁵ To think of the late medieval church as controlling marriage, however, would be fundamentally to misunderstand both the church’s ability to direct and police the laity’s actions and the somewhat peculiar nature of the medieval Catholic theology and canon law of marriage. Because of the particular contingent circumstances of twelfth- and thirteenth-century developments in theology and canon law, by the end of the thirteenth century the sacrament of marriage had come to be defined in such a way that it was the two principals, the man and woman marrying, who made the marriage bond rather than a priest. The sacramental bond was created by the mutual consent of the two parties alone. Marriage vows did not have to be exchanged in a church, nor was a priest’s presence required. A couple could exchange consent anywhere, anytime; all that was needed to prove the marriage in a church court were two witnesses. Neither partner could be married against his or her will, and at the same time, no one else’s agreement—priest, parent, guardian, or lord—was required to create a canonically valid marriage as long as both parties were of age (usually defined as twelve for girls, fourteen for boys). As Michael Sheehan remarked, this was an “astonishingly individualistic” marriage system,¹⁶ indeed one that in many ways ran counter to the prevailing currents of medieval society that emphasized the importance of the participation of parents, guardians, and (to a lesser extent) priests in the making of a marriage. Much of this book is concerned with exploring the inherent tensions between the individualism of the consent theory and the societal pressures to marry for family advantage and according to community norms.

The exchange of consent that created a marriage was known as a contract. Although to many modern people the word “contract” calls to mind a written agreement, validated by signatures of the parties, this use of the term goes back to the more basic meaning of the word as derived from Roman law: a binding pact made through the expression of consent or agreement, at least as often oral as written.¹⁷ While it was not necessary for words to be spoken to create the bond of marriage (making it possible for the mute to marry, for instance), in practice almost all marriages were created through the speaking of the words of consent, a performative utterance¹⁸ that constituted the contract. The uttering of these words need not have taken place in a church nor in the presence of a priest: they could be, and were, spoken in houses, fields, and taverns. As long as both parties expressed consent, the marriage was valid before God, and as long as there were two admissible witnesses, the marriage was also valid before the church court.

While in theory any number of words could convey this consent, in practice in late medieval England the words that constituted consent took on a formulaic pattern, reflecting (or possibly even influencing) the words laid out in the marriage rite in the church liturgy. Consent could be expressed in the present tense, immediately constituting a valid and indissoluble marriage: “I John take you Joan to be my wedded wife”; “I Joan take you John to be my wedded husband.” Or it could be expressed in the future tense, indicating an intention to make the marriage at a future time: “I will take you. …” In late medieval London, another formula was often used for future contracts: “I may find in my heart to have you as my husband/wife.”¹⁹ Although consummation was irrelevant in the case of a present-tense contract, making the marriage of Mary and Joseph canonical, in the case of a marriage undertaken with words of future consent, subsequent sexual intercourse rendered the contract automatically binding. Unconsummated future contracts (what we might call betrothals) could be broken up, but not easily: they could be dissolved only by mutual consent or if one of the partners subsequently made a present-tense contract with someone else. Whether a contract of marriage was made in the present or future tense, it was properly followed by the calling of banns (announcement in the parish church that the two would marry) and a church solemnization, a nuptial mass where the pair, perhaps for the second, third, or fourth time, exchanged consent in the present tense and received the priest’s blessing. A couple that did not proceed to a solemnization committed a sin, but if they had exchanged consent in the present tense they were still indissolubly married. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Law and Social Practice in The Making of Marriage in Late Medieval London
• Part II. Governance, Sex, and Civic Morality
• Conclusion: Sex, Marriage, and Medieval Concepts of The Public
• Appendix: Legal Sources
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments