Medieval Marriages
A wedding was a verbal promise that could be made anywhere – it did not even need to be on holy ground, with or without a priest, or any other witness. From the 1100s, the desire of the lords to control heiresses and their dowries prompted a new tradition that required promises to be made before witnesses, ideally a priest. The cleric would be responsible for making sure that the bridal couple were not closely related and that neither had a live previous spouse. From the twelfth century, canon law tried to prevent marriages forced on young people, or kidnapped brides, by making consent an essential element of a valid wedding. But a priest who owed his place and income to a powerful patron was unlikely to oppose him. A private promise to marry in the future – a betrothal – was considered as binding a commitment as a wedding oath.
Theodora, born to a wealthy merchant family around 1096 in Huntingdon, was betrothed to a lord, despite her wish to become a nun. Her parents complained that her attempt to break her betrothal made them the laughing stock of their neighbours’ The support of a hermit, who recommended Theodora’s vocation to the Archbishop of Canterbury, encouraged the young woman to escape from her family and she ran away from home dressed as a man, to join a woman hermit: Alfwen, at Flamstead.
Theodora changed her name to Christina and supported herself by her art – she worked in silk, embroidering and weaving pictures often based on illuminated manuscripts. The St Albans Chronicle records her beautifully worked sandals and mitres, which she made as a gift for the pope. Two years later, her fiancé released her from the betrothal and the Archbishop of York annulled the oath. Christina took her vows at St Albans Abbey and lived in the hermitage at Markyate, where a priory was established around her. She served as prioress and was joined by other devout women. She befriended and advised the abbot of St Albans, Geoffrey de Gorham, who recorded his feelings for her in the St Albans Psalter, in which there is a letter ‘C’ for Christina at Psalm 105, the psalm that celebrates the power of God to protect his people.
A betrothal could be converted into a binding marriage by a wedding ceremony – ideally before a priest and witnesses – or merely by a sequence of rituals: the payment of a token, the gift of a ring and consummation of the marriage: penile penetration. After that, the couple were fully married and the wife might be considered as her husband’s responsibility, both for her behaviour and for her debts. A bride did not even speak in the wedding service. In the Bury St Edmunds Missal of the 1100s, only the husband has a voice.
He was to say:
With this ring I thee wed, this gold and silver I thee give, with my body I thee worship, and with this dowry I thee endow.
Then the bride, having received the gold and silver and the dowry, falls to the feet of her husband.
She heard the almost idolatrous description of their union: with my body I thee worship. It’s a potent line, for marriages that we generally think of as ‘arranged’ and even ‘loveless’. She accepted the substantial gifts: the ring that proved the marriage, the ceremonial coins that represented the lifelong financial partnership, and her contribution – her dowry. She knelt, like a feudal tenant before a lord, like a lord before a king, to her superior.
Marriages for love took place – especially when there were no great fortunes to be settled. A church deacon in England met a young Jewish woman in Oxford while he was being taught by her father, a Jewish scholar. The two fell in love and the deacon proposed marriage and promised to convert to her religion. He took circumcision and converted to Judaism to marry the woman he loved. He was accused of apostasy by the church and burned at the stake at Osney in 1222.
Agnes Nakerer fell in love with a travelling minstrel, John Kent, and married him in secret in the early 1300s. Her parents forced her to the altar with a more valuable son-in-law, but John the Minstrel took them to the church court at York and won his wife back.
Common women tended to marry after they had worked for some years. Some Lincolnshire women married after 21 years of age, or even later in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when both husband and wife had saved enough money to start a home.) Women at Wakefield, Spalding and in some manors in Huntingdonshire were required to pay a feudal fee to the lord of the manor for the right to marry the man of their choice, and they often used their own money.
Marriages among the upper classes were made by parents and guardians for young people, as they were used to transfer property between families, resolve quarrels and even end local wars. The old Anglo-Saxon word for wives was ‘peace-weavers’. Any happiness that might follow the wedding proved a lucky bonus. Considerate and loving parents might choose a partner likely to suit their child; but others might be only concerned with the finances.
Most marriages ended in an early death: one in 40 medieval women died in childbirth in England in the 1500 and 1600s. The average age at death for medieval men and women was 40 years. There was no divorce but a marriage might be declared invalid because the spouses were closely related or the marriage forbidden by canon law. Causes for annulment could be leprosy, flagrant adultery by the wife, malicious abandonment, the couple being of different faiths, or a forced wedding A marriage could be annulled if either of the couple were unable to conceive children or the man was declared impotent. The judgment of experienced women was called on in such cases. A jury of 12 Canterbury women in 1292 examined Walter de Fonte and testified – after trying and failing to arouse him – that his ‘virile member’ was ‘useless’. Neither husband nor wife could refuse sex, having given consent at their wedding day once and for all – but there were many days off: the church ruled no sex on saints’ days, nor on feast days, holy days and days of penitence. Altogether, no-sex days took up about a third of the year, and sex was discouraged during menstruation or breast-feeding.
Misbehaviour in marriage was punished – but the marriage would not be dissolved. In Rochester in the 1300s, any wife guilty of adultery was whipped three times around the churchyard and three times around the market – the same punishment as for an adulterous husband.
Roman Catholic churches in Europe hosted same-sex marriages of women to women in the eighth century. These were legitimate marriages undertaken by parish priests who recorded the marrying women’s names in parish records in the usual way. As England came under the same papal jurisdiction, women-only marriages probably took place in English churches too. The wording of English marriage services from the tenth century speaks of a wife’ and a ‘bride’ and blesses future children of the marriage but does not define the marriage as heterosexual. The wedding service used in the twelfth century, the Bury St Edmunds Missal, refers to a bride and bridegroom, but not specifically to a man and woman. It was not until the sixteenth century that the Sarum Manual wedding service specifically referred to a man and a woman in the marriage vows.
