by Will Durant
Prostitution adjusted itself to the times. Some women on pilgrimage, according to Bishop Boniface, earned their passage by selling themselves in the towns on their route.13 Every army was followed with another army, as dangerous as the enemy. “The Crusaders,” reports Albert of Aix, “had in their ranks a crowd of women wearing the habit of men; they traveled together without distinction of sex, trusting to the chances of a frightful promiscuity.”14 At the siege of Acre (1189), says the Arabic historian Emad-Eddin, “300 pretty Frenchwomen … arrived for the solace of the French soldiers … for these would not go into battle if they were deprived of women”; seeing which, the Moslem armies demanded similar inspiration.15 In the first crusade of St. Louis, according to Joinville, his barons “set up their brothels about the royal tent.”16 The university students, particularly at Paris, developed urgent or imitative needs, and filles established centers of accommodation.17
Some towns—e.g., Toulouse, Avignon, Montpellier, Nuremberg—legalized prostitution under municipal supervision, on the ground that without such lupanars, bordelli, Frauenhäuser, good women could not venture safely into the streets.18 St. Augustine had written: “If you do away with harlots the world will be convulsed with lust”;19 and St. Thomas Aquinas agreed.20 London in the twelfth century had a row of “bordells” or “stews” near London Bridge; originally licensed by the Bishop of Winchester, they were subsequently sanctioned by Parliament.21 An act of Parliament in 1161 forbade the brothel keepers to have women suffering from the “perilous infirmity of burning”—the earliest known regulation against the spread of venereal disease.22 Louis IX, in 1254, decreed the banishment of all prostitutes from France; the edict was enforced; soon a clandestine promiscuity replaced the former open traffic; the bourgeois gentlemen complained that it was well nigh impossible to guard the virtue of their wives and daughters from the solicitations of soldiers and students; at last criticism of the ordinance became so general that it was repealed (1256). The new decree specified those parts of Paris in which prostitutes might legally live and practice, regulated their dress and ornaments, and submitted them to supervision by a police magistrate popularly known as the roi des ribauds, or king of the bawds, beggars, and vagabonds.23 Louis IX, dying, advised his son to renew the edict of expulsion; Philip did, with results much as before; the law remained in the statutes, but was not enforced.24 In Rome, according to Bishop Durand II of Mende (1311), there were brothels near the Vatican, and the pope’s marshals permitted them for a consideration.25 The Church showed a humane spirit toward prostitutes; she maintained asylums for reformed women, and distributed among the poor the donations received from converted courtesans.26
III. MARRIAGE
Youth was brief, and marriage came early, in the Age of Faith. A child of seven could consent to a betrothal, and such engagements were sometimes made to facilitate the transfer or protection of property. Grace de Saleby, aged four, was married to a great noble who could preserve her rich estate; presently he died, and she was married at six to another lord; at eleven she was married to a third.27 Such unions could be annulled at any time before the normal age of consummation, which in the girl was presumed to be twelve, in the boy fourteen.28 The Church reckoned the consent of parents or guardian unnecessary for valid marriage if the parties were of age. She forbade the marriage of girls under fifteen, but allowed many exceptions; for in this matter the rights of property overruled the whims of love, and marriage was an incident in finance. The bridegroom presented gifts or money to the girl’s parents, gave her a “morning gift,” and pledged her a dower right in his estate; in England this was a life interest of the widow on one third of the husband’s inheritance in land. The bride’s family gave presents to the family of the groom, and assigned to her a dowry consisting of clothing, linen, utensils, and furniture, and sometimes of property. Engagement was an exchange of gages or pledges; the wedding itself was a pledge (Anglo-Saxon weddian, promise); the spouse was one who had re-sponded “I will.”
State and Church alike accepted as valid marriage a consummated union accompanied by the exchange of a verbal pledge between the participants, without other ceremony legal or ecclesiastical.29 The Church sought in this way to protect women from abandonment by seducers, and preferred such unions to fornication or concubinage; but after the twelfth century she denied validity to marriages contracted without ecclesiastical sanction; and after the Council of Trent (1563) she required the presence of a priest. Secular law welcomed the ecclesiastical regulation of marriage; Bracton (d. 1268) held a religious ceremony essential to valid matrimony. The Church raised marriage to a sacrament, and made it a sacred covenant between man, woman, and God. Gradually she spread her jurisdiction over every phase of marriage, from the duties of the nuptial bed to the last will and testament of the dying spouse. Her canon law drew up a long list of “impediments to matrimony.” Each party must be free from any previous marriage bond, and from any vow of chastity. Marriage with an unbaptized person was forbidden; nevertheless there were many marriages between Christian and Jew.30 Marriage between slaves, between slave and free, between orthodox Christian and heretic, even between the faithful and the excommunicate, was recognized as valid.31 The parties must not be related within the fourth degree of kinship—i.e., must not have an identical ancestor within four generations; here the Church rejected Roman law and accepted the primitive exogamy that feared degeneration from inbreeding; perhaps also she deprecated the concentration of wealth through narrow family alliances. In rural villages such inbreeding was difficult to avoid, and the Church had to close her eyes to it, as to many another gap between reality and law.
After the marriage ceremony came the wedding procession—with blaring music and flaunting silk—from the church to the bridegroom’s home. Festivities would there ensue through all the day and half the night. The marriage was not valid until consummated. Contraception was forbidden; Aquinas accounted it a crime second only to homicide;32 nevertheless diverse means-mechanical, chemical, magical—were used to effect it, with chief reliance on coitus interruptus.33 Drugs were peddled that would produce abortion, or sterility, or impotence, or sexual ardor; the penitential formulas of Rabanus Maurus decreed three years of penance for “her who mixes the semen of her husband with her food so that she may better receive his love.”34 Infanticide was rare. Christian charity established foundling hospitals in various cities from the sixth century onward. A council at Rouen, in the eighth century, invited women who had secretly borne children to deposit them at the door of the church, which would undertake to provide for them; such orphans were brought up as serfs on ecclesiastical properties. A law of Charlemagne decreed that exposed children should be the slaves of those who rescued and reared them. About 1190 a Montpellier monk founded the Fraternity of the Holy Ghost, dedicated to the protection and education of orphans.
Penalties for adultery were severe; Saxon law, for example, condemned the unfaithful wife at least to lose her nose and ears, and empowered her husband to kill her. Adultery was common notwithstanding;35 least so in the middle classes, most in the nobility. Feudal masters seduced female serfs at the cost of a modest fine: he who “covered” a maid “without her thanks”—against her will—paid the court three shillings.36 The eleventh century, said Freeman, “was a profligate age,” and he marveled at the apparent marital fidelity of William the Conqueror,37 who could not say as much for his father. “Medieval society,” said the learned and judicious Thomas Wright, “was profoundly immoral and licentious.”38
The Church allowed separation for adultery, apostasy, or grave cruelty; this was called divortium, but not in the sense of annulling the marriage. Such annulment was granted only when the marriage could be shown to have contravened one of the canonical impediments to matrimony. It is hardly probable that these were deliberately multiplied to provide grounds of divorce for those who could afford the substantial fees and costs required for an annulment. The Church used these impediments to meet with flexible judgment excepti
onal cases where divorce would promise an heir to a childless king, or would otherwise serve public policy or peace. Germanic law allowed divorce for adultery, sometimes even by mutual agreement.39 The kings preferred the laws of their ancestors to the stricter law of the Church; and feudal lords and ladies, reverting to the ancient codes, sometimes divorced one another without ecclesiastical leave. Not till Innocent III refused divorce to Philip Augustus, the powerful King of France, was the Church strong enough, in authority and conscience, to hew bravely to her own decrees.
IV. WOMAN
The theories of churchmen were generally hostile to woman; some laws of the Church enhanced her subjection; many principles and practices of Christianity improved her status. To priests and theologians woman was still in these centuries what she had seemed to Chrysostom—“a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, a painted ill.”40 She was still the ubiquitous reincarnation of the Eve who had lost Eden for mankind, still the favored instrument of Satan in leading men to hell. St. Thomas Aquinas, usually the soul of kindness, but speaking with the limitations of a monk, placed her in some ways below the slave:
The woman is subject to the man on account of the weakness of her nature, both of mind and of body.41 … Man is the beginning of woman and her end, just as God is the beginning and end of every creature.42… Woman is in subjection according to the law of nature, but a slave is not.43 … Children ought to love their father more than their mother.44
Canon law gave to the husband the duty of protecting his wife, and to the wife the duty of obeying her husband. Man, but not woman, was made in the image of God; “it is plain from this,” argued the canonist, “that wives should be subject to their husbands, and should almost be servants.”45 Such passages have the ring of wistful wishing. On the other hand the Church enforced monogamy, insisted upon a single standard of morals for both sexes, honored woman in the worship of Mary, and defended woman’s right to the inheritance of property.
Civil law was more hostile to her than canon law. Both codes permitted wife-beating,46 and it was quite a forward step when, in the thirteenth century, the “Laws and Customs of Beauvais” bade a man beat his wife “only in reason.”47 Civil law ruled that the word of women could not be admitted in court, “because of their frailty”;48 it required only half as high a fine for an offense against a woman as for the same offense against a man;49 it excluded even the most high-born ladies from representing their own estates in the Parliament of England or the Estates-General of France. Marriage gave the husband full authority over the use and usufruct of any property that his wife owned at marriage.50 No woman could become a licensed physician.
Her economic life was as varied as the man’s. She learned and practiced the wondrous unsung arts of the home: to bake bread and puddings and pies, cure meats, make soap and candles, cream and cheese; to brew beer and make home medicines from herbs; to spin and weave wool, and make linen from flax, and clothing for her family, and curtains and drapes, bedspreads and tapestries; to decorate her home and keep it as clean as the male inmates would allow; and to rear children. Outside the agricultural cottage she joined with strength and patience in the work of the farm: sowed and cultivated and reaped, fed chickens, milked cows, sheared sheep, helped to repair and paint and build. In the towns, at home or in the shop, she did most of the spinning and weaving for the textile guilds. It was a company of “silkwomen” that first established in England the arts of spinning, throwing, and weaving silk.51 Most of the English guilds contained as many women as men, largely because craftsmen were permitted to employ their wives and daughters, and enlist them in the guilds. Several guilds, devoted to feminine manufactures, were composed wholly of women; there were fifteen such guilds at Paris at the end of the thirteenth century.52 Women, however, rarely became masters in bisexual guilds, and they received lower wages than men for equal work. In the middle classes women displayed in raiment the wealth of their husbands, and took an exciting part in the religious feasts and social festivities of the towns. By sharing their husbands’ responsibilities, and accepting with grace and restraint the grandiose or amorous professions of knights and troubadours, the ladies of the feudal aristocracy attained a status such as women had rarely reached before.
As usual, despite theology and law, the medieval woman found ways of annulling her disabilities with her charms. The literature of this period is rich in records of women who ruled their men.53 In several respects woman was the acknowledged superior. Among the nobility she learned something of letters and art and refinement, while her letterless husband labored and fought. She could put on all the graces of an eighteenth-century salonnière, and swoon like a Richardson heroine; at the same time she rivaled man in lusty liberty of action and speech, exchanged risqué stories with him, and often took an unabashed initiative in love.54 In all classes she moved with full freedom seldom chaperoned; she crowded the fairs and dominated the festivals; she joined in pilgrimages, and took part in the Crusades, not only as a solace but now and then as a soldier dressed in the panoply of war. Timid monks tried to persuade themselves of her inferiority, but knights fought for her favors, and poets professed themselves her slaves. Men talked of her as an obedient servant, and dreamed of her as a goddess. They prayed to Mary, but they would have been satisfied with Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Eleanor was but one of a score of great medieval women—Galla Placidia, Theodora, Irene, Anna Comnena, Matilda, Countess of Tuscany, Matilda, Queen of England, Blanche of Navarre, Blanche of Castile, Héloïse…. Eleanor’s grandfather was a prince and a poet, William X of Aquitaine, patron and leader of the troubadours. To his court at Bordeaux came the best wits and graces and gallants of southwestern France; and in that court Eleanor was reared to be a queen to life and letters both. She absorbed all the culture and character of that free and sunny clime: vigor of body and poetry of motion, passion of temper and flesh, freedom of mind and manners and speech, lyric fantasies and sparkling esprit, a boundless love of love and war and every pleasure, even to the death. When she was fifteen (1137) the King of France offered her his hand, anxious to add her duchy of Aquitaine, and the great port of Bordeaux, to his revenues and his crown. She did not know that Louis VII was a man stolid and devout, gravely absorbed in affairs of state. She went to him gay and lovely and unscrupulous; he was not charmed by her extravagance, and did not care for the poets who followed her to Paris to reward her patronage with lauds and rhymes.
Hungry for a living romance, she resolved to accompany her husband to Palestine on the Second Crusade (1147). She and her attendant ladies donned male and martial costumes, sent their distaffs scornfully to stay-at-home knights, and rode off in the van of the army, flying bright banners and trailing troubadours.55 Neglected or chided by the King, she allowed herself, at Antioch and elsewhere, a few amours; rumor gave her love now to her uncle Raymond of Poitiers, now to a handsome Saracen slave, now (said ignorant gossip) to the pious Saladin himself.56 Louis bore these dalliances, and her keen tongue, patiently, but St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the watchdog of Christendom, denounced her to the world. In 1152, suspecting that the King would divorce her, she sued him for divorce on the ground that they were related in the sixth degree. The Church smiled at the pretext, but granted the divorce; and Eleanor returned to Bordeaux, resuming her title to Aquitaine. There a swarm of suitors courted her; she chose Henry Plantagenet, heir to the throne of England; two years later he was Henry II, and Eleanor was again a queen (1154)—“Queen of England,” as she was to say, “by the wrath of God.”
To England she brought the tastes of the South; and she continued in London to be the supreme lawgiver, patron, and idol of the trouvères and troubadours. She was now old enough to bear fidelity, and Henry found no scandal in her. But the tables were turned: Henry was eleven years her junior, quite her equal in temper and passion; soon he was spreading his love among the ladies of the court; and Eleanor, who had once scorned a jealous husband, fretted
and fumed in jealousy. When Henry deposed her. she fled from England, seeking the protection of Aquitaine; he had her pursued, arrested, imprisoned; and for sixteen years she languished in a confinement that never broke her will. The troubadours roused the sentiment of Europe against the King; his sons, at her behest, plotted to dethrone him, but he fought them off until his death (1189). Richard Coeur de Lion succeeded his father, released his mother, and made her regent of England while he crusaded against Saladin. When her son John became king she retired to a convent in France, and died there “through sorrow and anguish of mind,” at the age of eighty-two. She had been “a bad wife, a bad mother, and a bad queen”;57 but who would think of her as belonging to a subject sex?
V. PUBLIC MORALITY
In every age the laws and moral precepts of the nations have struggled to discourage the inveterate dishonesty of mankind. In the Middle Ages—not demonstrably more nor less than in other epochs—men, good and bad, lied to their children, mates, congregations, enemies, friends, governments, and God. Medieval man had a special fondness for forging documents. He forged apocryphal gospels, perhaps never intending them to be taken as more than pretty stories; he forged decretals as weapons in ecclesiastical politics; loyal monks forged charters to win royal grants for their monasteries;58 Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, according to the papal Curia, forged a charter to prove the antiquity of his see;59 schoolmasters forged charters to endow some colleges at Cambridge with a false antiquity; and “pious frauds” corrupted texts and invented a thousand edifying miracles. Bribery was general in education, trade, war, religion, government, law.60 Schoolboys sent pies to their examiners;61 politicians paid for appointments to public office, and collected the necessary sums from their friends;62 witnesses could be bribed to swear to anything; litigants gave presents to jurors and judges;63 in 1289 Edward I of England had to dismiss most of his judges and ministers for corruption.64 The laws arranged for solemn oaths at every turn; men swore on the Scriptures or the most sacred relics; sometimes they were required to take an oath that they would keep the oath they were about to take;65 yet perjury was so frequent that trial by combat was sometimes resorted to in the hope that God would identify the greater liar.66