Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  A woman who did not marry the father of her out-of-wedlock child was not necessarily considered damaged goods in peasant communities. A historian who examined the records of Halesowen Manor, in England, between 1270 and 1348 estimates that for every two women who gave birth in marriage, one woman gave birth out of wedlock. Many of these women subsequently married, some of them quite well, suggesting they did not face permanent stigmatization. Even so, richer peasants, with more to lose in inheritance disputes, tended to avoid bearing children out of wedlock.12

  Marriage, not childbearing, marked men’s and women’s transition to adulthood in peasant society. In many parts of England, all unmarried men and women, regardless of age, were called lads or maids and were expected to defer to the married “masters” and “dames” of the village.13

  The badge of adulthood meant different things for each sex. For a man, marriage was closely connected to economic independence. A man got married when he inherited land or took over his father’s craft. In thirteenth-century England the word for an unmarried man—anilepiman, or “only man”—also meant “landless man,” while the word husbond could mean either a married man or a man with a substantial landholding. A married man with his own land and household was the basic political figure of village life. He was responsible for his wife and children as well as for any servants or apprentices who lived in his house. He answered for their misdeeds, disciplined them when necessary, and represented them at village meetings or in the courts.14

  For women, the relationship between marriage and authority was more ambiguous. Marriage marked a female as an adult, but it restricted rather than expanded her legal standing. A married woman lost the right to dispose of land, go to court, or handle her own affairs. Yet women in rural Europe needed marriage to achieve economic security and social status. No woman, married or not, could be part of the tithing group that kept the peace. Nor could a woman serve in any village office or act as a pledge for other people, the way peasant men frequently did. Acting as a pledge created obligations in others, and men could use the pledge system to establish dense networks of mutual aid that involved dozens of other people. Only through her husband could a woman gain this kind of influence beyond the household, even though marriage stripped her of the right to make economic contracts.15

  Some historians argue that the mutual dependence of husband and wife in production made medieval peasant marriages economic and emotional partnerships. Certainly, the fact that peasant husbands often made wives their executors implies a good deal of mutual respect. So does the gradual adoption of jointure, in which husband and wife held their land in common so that the woman would inherit the entire property, not just the traditional widow’s third, when her husband died.16

  However, any property a woman brought to marriage came under her husband’s control. He could dispose of any movable property or leases she inherited without consulting her, although he was not supposed to sell any free-hold land she inherited without her consent. Court cases show that some wives successfully guarded their rights. In the countryside around Barcelona in the early eleventh century, for example, Maria, the daughter of a wealthy peasant named Vivas, agreed that her husband could sell a field she had inherited from her father in order to meet some household needs. She insisted that in return she be compensated with a piece of land from her husband’s inheritance. He resisted, but she eventually got him in front of a scribe, where he signed over the land, according to the deed, pro pax maritum—for the sake of peace in the marriage.17

  However, if a husband refused to make concessions for the sake of household peace, a wife had little recourse. By law, husbands controlled all household resources, including any earnings wives brought in, and could “discipline” their wives by force if necessary. The extent of a husband’s authority in medieval thought was illustrated by the laws of England, Normandy, and Sicily defining a wife’s murder of her husband as a form of treason, punishable by burning at the stake.18

  Marriage in urban areas followed many of the same patterns. The revival of trade in Western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries created densely packed towns such as Paris, London, Milan, and Florence, where artisans and merchants conducted business out of homes, shops, and taverns. These towns provided a larger pool of potential spouses than was available in agricultural villages and offered more opportunities for unsupervised courting. Nevertheless, marriage was seldom a truly private affair anywhere during the Middle Ages.

  In cities, as in peasant villages, intermediaries were frequently involved in introducing a couple, testing the waters to see if a relationship might be taken to a new level, and conducting the property negotiations that accompanied marriage. Such matchmaking was not restricted to women. Indeed, according to historian Shannon McSheffrey, “it was the duty and privilege of senior men to ensure that suitable marriages were made, and unsuitable unions prevented.” 19

  In cities, as in the countryside, marriage was often a business partnership, with far-reaching economic implications for friends and relations on both sides. Merchant families used marriage alliances to raise capital and build business networks, and in many areas of northwestern Europe, a merchant’s wife became her husband’s partner in economic activities. She might keep the books for the family business or help out in the shop, act as an agent for her husband in his absence, and carry on her husband’s trade after his death.

  Such working partnerships were especially common among the craftsmen and artisans of medieval towns. In Genoa, skilled workers in the same trade often married, listing in their marriage contracts the inventory and work tools that each brought to the marriage. The couple typically conducted their business out of their home or lived above their shop. If a man was a weaver, his wife might operate a loom. If he made shoes, she might sew on the uppers. Many craft guilds, taking it as a given that the wife would work alongside her husband, allowed a man to take on an apprentice only if he had no wife. In fourteenth-century London the wives of men who dyed leather were even sworn into the guild with their husbands, and many guilds required that a man marry before he advanced to the rank of master.20

  Urban trades were often what historian Beatrice Gottlieb calls two-person careers. As with peasant marriages, this may have created mutual respect, dependence, and even love between husband and wife, but it did not leave much room for sentimentality if an untimely death cut the career in half. “When a spouse died, a job opening was created. . . . The widow or widower remarried to fill the opening, or a son or daughter took over and almost simultaneously acquired a mate.”21

  At the highest levels of the merchant elite, a wife was less likely to be an active partner in her husband’s business, although she participated in a busy round of social and cultural activities that enhanced her husband’s reputation. Wealthy urban merchants often married their daughters into the landed nobility. This brought nobles the ready cash of the merchant daughters’ dowries, while giving the merchants access to the nobles’ valuable social connections.22

  In urban as well as rural areas, marriage expanded a man’s authority while restricting a woman’s. Only when a man married did he become eligible to serve as a juryman, warden, or other local official. By contrast, marriage took away a woman’s freedom to enter into contracts and be held responsible for her own actions. A married woman was a feme covert. She was covered by her husband’s identity and lacked any legal standing of her own.

  In the cities, however, a married woman could petition the authorities to lift the restrictions of coverture. Such a woman, called a feme sole in France and England and a Marktfrau in Germany, was allowed to do business as if she had no husband. She was responsible for her own debts and could hire apprentices and enter into contracts without her husband’s approval.

  Most wives who engaged in independent businesses did so on a small scale, selling food and goods or brewing ale, tasks that could be combined with other domestic and productive activities. The frequency of such female multitasking was r
ecognized in an English statute of 1363 that restricted male artisans to a single trade but allowed women to follow several. But men’s specialization usually allowed them to command a higher price for their wares or labor.23

  Still, some women did become prosperous merchants. Alice Chestre of Bristol, England, conducted a thriving overseas trade in cloth, wines, and iron with Flanders, Spain, and Portugal in the years after her husband’s death in 1470. Another intriguing fifteenth-century woman was Margery Kempe, a successful brewer married to a debt-ridden and only intermittently employed husband. After giving birth to fourteen children, Margery became convinced that having sex with her husband was sinful. The church held that no woman was exempt from her “marriage debt,” the obligation to have sex with her spouse. But Margery had the financial resources to strike a deal with her husband. In return for release from her marriage debt, she paid off all his worldly ones.24

  Don’t Be “Too Fussy”: Marriage, Love, and Individual Choice

  Some historians argue that the Church’s doctrine of mutual consent, combined with the reemergence of commerce in the twelfth century and the loosening of serfdom after the Black Death epidemic of 1348, created an “astonishingly individualistic” marriage system in Western Europe. They say that individuals were allowed to choose their marriage partners freely and that once married, the couple was exempt from familial interference. All this, they believe, led to a unique emphasis on marital love and harmony.25

  The doctrine of consent did provide some leverage for an individual who wished to resist the pressures of parents or social superiors. Yet parents had powerful ways of controlling their children’s marital decisions. A young woman normally depended on her parents for her dowry, and often a young man could marry only if his parents agreed to set him up on the land or in the trade that he would someday inherit. The Church might feel compelled to validate the marriage of someone who married without parental consent, but in most countries secular law sided with the parents if they denied inheritance to a child who took this course of action. Parents also used such extralegal measures as intimidation, physical restraint, and even violence with impunity.26

  Where women married very young, as in medieval Italy, it was especially easy for parents to dispose of a daughter without regard for her wishes. In 1447 in Florence, Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, acting as head of the prominent Strozzi family after her husband’s death, wrote to her son announcing that she had engaged his sixteen-year-old sister to a rich silk manufacturer and was giving her a dowry of a thousand florins: “We tried to place her in a more powerful and more distinguished family, but it would have taken 1,400 or 1,500 florins, and this would have been your undoing and mine. I do not know if the girl is pleased, for it is true that, political considerations aside this [marriage] has little to recommend it. I, having considered everything, decided to prepare the girl and not to be too fussy. I am sure that she will be as well as any girl in Florence.”27

  Even in England, where “permissive” marriage was more widespread, parents often made business and political decisions that completely disregarded their children’s wishes. In 1413, two fathers from the Derbyshire gentry signed a marriage contract on which the bride’s name was left blank because the bride’s father hadn’t yet decided which daughter to marry off. In other cases on the Continent and in England, wedding agreements explicitly provided that a younger son or daughter would take the place of their older betrothed sibling should the latter die before the marriage could take place.28

  In the 1440s Elizabeth Paston, a daughter of the minor gentry, resisted her parents’ pressure to marry a man who was thirty years her senior and disfigured by smallpox. Her mother, according to a concerned cousin, confined Elizabeth to her room, where she was beaten “sometimes twice in one day, and her head broken in two or three places.” Eventually Elizabeth gave in and agreed to the marriage, provided that she was given “reasonable jointure” in the man’s property. In this case, the marriage fell through, and Elizabeth was eventually married off to someone more to her liking.29

  A truly determined pair of lovers who managed to escape being locked up by their parents and were willing to risk ostracism by friends and family could force a disapproving Church to recognize their marriage. But usually matters did not go that far. Marriage had so many economic and social ramifications for all social classes that people generally believed it would be foolish to make such a momentous decision entirely on their own. When parents and kin arranged a marriage for their child, they were investing in the child’s future as surely as a modern parent who sets up a college savings fund. Individuals in the Middle Ages understood that marriage was the most important “career” decision they would ever make. Accordingly, most generally followed their parents’ marital agendas. “I will do as my fader will have me,” said Margery Shepherd in 1486, “I will never have none ayenst my fader’s will.” Young people also took their neighbors’ and friends’ opinions into account. As Elizabeth Fletcher of Canterbury told her suitor, “I must be ruled by my friends as well as by myself.”30

  Marriage usually grew out of a collaboration among parents, friends, and the two individuals involved, and it was often based on very practical considerations. A different member of the Paston family, acting as a marital intermediary for his brother, wrote to his mother that he had found a young woman in London who would have two hundred pounds cash as a dowry and a significant inheritance after her stepmother died. The stepmother, he noted pointedly, was already fifty years old. Impressed by the prospect of an immediate cash dowry and an early inheritance, he “spake with some of the maid’s friends,” he reported, “and have gotten their good wills to have her married to my brother Edmund.” Edmund was consulted only after this negotiation.

  Of course a marriage undertaken for mercenary reasons might develop into a relationship based on affection or even love, while a love match might deteriorate into bitter dislike. We have little access into people’s internal world in this period because the habit of keeping diaries was not well established. We must rely on marital advice books, court cases, literature, and the rare memoirs that touched on married life for clues to how marriage was experienced. Each of these sources gives a different picture of the relations between husbands and wives.

  Portraits of Medieval Marriage

  Marriage advice books from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries are filled with monotonously detailed instructions to wives about being chaste, obedient, hardworking, and respectful, interspersed with practical tips on getting rid of fleas and an occasional sentence directing husbands to be chaste and loving too.31 The few manuals directed at husbands invariably sound more like tips for training a horse than building a marriage. The goal was that a husband should establish such complete sway over his wife that disobedience was unthinkable.

  Court records of the day, however, reveal that marriage was often not so orderly. Women talked back, and men violently imposed their wills. Wives could be subjected to astonishingly violent treatment without being granted relief. But most marriages never ended up in the courts, and it is risky to generalize from the violent ones that did.

  The published memoirs of medieval women give us a more positive view of marriage because wives almost always emphasize their reverence and fondness for their husbands. But a woman’s letters and memoirs were not likely to be published if they were critical of her husband or father. The celebrated seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys, for example, ordered his wife to destroy what she had written about his behavior because “it was so piquant . . . and most of it true.” When she refused, he grabbed the papers away from her and tore them up.32

  Whatever arrangements individual couples worked out in private, married life in medieval Europe took place in a context in which the law allowed a husband to control all the income or goods his wife brought into the marriage, to detain her physically inside the house, and to beat her for disobedience, although the violence was not supposed to endanger her life. Simil
arly, the cultural consensus in religious manuals, advice books, and public opinion was that wives should obey their husbands in all but the most extreme circumstances.

  The tale of Griselda was a staple of literature, folk stories, and marriage manuals in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Griselda, a beautiful peasant, married a marquis who put her through a series of extraordinary tests. First he took away her infant daughter, telling her he had decided to have the baby killed. Griselda responded meekly that she deferred to her lord’s judgment. Four years later she bore a handsome son. As soon as he was weaned, however, the marquis told her that his subjects did not want their future ruler to come from a peasant woman, so he was taking the son away to be killed too. Griselda replied that her love for her husband prevented her from wanting anything that did not please him.

  Twelve years later the marquis announced he was casting Griselda aside for a young maiden of more noble birth, and he wanted her to prepare the wedding celebration. She readily agreed, exclaiming with pleasure when she saw how beautiful the young lady was. Just before the wedding was to take place, the marquis revealed that the radiant young “bride” was really her own dear daughter, who had been raised all these years, along with her brother, by their aunt. Once Griselda revived from a joyous faint, she and the marquis “lived together in great love and peace and concord” for the rest of their lives.33

  Griselda was the “surrendered wife,” fourteenth-century style. But most fourteenth-century commentators who repeated the tale conceded that the marquis had gone a bit too far. In the version repeated in a marital advice book written by “The Goodman of Paris,” the author explains that he does not expect such complete obedience from his bride, “for I am not worthy thereof, and also I am no marquis nor have I taken in you a shepherdess.” Yet he immediately calls her attention to the most important moral of the tale: “that by good obedience a wise woman gains her husband’s love and at the end hath what she would of him.” It is not always wise, the Goodman admonishes his wife, “to say to one’s ruler: ‘I will do naught, it is not reasonable’; greater good cometh by obeying.”34