A new emphasis on the married couple’s right to privacy also emerged in the sixteenth century, as Protestants and Catholics alike began to condemn the noisy public rituals that had marked a community’s acceptance or rejection of a marriage. We have already seen what a fracas could break out when a community in the late Middle Ages disapproved of a particular marriage. But neighbors were traditionally just as boisterous in celebrating a wedding. They escorted the newlyweds to bed, playing loud music and making sexual jokes. In England, wedding guests played games such as throwing the stocking, in which the male bachelors in the crowd threw the couple’s stockings at the bride while she sat in bed with her new husband. The first man to hit her on the nose with a stocking was said to be the next to marry. Although the revelers eventually retired so that the couple could consummate their vows, they returned the next morning to wake the couple with more music and merriment.
By the seventeenth century religious reformers were unanimously condemning these customs as insults to the dignity of marriage, but many individuals clung to the old ways. In 1667, Samuel Pepys wrote that he had attended a wedding at which the neighbors were not invited, as was customary, to wake the couple with music in the morning, “which is very mean me-thinks, and is as if they had married like dog and bitch.”29
Are We There Yet?
Despite the growing emphasis on the special relationship between a husband and wife, Western Europeans were still far from accepting the idea that marriage should be based on love and intimacy. Even as reformers rejected neighbors’ right to regulate and supervise marriage, they encouraged the state to tighten the definition of a legal marriage and shore up the right of parents to veto a proposed match. Luther argued that parents did not have the right to force a child into a loveless match but that they were totally justified in forbidding a match, even if the couple loved each other. In the sixteenth century Catholic theologians also backed away from their earlier commitment to the validity of a marriage based on consent.
During this period the same social changes that were creating more family partnerships and increasing the independence of the nuclear family were eroding the constraints that had led youths to defer willingly to parents and neighbors on matters of marriage and sex. More and more individuals were making their living by doing day labor for wages, rather than by farming, entering long-term apprenticeships, or being live-in servants.30
Authorities became alarmed by the new breed of “masterless” men and women: beggars, migrant workers, mercenary soldiers, servants who claimed the right to change employers, and “idle persons” who tried to gather food in what used to be the “commons” instead of just accepting whatever work they were offered. The number of such rootless people grew as real wages for farm workers and landless laborers dropped sharply between 1500 and 1620. Officials saw the young men wandering from town to town as a threat to public order. Established journeymen and apprentices feared having to compete with them for work. Unmarried women were considered worrisome on moral as well as economic grounds.
In Germany and France, cities passed laws forbidding unmarried women from establishing residence unless they were employed as a servant in a household and requiring them to leave town if they gave up such a position. In many regions, city and parish officials, fearing that impoverished individuals who married would be unable to maintain independent households, started to forbid such people from marrying at all. A typical concern was expressed in 1628 by an English minister who wrote of a young woman in his parish that “she hath no house nor home of her own.” He noted that she would likely be a “charge on the parish, and therefore will hardly be suffered to marry.”31
But what about those who ignored such rules and married “by consent”? In theory Protestants may have held marriage in higher esteem than Catholics, but in practice they were far less willing to accept the validity of an informally contracted marriage. In Zurich, a 1525 ordinance decreed that a marriage was not valid unless attended by “two pious, honorable, and incontestable witnesses.” In Zurich and Geneva, a marriage contracted by young people without parental consent could be rescinded by the courts, even if the couple had been living together for some time. In 1534, Nuremberg officials ruled that parental consent, up to the age of twenty-five for men and twenty-two for women, was needed for a legal marriage. In the 1520s and 1530s, Strasbourg raised the legal age of marriage for men to twenty-five and for women to twenty, and then changed it again, to twenty-five for both sexes, in 1565. Protestant courts were quick to invalidate clandestine marriages, even if based on “words of the present” and consummated by sexual intercourse or long-term cohabitation.32
Catholics also narrowed their criteria for a valid marriage. In France a 1556 edict required parental consent for men up to the age of thirty and for women until age twenty-five. A later law in France provided that a couple of any age who married without parental consent could be banished or imprisoned.33
These rulings could be catastrophic for women and children. Elizabeth Pallier and Pierre Houlbronne, for example, had lived together for eight years, had children together, and eventually, though belatedly, were married in church. According to traditional canon law, this was a perfectly valid marriage. But when Pierre got a job at the Palais de Justice, a post that suddenly made him a very desirable marriage partner, his parents petitioned to have the marriage declared invalid because he had not received their consent. In 1587 the court upheld the parents. After eight years with Pierre, Elizabeth instantly became an unwed mother. Her children were suddenly illegitimate, with no claim on their father’s property. Pierre, on the other hand, was free to contract a more advantageous marital alliance.34
Penalties for sex outside marriage also increased in this period. Protestant cities in Germany and Switzerland imposed new sanctions on couples who consummated their marriage before the public ceremony, in hopes of ending the long-standing acceptance of a pregnancy that occurred between betrothal and marriage. In England, in the 1620s, parish officers began sending women who were pregnant at the altar to church courts for punishment. Some Protestant jurisdictions encouraged neighbors to spy on one another to ferret out illicit sex. Meanwhile the practice of annulling clandestine marriages increased the number of illegitimate children.35
Catholics also stepped up the effort to penalize women for sexual activity outside marriage. In 1556 in France, Henri II issued an edict requiring single or widowed women who were pregnant to register at local government offices and submit to interrogation.
So even as the abstract celebration of married love increased, the enhanced right of parents and authorities to veto or invalidate marriages set limits on the number of love matches. In many cases, courts upheld the parents’ control from beyond the grave. In sixteenth-century England, a father’s will often made his child’s inheritance conditional on whether a future marriage was approved by “overseers” he had designated before his death. A poignant case from Holland involved Agatha Welhoeck, who fell in love with an older widower in 1653. After trying for nine years to win her father’s consent to the match, Agatha appealed to the court in The Hague. The judges, unmoved by her declaration that she and her intended were as well matched “as I believe two true souls have ever lived,” declared her a fugitive and returned her to her parents’ home. In his will, Agatha’s father instructed his widow to continue refusing permission for the match. It took until 1670, seventeen years after they had fallen in love and five years after her father had died, for Agatha and her soul mate finally to marry. Their efforts to gain permission to marry lasted almost twice as long as the marriage itself, which was cut short by the husband’s death nine years later.36
The American colonies were not much more permissive than the Old World, although unsettled conditions allowed for more evasion of the rules. Eight of the thirteen colonies had laws requiring parental approval for at least some categories of young people. In New England a man could be whipped or imprisoned if he “inveigled” or “insinuated” h
imself into a woman’s affections without her parents’ or guardian’s consent to the courtship.37
Even where individuals were free to make their own marriage choices, children generally continued to accept their parents’ right to supervise their courting. If the parents actively opposed a match, the children usually backed down. The consequences of defying a parent could be very severe, financially and personally. A woman might disobey her parents to become engaged to a man of her choice, only to be left estranged from her kin and compromised in her community if the man succumbed to pressure and backed out of the marriage. Many men did back out of a match if the bride’s parents disapproved, worrying that their prospective wife would be disinherited or that there was no advantage in having hostile in-laws. Few people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries believed that “love conquers all.”38
The prudent woman obliged her kin unless she had taken a violent dislike to a prospective suitor or developed an unusually intense attachment to another. In 1651, when Alice Wandesford of Yorkshire was twenty-five, her family urged her to marry and identified several prospective suitors. In her autobiography, Alice recorded that after a second visit, her mother told one gentleman “that she was willing he should proceed with his suit, if I should see cause to accept.” Alice had no particular desire to give up her “happy and free condition.” But she decided that getting married would please God, her family, and her friends. This particular suitor, she reflected, “seemed to be a very godly, sober, and discreet person, free from all manner of vice, and of a good conversation”—as well as possessed of “a handsome competency.”39 Alice’s acceptance of his proposal was a free choice, based in part on her feeling that she would get along with him once they were married. But her decision-making process was hardly starry-eyed.
Men too made their choices with an eye toward financial advantage, convenience, and desire to please parents and friends. In sixteenth-century Cologne, Hermann von Weinsburg’s parents suggested he marry an older widowed neighbor who owned a nearby wool and yarn shop. Weinsburg told his parents that he would be happy to take their advice, noting “the wisdom of the proverb: ‘one should marry the experienced in the neighborhood.’ ”40
In seventeenth-century England, Samuel Pepys’s cousin was exceptionally blunt about his motives for marriage. He asked Pepys to help him find a wife to replace his sister, who had kept house for him until her death, specifying that he wanted a widow without children but with a good income. She should be sober and industrious and not someone who would make great demands upon his time.41
Marriages based too much on love were cause for comment. In the late seventeenth century the nephew of a Yorkshire businessman remarked disapprovingly that his uncle was “the strangliest inchanted and infatuated in his first marriage that I think ever any wise man was.” In the colony of Virginia, London Carter noted that one woman of his acquaintance “was more fond of her husband perhaps than the Politeness of the day allows.”42
For most men, marriage was part of the “credentialing” required for adulthood, or even a necessary career move. Historian Rosemary O’Day points out that young men frequently “decided to marry without reference to any specific individual,” either because they needed the financial stake of a dowry or had reached the stage in their profession or self-employment where respectable society would expect them to begin a family. In seventeenth-century New England, Thomas Walley wrote in his diary that just when he had made up his mind to go to Boston to seek a wife, God “sent me a wife home to me and saved me the labor of a tediouse [sic] journey.” These sound like the words of someone who has been spared an irritating shopping expedition, not a man who has found the love of his life just down the road.43
People valued love in its proper place. But it is remarkable how many people still considered it a dreadful inconvenience. In the 1690s Elizabeth Freke, wife of the sheriff of Cork, Ireland, thought her husband’s plan to marry their son to the daughter of an earl was too ambitious, but she went ahead and arranged the meeting. To her great annoyance, her son not only was smitten with the girl but had the poor judgment to show it, thus weakening his family’s bargaining position in negotiations over the financial settlement. The girl’s parents, Freke wrote crossly, “found my son so taken with the young lady that they would have made us . . . paymasters to the young company.” But Elizabeth was not intimidated. “I cared not to be frightened out of my money, nor my son either,” she recorded, and the match fell through, “though my son was bitterly angry with me for it.”44
Some seventeenth-century parents were more indulgent toward their children’s personal preferences than Lady Freke. But when they weren’t, they rarely felt a need to justify their intransigence or cloak it in concern for their children’s long-term happiness. And even individuals who believed that love was a vital part of marriage defined love in ways that were very different from the mutual esteem and reciprocal obligations that most modern couples wish for. Wives, for example, were expected to ignore their husbands’ extramarital adventures. In the early sixteenth century Elizabeth Stafford, wife of the Duke of Norfolk, became so angry about her husband’s affairs that it caused a family scandal. Her brother wrote to the duke commiserating with him about the couple’s deteriorating marriage, which he blamed not on his brother-in-law’s infidelity but on his sister’s “wild language” and “wilful mind.”45
Few men prior to the eighteenth century seem to have questioned the sexual double standard, even if they were in affectionate marriages. In Miriam Slater’s study of the seventeenth-century marriage of Sir Ralph and Mary Verney, there is a frankness about male sexual privilege that later generations of men were more likely to conceal. The couple was clearly devoted to each other. Yet on the eve of Lady Verney’s departure for an extended trip, Sir Ralph’s uncle, who was close to both, wrote cheerfully to his nephew: “I presume that once within these 3 or 4 months you will have as fair an old time of whoring as . . . you are like to have.” After Lady Verney’s return home, she became ill, and Sir Ralph asked his uncle to find them a maidservant. His uncle replied that he found just the woman. “Because you writ me word that you were in love with Dirty Sluts, I took great care to fit you with a Joan that may be as good as my Lady in the dark.” He noted that a former maidservant of the Verneys “is very confident she will match your cock, and she should know for they lived half a year together in one house.”46
Here we have Sir Ralph’s sexual infidelity being lightly discussed, not only by a relative of the couple but by a former servant—and a female one to boot. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such carrying-on became more discreet. At the very least it was cloaked in more hypocrisy, indicating the existence of a social standard that people did not care to challenge openly. Such a standard for mutual sexual fidelity was comparatively rare outside the ranks of religious reformers before the eighteenth century.
The definition of marital companionship also remained very limited throughout this period. The fifteenth-century humanist Leon Battista Alberti told men they had “the opportunity to communicate fully” with their wives. But he advised a husband to hide his personal papers from his spouse and “never to speak with her of anything but household matters or questions of conduct, or of the children.”47
Two centuries later the Puritan moralist William Gourge assured his audience that “man and wife are after a sort even fellows and partners.” But he insisted that a wife should always address her spouse with reverence, avoiding such overly familiar endearments as “sweetheart,” “love,” “dear,” “duck,” and “chick.” Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts wrote in the seventeenth century: “A true wife accounts her subjection her honor and freedom.” Another New England Puritan urged wives to repeat a catechism that ended: “Mine husband is my superiour, my better.” In England in 1663, Lord Chief Baron Matthew Hale declared flatly that “by the law of God, of nature, or reason and by the Common Law, the will of the wife is subject to the will of the husband.”48
Secular authorities and religious moralists continued to accept a husband’s use of force against his wife. He was usually urged to see violence as a last resort and not to make it too severe, but his right to “chastise” his wife was rarely challenged. Throughout Europe, community shaming rituals were typically aimed at “scolds”—wives who disobeyed, talked back, or actually fought with their husbands—rather than at husbands who battered their wives.49
In colonial America too, authorities and neighbors alike remained more concerned with wives who challenged patriarchal power than with husbands who abused it. Men were so sensitive on this question that they sometimes sued for slander when neighbors gossiped, as they frequently did, that a husband was allowing his wife to usurp his authority. A husband could be fined or ducked in the village pond for not controlling his wife. Even the governor of New Haven colony was once prosecuted and found guilty of “not pressing ye rule upon his wife.”50
The new respect for the institution of marriage that had developed in Western Europe by the sixteenth century is beautifully expressed in the words for the solemnization of matrimony that were adopted by the Church of England in the mid-sixteenth century and are still used today. “Dearly beloved,” the ceremony opened, “we are gathered together here in the sight of God . . . to joyne together this man and this woman in holy matrimony, which is an honorable state, instytuted of God in Paradise.” At the end of the ceremony the man was instructed to say to his wife: “With this ring I thee wed: with my body I thee worship; and with all my worldly goodes, I thee endow.”51
A moving promise, but one that illustrated the gap between ideal and reality in early modern Europe. Those words should really have been spoken by the bride. The wife was legally required to worship her husband with her body. He could force sex upon her, beat her, and imprison her in the family home, while it was she who endowed him with all her wordly goods. The minute he placed that ring upon her finger he controlled any land she brought to the marriage and he owned outright all her movable property as well as any income she later earned. Prior to the late eighteenth century, few voices challenged these inequities.
Marriage, a History Page 19