What Happened On A Medieval Wedding Night?

We've been tying the knot for thousands of years in one way or another, but what did a medieval wedding look like? The church had very strict ideas around monogamy and sex in this period, which affected the rituals of a wedding day, AND night. What happened in the bed chambers of the newlyweds? Why was pleasure so important? And why were divorce courts so humiliating? Joining Kate today is author and historian Jacqueline Murray, to take us back to the Middle Ages. This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 1:43Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am me, you are you, and you are listening to Betwixt the Sheets. And we are all very, very relieved that you are doing so. But before we can go any further together, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering underage adults, so Betwixt and you should be an adult too. We call that the Fair Do's warning, because if you listen to that and then you keep listening and something upsets you, well, fair do's, we did warn you. Right, on with the show.

• 2:16Kate Lister?

  Don't you just love a wedding? All the traditions playing out, the family bust-ups, the maid of honour crying into the cake. It's such a beautiful sight. Here, at a medieval wedding though, we have got other things going on. Everybody has made their way into the couple's bedchamber and are now having a right old song and dance about the happy couple getting down to do it. There are people throwing stockings at the bride, a priest chucking grain on the bed. I'm telling you, it's all kicking off round here. In fact, we'd better be on our way and leave the newlyweds to it. But what else went down at a medieval wedding? Let's find out.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  What do you look for in a man?

• 3:06Speaker 05

  Oh, money, of course.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

• 3:10Speaker 06

  I make perfect copies of whatever my father means by just turning the knob and pushing the button.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 3:25Speaker 07

  Goodness, I'm fearful of them. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derek.

• 3:34Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Shades, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Wedding ceremonies have long been steeped in tradition, or rather, we like to think that they are. And let's be obvious, they're pretty patriarchal ones at that. But how different was a medieval wedding ceremony? What expectations were there for the wedding night? Under what conditions could the couple get a divorce? Especially at the time when the church was all-seeing and all-powerful. Well, joining me today to take us back to the medieval wedding is Jacqueline Murray, Professor of History at the University of Guelph in Canada. Elaborate hats and chastity belts at the ready. Let's do this.

• 4:21Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Bertwix the Sheets. It's only Jacqueline Murray. How are you doing?

• 4:28Speaker 05

  Oh Kate, I'm thriving and I'm so excited to be here to talk to you about things between the sheets.

• 4:36Kate Lister?

  Medieval sheets, because this is your area of expertise. You are the author of, well, many things, but you are the author of From Texts to Bodies: Sexes, Genders and Sexualities in Pre-Modern Europe.

• 4:50Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 4:50Kate Lister?

  Oh, so as a first question, why medieval? What brought you to this area of study? Do you remember what your origin story is the first time you thought this is for me?

• 5:02Speaker 05

  Well, I was actually led to it by my sources for my dissertation. I was supposed to be looking at marriage and family, which remains one of my subspecialties. In manuals written for how to teach priests to hear confession. And my supervisor and I thought we'd hear all kinds of things about the relationship between husbands and wives, and how to deal with your children and so on. Not so. Families were basically never mentioned at all.

• 5:35Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 5:36Speaker 05

  The sources only wanted to talk about marriage and how to create a legitimate marriage, and human sexuality, and when it was legitimate and when it wasn't. And so the sources themselves drew me into questions of sexuality. I've moved further along from manuals for confessors, but that brought me into the history of sexuality in the Middle Ages, and I've tried to broaden my scope as a result.

• 6:05Kate Lister?

  I love those, the penitentials, that's what they're called, right? The texts, the kind of, there's some insane stuff in there.

• 6:12Speaker 05

  Yes, and if you move into the early 13th century, they take on a different tone because they stop being lists and they start being authors writing about what they think, and how you should greet a penitent, and how to wiggle out of them confessions of their deep and darkest sexual sins, like fornication or masturbation. You really get a glimpse into...

• 6:46Speaker 05

  What churchmen thought people were doing and why it was bad. And so they're quite fascinating.

• 6:54Kate Lister?

  Aren't they? But I'm going to get distracted if we start talking about this. So we should talk about marriage. First, before we even get to marriage, it's always useful to remember that the medieval period is a phenomenally long span of history. How do you define it? What's the kind of cutoff dates?

• 7:11Speaker 05

  My Middle Ages runs roughly from around 500 to 1500. But if we want to talk about marriage in the Middle Ages, it really needs to be given a small foundation. And then we can look at it from about the year 1200 to 1500 as a kind of regularized institution. In the early Middle Ages, there were lots of different Germanic peoples coming into Europe, and there was the Christian Church and so on. They all had different ideas about marriage and sexuality.

• 7:49Speaker 05

  And the Church spent roughly those years trying to convince Germanic peoples to follow Christian beliefs, in particular, to stop practicing polygamy and divorce. And the Church was promoting monogamy and indissoluble marriages. Once it had been made, it was for life. And so that gets itself sorted out by around the year 1200. And the appropriate ceremonies and so on appear at that time and are widely embraced.

• 8:29Kate Lister?

  When we think of marriage today and a wedding, we have loads of customs and it's very much a social norm. And we sort of need to remember, it was very much not always the case. You know, the idea that you'd get married in a church, that a priest had to be there, that you had to announce these things, that all had to become formalized at some point, right?

• 8:50Speaker 05

  That's right, and that's what was done in the late 12th century and we can see clearly in the early 13th century. And what is most remarkable is the ideas that were set down then, you still see reflected in contemporary marriage ceremonies.

• 9:08Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 9:09Speaker 05

  I know, it's an incredibly stable practice and ideology. One of the things that we always think of is the exchange of the ring.

• 9:22Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 9:23Speaker 05

  That we have evidence for from the 9th century.

• 9:28Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 9:29Speaker 05

  When Pope Nicholas wrote to a king of the Bulgarians describing how marriage was practiced in the West, because the king was just converting to Christianity. And one of the things that he mentions in the 9th century is the exchange of rings.

• 9:46Kate Lister?

  It's crazy, like, it could have been marriages where that wasn't happening, and of course, that had to be introduced. I suppose a good place to start would be to ask, why did the Church care about marriage? Why did the Church feel the need to get involved in marriage?

• 10:05Speaker 05

  The Church wanted to get involved in marriage because the Church was heavily involved in human sexuality.

• 10:11Kate Lister?

  There we go.

• 10:12Speaker 05

  Sex was considered problematic at best, sinful most of all. And the only legitimate context for male and female sexual intercourse was within a legitimate marriage. Saint Augustine said, at a time when every early Christian writer was condemning marriage because it was the locus of sex and sex was sinful and we had to eradicate sin, Augustine said, wait a minute, there was the possibility of human sexual activity within the Garden of Eden, where it would have occurred without sin.

• 10:55Speaker 05

  And he said, there are three goods of marriage that make it an honorable institution. Faith, which is the couple agreeing to an indissoluble bond for life. Children for the procreation of the race and the extension of the Christian church. And sacrament, which is suggesting that marriage parallels the relationship of Christ and the church. That's kind of how marriage becomes a sacrament, the last and seventh of the sacraments, is through these kinds of beliefs of indissoluble bond and the relationship of Christ and the church.

• 11:39Speaker 05

  And that takes a long time to take hold of. And then what we see in practice by the early 13th century is people agreeing, a couple exchanges vows for an indissoluble marriage, unless they can figure out how to get it annulled in the future. And so they work very hard in figuring that out. And there were two easy outs. A marriage had to have the capacity to have children. And so if a marriage could not be consummated, it was considered null. The main issue with marriage is the husband and wife consenting between them, but the marriage also had to be consummated.

• 12:22Kate Lister?

  The medieval church seems to have got itself in a proper twist around sexual pleasure, which seems to be a relatively new addition. It's not that sex was a completely hang-up free affair in the ancient world, but I think if you'd said to a Greek or a Roman person pre-Christianity that pleasure itself is bad, they would have been quite confused. But that seems to be something that the church, they get themselves into a right state until they can only come up with, well, all right, but you can do it as long as you're married and then only within these certain conditions as well.

• 12:54Speaker 05

  So one of the issues behind that is that the early church fathers were all educated as any elite Roman man would have been educated with the Greek philosophers and so on. And a lot of the early influences on asceticism that Christianity developed was in fact rooted in Stoic philosophy. So the pagans gave it to us. And then it was incorporated and they had to figure a way out. So there's a lot of debate about whether if a husband

• 13:35Speaker 05

  and wife are having sex, whether or not it's allowed for them to have pleasure. And one of the prevailing medical views at the time insisted that both the man and the woman had to experience pleasure and an orgasm in order that they both release their seeds so that procreation could occur. So the idea was lie back, think about procreating children, and if there's a little bit of fun in the process, well, so be it.

• 14:08Kate Lister?

  So marriage kind of develops as this formula is panic around sex, really, in the Middle Ages?

• 14:15Speaker 05

  Yes, and it's formulated then and it's preserved and reified then at a time when they're also, for example, denouncing unnatural sexual activities such as masturbation or bestiality and so on. So there's a kind of flip side. They try and make marriage a lovely institution. There's writers who say that husbands and wives should love each other with marital affection, almost be like best friends. You know, they're a partnership in it together. And indeed, they were because they were economic partnership as well as

• 15:00Speaker 05

  a kind of a spiritual partnership.

• 15:03Kate Lister?

  I was just about to ask you about the economics of this because it's, there seems to be so many different strands to the idea of marriage. On the one hand, you've got the church talking about spiritual salvation and procreation and all of these things and how important it is to God. But on the ground, It's also an economic necessity, especially for women who are going to struggle to earn their own money and support themselves, that they sort of, they have to get married, right? And it's been that way for a very long time in our history.

• 15:33Speaker 05

  Yes, it has. There were very few options for women of any rank. At the highest levels of society, they were a means by which economic and political relationships were grounded. Two great families would marry in together and be allies. It was actually one of the only reasons that the theologians believed that consent was expendable between the couple, was if it was for a peace treaty between warring nations. So even the elites, and men as much as women in the elites, were kind of used as pawns in marriage.

• 16:17Speaker 05

  And at the lower levels, quite right, the economy was based on the family as the economic unit. If you lived in rural society in particular, it was a wife contributed as much to the household economy as did a husband, and they needed children to help out too. So he might plough the fields, she collected eggs and sold them at the market, and the children looked after the sheep in the field. And that was a very tight economic unit. And the importance of children is indicated by the fact that sometimes we see in these

• 16:58Speaker 05

  areas, individual cases, we don't have great swaths of evidence, but individual cases where a couple didn't formally marry until the woman were pregnant in order that he could be assured that he'd have the children that he needed to run his farm and his piece of land.

• 17:25Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Jacqueline after this short break.

• 17:43Kate Lister?

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• 21:11Kate Lister?

  Do you think love came into, because I have heard it argued by people, and I've never been entirely convinced by this, but romantic love is a very modern invention, that it came in with the Victorians, that until this point, it was all business, it was all, you know, how many cows do you have? I've got two goats and a chicken. All right, then we'll get married. Do you think that, well, from your research, where does romantic love figure into this arrangement?

• 21:34Speaker 05

  I'm not sure romantic love comes in until later in the period, but I think there is marital affection. And so, a couple cares for each other, prays for each other's souls, does the best they can for each other. And some of the language that we see in court cases or coroner's records or so on uses the language of my dearly beloved wife who, you know, fell into a ditch and drowned.

• 22:08Kate Lister?

  Jesus Christ.

• 22:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, there were a lot of ditches in the Middle Ages, it seems. And you hear real regret. Or another place that you can see this affection is if one of them falls ill, the lengths to which another goes, not only to get medical treatment, but perhaps to get them to a pilgrimage site like Canterbury, where Thomas Becket was known to perform miracles at his tomb. And there's recordings of the people who supervised pilgrimage sites about the lengths at which parents and children and children and parents

• 22:51Speaker 05

  and spouses went to try and achieve cures for their their family members.

• 22:58Kate Lister?

  Would these have been arranged marriages? I assume that if you were very rich and if you were in the Middle Ages getting married, this would have been set up. But would that have been the case for poorer people too?

• 23:08Speaker 05

  Well, both, in the sense that marriage was done rationally at, say, the village level. Because of the rules of consanguinity, you couldn't marry people who were too near to you because you might be related by blood.

• 23:24Kate Lister?

  Right, okay.

• 23:25Speaker 05

  Often, they might marry someone from the next village. But there was a dowry. The woman needed to bring a dowry.

• 23:33Kate Lister?

  Of course.

• 23:34Speaker 05

  And so there was an economic aspect to it. The man had to give, endow the woman with a certain dowry that she would have use of for life, should he pre-decease her. So people were sensible. And also, and we see this particularly in the cities among the urban artisan class. People listened to their friends and their family. And there are court cases that show a woman saying, I'm not sure I can accept your proposal. I'll have to check with my friends. And that would include family members. And the other side of it is, because the theologians said marriage could not be coerced.

• 24:19Speaker 05

  And consent had to be freely given. We actually find the occasional case of someone, sometimes a man, but mostly a woman, resisting and saying, I will not marry the person that you have selected for me.

• 24:36Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 24:37Speaker 05

  We have two cases of this within the famous Paston family of merchants in the 15th century. Elizabeth Paston was supposed to be married by her family to Stephen Scrope, and she was having none of it. And some of the reports say that she was locked in her room for weeks and beaten twice a day, and her head had been broken open and bleeding.

• 25:05Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 25:06Speaker 05

  But still, she refused. In the end, her resistance was broken down and she agreed, but then the marriage never happened anyway. Uh, maybe Scrope got the idea.

• 25:16Kate Lister?

  Yeah, you would.

• 25:18Speaker 05

  By the way, he was 50 and she was 20 at the time.

• 25:21Kate Lister?

  Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah.

• 25:23Speaker 05

  But really interesting to see a young woman of that age living with her family. Exercising that resistance and being strong about it.

• 25:32Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 25:33Speaker 05

  The other Paston was Marjorie Paston, who married privately and secretly, a clandestine marriage, with the family's estate manager. And we have two pieces of information that's very interesting. One is a letter from Richard to Marjorie when she's being kept and locked up by her family, and they're saying, you can't marry him, that's not what's happening. Talking to her as my own beloved dear wife, my dear who is my wife before God, and so on, because they had secretly exchanged consent.

• 26:13Speaker 05

  And then there's Marjorie's mother's letter that says she was so defiant, but she went before the bishop. She repeated the words she had said to Richard, and the bishop had no choice but to agree that they were married. So sometimes people rebelled, and sometimes quite successfully, that marriage between Marjorie and Richard lasted their lifetime.

• 26:38Kate Lister?

  On a slightly unrelated note, I found myself watching Braveheart the other night. I don't know why I was doing that, but they have that strange part in the beginning where the nobles of medieval Scotland, the English nobles, go, we're going to introduce prima nocte, which is where any lord can take a common girl into his bed on the night of her wedding. And then there's this like, oh, if we can't get them out, we'll breed them out. And I just wondered, has that ever, ever been a thing? Or is that Hollywood nonsense? Was there ever any law?

• 27:06Speaker 05

  Hollywood nonsense. Never.

• 27:08Kate Lister?

  I knew it.

• 27:08Speaker 05

  It was never law, ever. And it was never really custom either. I don't know the roots of it, but I know that there is a book written that absolutely denounces that notion. That's a Victorian.

• 27:23Kate Lister?

  That it would be, wouldn't it? Yeah. Along with chastity belts and everything else that they came up with. That never made any sense. But that does lead me on quite nicely to talk about the importance of virginity in marriage, which, you know, thankfully, that's, we're not placing a big premium on that nowadays, although some cultures do. But it was a big deal in the past.

• 27:44Speaker 05

  True enough. And as my earlier example suggested, in the lower levels of society, virginity was not as important, but it certainly was in the middle ranks of society because it was based on family honor. And this was also true in the higher ranks. It was the honor of the family, particularly the father, that the daughter was a virgin when she married. And it was absolutely critical if it were amongst the royalty and nobility. And this is mostly not because the hymen was so special and important, but because it was a way of

• 28:29Speaker 05

  guaranteeing a legitimate lineage. Children inherited property, children inherited kingdoms. And the father needed to make sure that the child was his. So if a woman were not a virgin, then it's all up for grabs. It could be anything. Anybody's kid. And the honour of the family and the way that they passed down their goods through the male line and so on was critical. And that's really the focus of virginity. Although the church theology also wanted people to be virgins, but that's because they were anti-sex, basically.

• 29:10Kate Lister?

  Were they ever interested in men being virgins as well? Has the emphasis always been that it has to be the woman? Has there ever been a point where they were like, we're going to test this man for his virginity?

• 29:21Speaker 05

  Well, that they could. Unfortunately, it's virtually impossible to tell if a man is a virgin.

• 29:30Kate Lister?

  Oh, and a woman too. The World Health Organisation has recently spoken out about that. So you can't tell that with these so-called virginity tests, but they thought they could.

• 29:38Speaker 05

  They thought they could. The only time that virginity for men has seemed important was within the context of monasteries, where men were supposed to be chased and repress their sexuality.

• 29:51Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 29:52Speaker 05

  And so within some areas of monasticism, you wanted to know if a man was a virgin, but you could never really tell.

• 30:00Kate Lister?

  No. Well, let's say that we're in the Middle Ages and I'm going to get married. What would a medieval wedding? I'm definitely not a virgin, I'm a bit too old for this. I think my ship has well sailed. But let's just pretend that I am. What would the celebrations be like?

• 30:17Speaker 05

  You could be a widow.

• 30:18Kate Lister?

  I could be a widow. I could be a widow.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  That's how you get out of having to be a virgin at marriage.

• 30:25Kate Lister?

  Nice.

• 30:26Speaker 05

  So let's take sort of an urban, middle-class kind of family. Or just that social level. The parents of the woman would have looked around for an appropriate husband and suggested it to her. They get to meet and if they both consent, they agree in words of the future tense that, I will take you as my husband, I will take you as my wife, which means at some point in the future, we're going to get married. That's the betrothal. And then the bands would be read out by the church on three consecutive weeks, saying that John Smith and Joan Gray are going to be married.

• 31:11Speaker 05

  And the purpose of that was because it was so hard in these communities to know if people were related to each other, particularly in rural communities where there was very little social mobility. And people might know, someone else in the congregation might remember that John's great-grandfather, in fact, was married to Joan's great-grandmother, something like that. And that union would be considered consanguineous, and so they were not legitimately able to marry.

• 31:51Speaker 05

  Or the other reason was because a lot of times, one spouse would desert another and go and move to a different city, or a different village, and want to take up with a different partner. And so someone might be able to say, wait a minute, I was a peddler passing through that village. I know this man was already married. So, we get that out of the way. And couples would be married formally, on the steps of the church. The priest does not marry, and in fact, now does not marry them. He is not the actor. The couple exchange the vows between themselves.

• 32:35Speaker 05

  They make their promises to each other, and that is what forms the sacramental bond of marriage. So, everyone's standing around outside the church door, then they'd go in and have a mass, and following that, they'd have a feast and dancing and so on. Then the couple would go off and spend the night together, or everyone else would just stay and have a good party. Now, that's formal marriage, and that was often too expensive, or priests weren't available, or whatever. You had to pay the priest to give his time to marry. And so people wed informally.

• 33:18Speaker 05

  They might be sitting at a friend's house with a bunch of of their friends and have decided that they wanted to get married and just with their friends there. They might exchange vows. Or sometimes we even hear that they're in a tavern. They've been drinking.

• 33:37Kate Lister?

  Oh, that's a nightmare.

• 33:39Speaker 05

  Then they exchange their consent and everyone goes on drinking. But what's interesting about these informal marriages, Kate, is that people without a priest knew the critical formulaic words to say to form that sacramental bond. I will take you as my wife. I will take you as my husband. And that's all they needed to do. The witnesses are there just to confirm that it happened. If there's some question about the marriage in the future. Usually the man gives a woman a little gold ring, although sometimes it might be a silver

• 34:23Speaker 05

  belt, I saw in one case recently, but a gift that's part of symbolically endowing her and bringing her, sharing his goods with her, which was one of the focuses of marriage.

• 34:37Kate Lister?

  And then there's the wedding night. And I've heard all manner of things about this, from there would have to be bloody sheets hung up the next day to prove there'd been consummation. I've heard people say, oh, there would have been people stood around watching a newly married couple having sex. I'm not sure about that. Well, what's, what does your research say?

• 34:57Speaker 05

  Well, a lot of the evidence doesn't take us to the bedroom door, to be honest, because our single most important examples that give us evidence of what real people were doing.

• 35:12Speaker 05

  Are records where a couple is being challenged one way or another in court, occasional examples from literature and so on. And literature, we don't know how reflective that is. But there was in the very early Middle Ages, the notion of blessing the bed of the couple. And this became Christianized. So there's a famous picture of a priest blessing the conjugal bed with the couple inside it. And they put grain on it. And the priest says a few prayers that they're all praying for fecundity and for the couple to have children.

• 35:56Speaker 05

  And sometimes there might be a charivari. All the guests at the wedding are getting a bit too drunk. And so they all decide to burst into the bedroom and see what's happening. And then at the highest levels of society, where it's so important that A, the woman be a virgin and B, the marriage be consummated. Members of the court would stand around and watch so that they could confirm that the marriage had been consummated. And I don't think, given that those couples frequently may not have met before the wedding day. I'm guessing that that wasn't a very pleasant experience for either of them.

• 36:46Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Jacqueline after this short break.

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• 38:47Kate Lister?

  It's not medieval, but the marriage of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI wasn't allegedly consummated for seven years. There's various reasons to this, but it seems that they just didn't quite know what to do with one another. Marie Antoinette's brother got to the bottom of it and he said that what had been happening was that Louis had been coming in, inserting himself for a few minutes, staying perfectly still and then withdrawing without reaching an end.

• 39:13Kate Lister?

  Bless them. But that made me think that I was like, what counts as consummation then? Like, I know that this is like, we're now into weird theological territory, but would the medieval or the church in general have counted that as an act of consummation? Or does there have to be an orgasm?

• 39:30Speaker 05

  It's not so much there has to be an orgasm, there has to be an ejaculation of semen into the woman's vagina.

• 39:37Kate Lister?

  I knew it. Yes, that was what I thought as well, because I couldn't work out why they were saying it hadn't been consummated, even if Louis had been doing this weird, just sort of lying there, not doing anything. Bless him.

• 39:49Speaker 05

  Anything else wouldn't count as consummation, or interestingly enough, sometimes even as sex. Anal sex didn't count as fornication and adultery.

• 40:02Kate Lister?

  See, that's some small print.

• 40:04Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, I know, I know.

• 40:09Speaker 05

  But in addition to getting married, one of the couple's challenges was, what do we do if we want a divorce now that the church won't let us divorce? And we see many cases in which one spouse simply moves to a different place and sets up a new family and household and life and friends and gets married. And then somehow the other spouse finds this out and goes and demands that the church return the spouse. And we find both the wife and the husband doing this. Sometimes it's the husband wanting

• 40:50Speaker 05

  to get his wife back. Sometimes it's the wife wanting to get her husband back. But basically, they've gone on and set up new marital arrangements. But they wouldn't have been legitimate marriages because they were already vowed. And I think that that's really interesting. There are more cases like that than there are cases wanting the dissolution of marriage. There were two reasons a marriage could be dissolved. One was whether they were too closely related. And so they'd get out the genealogy charts and count if they were related. In that case, they were allowed to separate. For example, that's why Eleanor of Aquitaine and King Louis

• 41:31Speaker 05

  of France were able to separate so that Eleanor could go on and marry Henry the Second, and then we get the lion in Winter.

• 41:40Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 41:40Speaker 05

  But the other reason would be non-consummation of marriage. So this is where your Marie Antoinette

• 41:48Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 41:48Speaker 05

  question becomes very relevant. The couple had to have the capacity to procreate for the marriage to be legitimate. So one of the only reasons was for separation was impotence of the man.

• 42:04Kate Lister?

  Hello.

• 42:04Speaker 05

  Non-consummation of the marriage and that theoretically, they believed that it might be the woman's fault, but in practice, it was impotence. And we find a bizarre number of cases. And in some of these, it's very clear that an unhappy husband and wife are colluding in order to separate.

• 42:31Kate Lister?

  You would. You would, wouldn't you?

• 42:33Speaker 05

  And in other cases, it's the wife just trying to get rid of the husband by alleging he's been impotent ever since they got married. And there's an elaborate ecclesiastical framework for adjudicating this that goes as far as having the man's body examined by women, midwives or married women.

• 42:56Kate Lister?

  Oh, no.

• 42:57Speaker 05

  And then public attempts at intercourse.

• 43:00Kate Lister?

  Oh, no.

• 43:05Kate Lister?

  Oh, if you were just colluding with the missus because you were both fed up and what, that is really committing to it. So the man would be basically they'd try and make him have an erection in public, basically.

• 43:18Speaker 05

  That would be less likely to happen if both the couple agreed. That often happened, though, if the wife said, "I have not been able to conceive children. We've been married three years. He can't do it." And then the husband, of course, is shamed and wants to, and the courts are confused. The husband wants to say, "No, no, I am potent." And the courts need evidence. And these ecclesiastical courts were rigorous followers of Roman law and the law of evidence. And so they couldn't just accept the whispers

• 43:57Speaker 05

  of the neighbors who say, "Yeah, yeah, they never did it," and had to figure out a way that was a legitimate proof for the court to make a decision. So that's the underlying logic behind that. Because if they had consummated the marriage and made the sacramental vow, if they went off with other people, or whatever, they'd be committing a mortal sin. And that's why the Church was so concerned about adjudicating marriage and exercising surveillance over how it was done. Because people could unwittingly be married and go and marry other people,

• 44:42Speaker 05

  or they could do it deliberately, and their immortal souls were at risk.

• 44:47Kate Lister?

  Were there ever any women that were accused of, well, not impotence, but not being able to perform?

• 44:55Speaker 05

  That was a theoretical possibility. You see it in both canon law and theology as a possibility. Sometimes you see it as an accusation. And again, it's just an attempt to get out of a marriage. Given that it is my understanding that it is physiologically impossible. They thought the woman would be too narrow to admit the man's penis.

• 45:22Kate Lister?

  I see.

• 45:23Speaker 05

  And the physicians of the time said, "Well, let's go in and have some surgery and widen her up."

• 45:29Kate Lister?

  Oh, God.

• 45:30Speaker 05

  So in fact, I take it mostly as a theoretical debate between men in an elite educated class who are all vowed to celibacy, who really are just theorizing.

• 45:46Kate Lister?

  So it sounds like once you got into this thing then, which is quite terrifying, given that you can get married at the pub after a few jars with your friends. It's very difficult to get out of this once you're in.

• 45:57Speaker 05

  Yes, it is.

• 45:58Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 45:59Speaker 05

  This is what we know that they went to the pub because they appear before the court trying to either deny that a marriage occurred or a third party is intervening and saying, that's actually my wife. And so there's a bit of court information. And one thing the witnesses would have been asked is, who was there? When did it happen? What words did they say? What was the context? And, you know, sometimes me and my friends were sitting on the trunk in the hallway or having jars in the pub and, you know, all these different places. It took place in a garden and we asked John Foster to come and be a witness to our vows.

• 46:43Speaker 05

  And that, incidentally, is what the priest is. The priest is the primary witness to the vows in the formal marriage ceremony.

• 46:52Kate Lister?

  So as a final question then, listening to everything that you've said, medieval marriage makes sense for many, many, many reasons. It sounds a bit mad and very difficult to get out of, but I can understand why they're doing this. It's spiritual, but also economic and it's, you know, alliances and da, da, da. And I'm wondering what you think about the institution of marriage to this very day? Because we don't have to get married because otherwise I'm going to be out on the street if I don't have a husband to look after me. Nobody's interested in marrying me to cement an alliance with Spain. We're not doing that anymore. Why do you think we still continue to get married?

• 47:30Speaker 05

  I think that it is a holdover from the Victorian period. And their romance with the idea of the family and the loving couple. I mean, the Victorians really played that up. So it enters into the 20th and, and the 50s, of course, with marriage and the suburbs and children keeps it going. But honestly, Kate, I have no idea.

• 48:01Speaker 05

  Why people want to get married now, unless they are faithful believers in a religion that mandates marriage and that encourages marriage and that if marriage now really has probably gone back to being a spiritual relationship within a religious context, or it's just something you do to throw a big party.

• 48:27Kate Lister?

  People still doing it down the pub because they've had a few too many.

• 48:31Kate Lister?

  Jacqueline, you have been incredible to talk to. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 48:38Speaker 05

  They can find me at [email protected]. I'm at the University of Guellf and you can find me on the website there.

• 48:48Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much. I've thoroughly enjoyed talking to you.

• 48:51Speaker 05

  Thank you, Kate. It was great fun.

• 48:58Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Jacqueline for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. I know everybody asks you to do it, but it does actually help us out. And if you wanted to email us to say hi or suggest an episode, then you can do so at [email protected]. Coming up, we have got the final episode in our limited series, History's Worst Fuckboys, and perhaps the ultimate example, Henry VIII ba-ba-bom, and an episode on the Greek myth of Medusa. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex,

• 49:39Kate Lister?

  Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

• 50:23Speaker 03

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