Contexts of Marriage in Medieval England: Evidence from the King's Court circa 1300

Abstract

In medieval England, as in the rest of Christian Europe, marriages contracted privately and solely by the exchange of words of present consent something like I here take you as my legitimate wife [husband] were considered binding even without consummation from the late twelfth century. Such marriages would be enforced by the ecclesiastical courts, even if the enforcement required a divorce between a man and woman solemnly married in church.' Such a divorce, of course, was never a divorce in the modern sense, but rather an annulment, a judicial declaration that since one of the parties to that church ceremony had already been married, the ecclesiastical ceremony had not produced a marriage at all. The original, privately contracted marriage stood in full force. The moral problems faced by the ecclesiastical courts in such matters were substantial; the problems presented for the king's court, particularly in matters relating to property rights, were no less so. The practice of the ecclesiastical courts in this regard is now fairly clear, but the context of the cases heard there is not. R. H. Helmholz has examined the evidence from the ecclesiastical courts.2 The best of this evidence, however, falls after the middle of the fourteenth century. The plea rolls of the king's court, on the other hand, provide a certain amount of excellent material from the decades around 1300. Moreover, evidence from ecclesiastical courts tends to treat marriage litigation as a self-contained unit, whereas