Marriage in Medieval England
Mary Purnell
Medieval theology was in large part defined by the dichotomy of the body and the soul. The latter was seen to be the chief virtue of humanity, an element of heaven that humans possessed only by the grace of God. Conversely, the body was considered an instrument of sin, and an earthly prison to the soul. According to John Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer’s who died just shortly after Richard’s deposition,
The Creator of every creature,
Who made the soul of man in His image,
In order that the body by reason and nature
Might be ruled with just governance,
Gave superiority to the soul;
Because he made it discreet and rational,
Reason is therefore constable over the body.
(I, 1-9)
A critical feature of Gower’s perspective is his distinction between what is of heaven and what is not. In the Bible, God says, “‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’” (Genesis 1:26, emphasis mine). Gower on the other hand distinguishes between man’s physicality and spirituality, preferring instead to say that God “made the soul of man in His image” (emphasis mine).
A natural outcome of rejecting the flesh is a rejection of sex by extension. In fact, even thinking about sex was a sin; a famous 14th-century poem maintains that a “brennynge” desire for sex is a “deadly synne [th]at men schuld Drede” (Speculum Vitae, 9191-9232). But did that stop people from having sex? Of course not.
Marriage was put forth as the perfect solution for those who wanted to be virtuous, but, you know, not that virtuous. And while it wasn’t the same as the abbey, the practice was still thought to be sanctified by God, and received due credit for its important function of populating the earth. The above excerpt from Gower is in fact a stanza from a treatise he wrote for young lovers on what constitutes a virtuous marriage, and in it, he defends the practice as a holy union:
A natural outcome of rejecting the flesh is a rejection of sex by extension. In fact, even thinking about sex was a sin; a famous 14th-century poem maintains that a “brennynge” desire for sex is a “deadly synne [th]at men schuld Drede” (Speculum Vitae, 9191-9232). But did that stop people from having sex? Of course not.
Marriage was put forth as the perfect solution for those who wanted to be virtuous, but, you know, not that virtuous. And while it wasn’t the same as the abbey, the practice was still thought to be sanctified by God, and received due credit for its important function of populating the earth. The above excerpt from Gower is in fact a stanza from a treatise he wrote for young lovers on what constitutes a virtuous marriage, and in it, he defends the practice as a holy union:
From the spirit Love seeks continence,
And to live chaste, contemplating God alone;
The body by natural experience
Seeks to have a female, so that it might multiply;
With good souls the one seeks to make heaven replete,
The other fills the earth with its labor.
(II, 10-19)
In theory, marriage was a perfect union, a reflection of the bond that “[unites] and neuer schal fayle / Betwene [Jesus] crist and holy chirche” (Speculum Vitae, 10991-11032). In practice, things were a bit more complicated. There were no legal requirements to marry or to prove that one was married; validity of a marriage was predicated solely upon consent from both parties. In fact, getting married was so simple that it occasionally happened by accident.
There were two ways to get married. The first was quite simple: exchange a spoken promise of future commitment, and then have sex. The second was even simpler: exchange a spoken promise of present commitment. No witnesses or licenses were necessary to tie the knot. These surprisingly informal steps to commitments that lasted for life gave way to a social understanding of matrimony that Cordelia Beattie refers to as “degrees of marriage” (332). It was remarkably easy to get married, and with no required license, it was just as easy to separate. It wasn’t entirely unheard of for a man and a wife to live separately.
Furthermore, the culture of marriage was so fluid that women could claim their status as wife or reject it at will, typically depending on which was more advantageous at that given moment. When a man and woman married, by law the woman’s property and wealth went to her husband. Single, she was independent to own, inherit, buy, sell, sue, and be sued. The fluidity of marriage was such that she could pick which she wanted to be: married or unmarried. Since the man assumed complete responsibility for her, if she ever forgot to pay her debts, she could assert her status as a wife and make her husband handle the whole affair.
Many of these features of medieval marriage carried into Elizabethan marital practices , with some improvements. Still, marriage in Shakespeare’s time was mostly contingent on whether or not there was mutual consent.
There were two ways to get married. The first was quite simple: exchange a spoken promise of future commitment, and then have sex. The second was even simpler: exchange a spoken promise of present commitment. No witnesses or licenses were necessary to tie the knot. These surprisingly informal steps to commitments that lasted for life gave way to a social understanding of matrimony that Cordelia Beattie refers to as “degrees of marriage” (332). It was remarkably easy to get married, and with no required license, it was just as easy to separate. It wasn’t entirely unheard of for a man and a wife to live separately.
Furthermore, the culture of marriage was so fluid that women could claim their status as wife or reject it at will, typically depending on which was more advantageous at that given moment. When a man and woman married, by law the woman’s property and wealth went to her husband. Single, she was independent to own, inherit, buy, sell, sue, and be sued. The fluidity of marriage was such that she could pick which she wanted to be: married or unmarried. Since the man assumed complete responsibility for her, if she ever forgot to pay her debts, she could assert her status as a wife and make her husband handle the whole affair.
Many of these features of medieval marriage carried into Elizabethan marital practices , with some improvements. Still, marriage in Shakespeare’s time was mostly contingent on whether or not there was mutual consent.