Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. Sara McDougall
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was absent, in scholarship on bigamy in medieval England. Even scholars who worked expressly on bigamy in England do not offer us a great deal of guidance in this matter. Philippa Maddern, writing on bigamous marriages, analyzed records from London, York, Canterbury, Norwich, Rochester, and Wisbech, ranging from 1350 to 1500. She found 75 cases in which litigants sued for divorce on the grounds of an existing prior marriage, 53 additional cases involving bigamy or adultery brought to court, and 91 ex-officio accusations of bigamy. At least sixteen confessed. Some people, seeking to avoid detection, traveled considerable distances from the place they were known to be married, even to the Continent.143 However, one matter that Maddern does not address is how, if at all, the courts punished those bigamists found to be guilty.144
Sara Butler, writing on husband desertion, found that in her 121 selected cases a number of wives remarried. For example, five out of seventeen wives brought before the court of Canterbury were accused of bigamous remarriage. We do not know if or how the court punished them. Butler does explain that deserting wives faced the threat of excommunication and imprisonment and also risked exposing anyone who aided them to accusations of ravishment or abduction. Wives who agreed to return home often did so on penalty of a fine and beatings around the marketplace.145 Butler describes these judgments as “typical.” All this leaves us, then, with the idea that bigamy took place rather often in England. Courts may well have regularly punished bigamous offenders, even those detected in the course of civil marriage litigation, but we simply do not know at present. We can assert that some punishment for some bigamous marriages is at least a real possibility, at the very least as a kind of adultery and possibly as a more serious violation of the sacrament of marriage. We do not know, however, if or how the courts punished bigamists, but I would argue that we have some reason to suspect that they, like the officiality in Rochester, well might have done so. Nevertheless, scholarship on English officialities taken as a whole does not encourage the view that bigamy mattered a great deal to church court officials in late medieval England. Courts seem to have been much more intent on punishing sexual offenses, and the few bigamists we see punished appear to have been punished more for their adultery than for their multiple marriages.
At present, therefore, we can assert that bigamy seemed to matter in Troyes as it mattered nowhere else in the fifteenth century. We must, however, remember that the sources from Spain, Italy, and perhaps also Germany and England may yet have a good deal more to say on the matter; they await future scholarship. Nevertheless, at least for the present, scholarship on other local courts does not tell anything like the tale about bigamy found in Troyes. In other parts of late medieval Europe bigamy does seem, to return to Charageat’s useful distinction, more a matter of contract violation than a crime against the sacrament of marriage.
That does not mean that bigamy did not matter at all in these other parts of Western Christendom. Punishment is not the only issue. Prevention offers further evidence of concern over bigamy, and evidence for prevention is far more widespread. In northern France and arguably in other parts of Europe, we find assiduous efforts to prevent bigamous marriage. Indeed, the prevention of bigamy was one of the main reasons church officials acted to punish—if not invalidate—clandestine marriage. Certainly it was one of the reasons the northern French dioceses studied by Carole Avignon made such assiduous efforts to require letters proving freedom to marry from all strangers to the diocese or parish. An outsider to a community was far more likely to be a potential bigamist than a distant relative of a prospective spouse.
Having attempted to assess the evident lack of bigamy prosecutions elsewhere, we must also return to Troyes itself and seek out the limits of what the surviving sources permit us to know about the prosecution of bigamy there. To continue, then, on to another issue that lies at the margins of what we can learn about bigamy prosecutions, we have the thorny question of when the prosecution of bigamy actually began in Troyes. Chronology is a major concern in attempting to describe how bigamy came to be perceived as a crime that called for prosecution and punishment in an ecclesiastical court in northern France. Evidence for the subjection of bigamists to public punishment of some kind emerges only in the fifteenth century with any consistency. In particular, records detailing an ecclesiastical court’s use of the ladder of the scaffold and of prison to punish bigamists appear only beginning in the fifteenth century. That evidence of this handling of bigamy emerges only from fifteenth-century records, however, does not mean that bigamy was not already so prosecuted in earlier centuries. As explained above, the punishment of exposure on the ladder of the scaffold for bigamy dates to the thirteenth century in some northern French synodal statutes. Even as the description of a punishment must always be kept apart from any assumption that it may have been applied, the possibility of application nevertheless exists from the thirteenth century. We also have no clear date to mark as the beginnings of the officiality of Troyes’s proactive regulation of the sex, marriage, and violence of their laity and clergy. Court records on this subject, evidence of court action, again date to the fifteenth century. In the fourteenth century, however, we already have some suggestions of a court that at least competing jurisdictions and some unhappy members of the laity considered to be overactive and overly punitive in its handling of the laity.
Sources that date to the five years in which Jean Braque served as bishop of Troyes (1370–75) offer both evidence that suggests an active—and perhaps even reforming—bishop and also evidence of an active officiality. During those five years, Braque issued synodal statutes and either went on parish visits in the diocese or required others to do so, two possible signs of a resident and active bishop, one interested in reforming morals in his diocese.146 Secular jurisdiction in Troyes at that time included at the highest level the Grands Jours de Troyes, a deputation of the Paris Parlement. In 1371 this body reproached Jean Braque for “l’immixion de son official dans les affaires purement temporelles et seculieres,” an accusation that has a good deal of resemblance to the conflict between officials of the king and those of the bishop between 1458 and 1462.147
That Braque was reprimanded by the Grands Jours de Troyes certainly suggests that the Troyes officiality may at least have had moments of regulation of lay morals prior to the fifteenth century. Théophile Boutiot, a nineteenth-century archivist and historian of Champagne and its institutions, goes so far as to describe Braque as continuing the traditions of his predecessors in pushing his jurisdiction into matters that secular officials claimed as fully secular. This description, however, Boutiot does not support with any examples.
To be sure, the activity of Jean Braque and his official may have had more in common with the court activity of fifteenth-century Rouen or Paris concerning marriage and morals, which is to say, they might have been more inclined to collect fines than to subject an offender to public punishment or imprisonment. Nonetheless, we have another example that suggests that the officiality of Troyes made use of its prison to punish laity, if for reasons unknown to us, prior to the fifteenth century. In 1391 the Grands Jours considered a defamation suit brought by Pierre d’Arcis, then bishop of Troyes, and his official. The bishop accused the bailiff of Rameru and two women, the widow and the mother of a man who had died in the official’s prison, of calumny against the bishop and his official. They had allegedly said that the bishop and his official had left the man, one Jean Hubert, to die in their prison.148 The bishop and the official won their case, but for our purposes, we know at least that the bishop made use of his prison and that the prisoners included at least one member of the laity. All this, of course, is only suggestive, but it is at the very least just that, and so prior prosecution of bigamy in Troyes should certainly remain in the realm of the possible, if not quite the probable.
If we can suspend any remaining disbelief until further research addresses these questions, if we focus instead on working with the scholarship and sources as they stand, certainly northern France remains unique in its efforts to regulate marriage in the fifteenth century. These efforts focused particularly on the prevention and prosecution of bigamous marriage. Among the ecclesiastical courts of Western Christendom, Troyes stands apart above all in the repeated subjection of male bigamists to public punishment and imprisonment, a special combination of ecclesiastical punishments usually reserved for male clergy who had most seriously violated their religious obligations, notably the ban on shedding blood.
With this background in law, theology, and custom in hand, having stretched also to the limits that the surviving sources and