Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. Sara McDougall
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a widow. However, it seems that Étienne’s first wife was still alive, still living back in the diocese of Langres where Étienne had abandoned her. Moreover, Étienne had known that she was probably alive at the time he married, or in any event had made no effort to find out for certain. He had nonetheless sworn that he was a widower and free to marry Marguerite. All this was revealed in the course of Étienne’s prosecution at the hands of the bishop’s delegated judicial official, three years after his marriage to Marguerite. In consequence of his acts he met one of the harsher punishments handed down by this court.
Étienne’s case was one of many. From 1423 to 1468 the bishop’s court in Troyes so prosecuted nineteen men and one woman for knowingly contracting two concurrent marriages. These men and one woman came from various dioceses across northern France. They had, on the whole, left a spouse behind in another diocese and come to Troyes, where they married again. Others were native to Troyes and had left wives behind there before moving on to remarry. Still others married twice without leaving Troyes at all. Some men had been abandoned first by their wives, rather than the other way around. Regardless, all were punished for bigamy.
The activities of this court in so prosecuting bigamous offenders are incomprehensible without knowledge of the theological and legal traditions of bigamy found in Christian marriage law and traced in this chapter. The language of the judgments found in these records makes this clear. The ecclesiastical judges in Troyes perceived in the crime of bigamy not only perjury, deception, and fraud but also an attack on the very nature of sacramental marriage. For example, here are the terms in which Étienne was condemned. The court accused Étienne of having “vilified the state of marriage,” a thing created, as the court reminded Étienne, “in the terrestrial paradise, instituted by Jesus Christ.”155 Étienne’s fraudulent marriage defied the model marriages of Adam and Eve and Christ and the Church. Further, “he had shown contempt for the people of the holy church militant, above all his deceived second wife.” That is to say, Étienne’s act was not a private violation but a public action, an attack on the Christian community. These crimes had been committed publicly and against the body public and thus, implicitly, deserved public punishment. And so, Étienne was sentenced to exposure on the ladder and after that to prison. As with Étienne, so with the other convicted bigamists. Such was the punishment for these violations of the obligations of what the court records refer to as the “order of matrimony.”
To conclude, the insistence upon marriage as monogamous had ancient roots in Christianity. Looking to the eleventh century, it is not going too far to link Christian insistence on indissoluble monogamy to the requirement for priestly celibacy.156 Married to the Church, fully ordained clergy could have no other spouse. As for the laity, they married each other, but this bond too had to mirror the bond of Adam and Eve or Christ and Church. These ideas had important consequences for how all Christians were meant to conduct their lives at the end of the Middle Ages, and we see the earliest signs of this in fifteenth-century northern France and Burgundian lands.
All of this was not just theological theorizing; in Troyes it became part of an active judicial court practice. By investigating bigamy as prosecuted in the diocese of Troyes we learn about the role of theology and law in prosecution, about the priorities and attitudes of ecclesiastical judges in late medieval northeastern France. Moreover, in studying the prosecution of bigamy, we learn not only about the role of law and theology in court practice but also about the behavior of ordinary Christians. We learn that we are in a world that attributed great importance to getting married. The people prosecuted in Troyes knew they ran tremendous risks in committing bigamy, in this sort of imposture, which was a threat to salvation and to the legitimacy of their marriages, a threat to family property and inheritance, to social status, to honor in their communities. Nevertheless, they remarried.
We can only understand their motives if we understand the broader religious and cultural world in which they lived. Marriage removed much of the sin from a sexual relationship; it accorded legitimacy to any children. Marriage provided legal protections and benefits. It provided social standing and participation in a holy sacrament. Only married women were allowed to partake in certain blessings such as reentry into a church after the birth of a child. Only married women could have children without fear of prosecution for adultery. Only married men could be sure that their children would have the full benefits of whatever inheritance or position in the world their fathers might confer.
To be sure, those who remarried bigamously only seemingly gained these advantages: their marriages had no real legitimacy and their sexual relationship was a sin for whichever spouse knew the marriage was bigamous. Nevertheless, even bigamous marriages had advantages. The children of bigamous marriages were recognized as legitimate as a rule, on the presumption that at least one spouse believed the marriage legitimate. Also, even a bigamous marriage offered at the very least the semblance of a legitimate, sacramental marriage, especially if celebrated with a priest’s blessing.157
All of this incited ordinary people to commit what I call “bigamy.” In the Middle Ages, there were many kinds of bigamy. “True bigamy,” “bina matrimonia” when willfully contracted, stood apart as a crime, and a crime that was understood as an attack on the fundamental nature of the sacrament of marriage. Christian marriage required strict adherence to the model marriages of Adam and Eve and Christ and the Church. By the later Middle Ages, in northern France, those who married despite being already married to a living spouse thus faced prosecution and punishment for an unchristian act, an act that violated Christian identity: the crime of bigamy.
CHAPTER 2
Bigamous Husbands
Between 1423 and 1468, the officiality of Troyes convicted twenty men including one Franciscan friar for the crime of willfully marrying “de facto, cum de jure non posset”; in fact only, as not legally permissible. Who were these men, and why did the court in Troyes prosecute them? The second half of that question is a more appropriate topic for Chapter 5, “Why Prosecute Bigamy?” In this chapter we will seek out what information we can gather about who these men were, what common identity, if any, they shared, and what about them as a group led to their denunciation, prosecution, and conviction. Learning as much as we can about the men prosecuted and convicted for bigamy will thus further inform our reading, in the final chapter, of why the court chose to prosecute these men in particular.
Almost all of the information we have about these men is drawn from the sentences passed against them by the court. Indeed, the court’s record of the sentence is usually the only opportunity we have to encounter these men in the sources; almost no other surviving records offer any information about them. As with the sentence passed against Étienne “Languedoc” described at the close of the previous chapter, these sentences gave the date, listed the court officials present at the sentencing, and then proceeded to describe the convicted bigamist and some details of the first and second marriages. These sentences declared that two marriages had taken place during the lifetime of a first spouse and that the bigamist either did not seek out proof of death or else provided fraudulent proof before remarrying. Such, it seems, was sufficient to define a crime.
We have, then, usually, at least that much information to work with. Some of the sentences offer more details than others. A few sentences provide information about where the first wife resided at the time of prosecution; others mention children born to the first or second marriages, or both. All of this contributes to a rough understanding of who these men were and how they came to marry twice. These records can offer important clues about these men, how they set about marrying and remarrying, and the deeper questions of why they acted as they had, and why the court responded as it did.
To begin with a caveat, accepting the information provided in these sentences as true or factual requires something of a leap of faith. It is quite possible that these men lied to the court. They may have lied about where they were from, about their names, and also about the details of their prior marital histories. After all, these men had almost all attempted to pass themselves off as widowers, or in any case as men free to marry, while in reality they had a living wife,