“Un de ces jours mourra un de mes pairs;
Toute la terre vous en voudrai donner,
Et la moiller, si prendre la voulez.”[femme

Though he is perhaps right in pleading that, as time went on, the compulsion was rather less barefaced than this, he is still compelled sadly to acknowledge of the average medieval match in high life that “after all, whatever may be said, those are not the conditions of a truly free marriage, or, to speak plainly, of a truly Christian one.” From this initial defect two others followed almost as a matter of course: the extreme haste with which marriages were concluded, and the indecently early age at which children were bound for life to partners whom they had very likely never seen. Gautier quotes from another chanson de geste, where a heroine, within a month of her first husband’s death, remarries again on the very day on which her second bridegroom is proposed and introduced to her for the first time; and the poet adds, “Great was the joy and laughter that day!” The extreme promptitude with which the Wife of Bath provided herself with a new husband—or, for the matter of that, Chaucer’s own mother—is characteristically medieval.

[Larger Image]

BRASS OF SIR JOHN AND LADY HARSYCK
(From Southacre Church, Norfolk (1384))
(For the lady’s cote-hardie and buttons, see [p. 27], note 2.
Her dress is here embroidered with her own arms and Sir John’s.)

But child-marriages were the real curse of medieval home-life in high society. The immaturity of the parents could not fail to tell often upon the children; and when Berthold of Regensburg pointed out how brief was the average of life among the 13th-century nobility, and ascribed this to God’s vengeance for their heartlessness towards the poor, he might more truly have traced the cause much further back. “In days of old,” wrote a trouvère of the 12th century, “nobles married at a mature age; faith and loyalty then reigned everywhere. But nowadays avarice and luxury are rampant, and two infants of twelve years old are wedded together: take heed lest they breed children!”[198] The Church did, indeed, refuse to recognize the bond of marriage if contracted before both parties had turned seven; and she further forbade the making of such contracts until the age of twelve for the girl and fifteen for the boy, though without daring, in this case, to impugn the validity of the marriage once contracted. That the weaker should be allowed to marry three years earlier than the stronger sex is justified by at least one great canon lawyer on the principle that “ill weeds grow apace”; a decision on which one would gladly have heard the comments of the Wife of Bath.[199] But “people let the Church protest, and married at any age they pleased”; for it was seldom indeed that the ecclesiastical prohibition was enforced against influence or wealth, and the Church herself, theory apart, was directly responsible for many of the worst abuses in this matter. Her determination to keep the whole marriage-law in her own hands, combined with her readiness to sell dispensations from her own regulations, resulted in a state of things almost incredible. On the one hand, a marriage was nullified by cousinship to the fourth degree, and even by the fact of the contracting parties having ever stood as sponsors to the same child, unless a papal dispensation had been bought; and this absurd severity not only nullified in theory half the peasants’ marriages (since nearly everybody is more or less related in a small village), but gave rise to all sorts of tricks for obtaining fraudulent divorces. To quote again from Gautier, who tries all through to put the best possible face on the matter: “After a few years of marriage, a husband who had wearied of his wife could suddenly discover that they were related ... and here was a revival, under canonical and pious forms, of the ancient practice of divorce.” It is the greatest mistake to suppose that divorce was a difficult matter in the Middle Ages; it was simply a question of money, as honest men frequently complained. The Church courts were ready to “make and unmake matrimony for money”; and “for a mantle of miniver” a man might get rid of his lawful wife.[200] An actual instance is worth many generalities. In the first quarter of the 14th century a Pope allowed the King and Queen of France to separate because they had once been godparents to the same child; and at the same time sold a dispensation to a rich citizen who had twice contracted the same relationship to the lady whom he now wished to marry. The collocation, in this case, was piquant enough to beget a clever pasquinade, which was chalked up at street corners in Paris. John XXII. probably laughed with the rest, and went on as before.

On the one hand, then, the marriage law was theoretically of the utmost strictness, though only to the poor man; but, on the other hand, it was of the most incredible laxity. A boy of fifteen and a girl of twelve might, at any time and in any place, not only without leave of parents, but against all their wishes, contract an indissoluble marriage by mere verbal promise, without any priestly intervention whatever. In other words, the whole world in Chaucer’s time was a vaster and more commodious Gretna Green.[201] Moreover, not only the civil power, but apparently even the Church, sometimes hesitated to enforce even such legal precautions as existed against scandalous child-marriages. A stock case is quoted at length in the contemporary “Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln” (R.S., pp. 170-177), and fully corroborated by official documents. A wretched child who had just turned four was believed to be an heiress; a great noble took her to wife. He died two years later; she was at once snapped up by a second noble; and on his death, when she was apparently still only eleven, and certainly not much older, she was bought for 300 marks by a third knightly bridegroom. The bishop, though he excommunicated the first husband, and deprived the priest who had openly married him “in the face of the church,” apparently made no attempt to declare the marriage null; and the third husband was still enjoying her estate twenty years after his wedding-day. In the face of instances like this (for another, scarcely less startling, may be found in Luce’s “Du Guesclin,” p. 139), we need no longer wonder that our poet’s father was carried off in his earliest teens to be married by force to some girl perhaps even younger; or that in Chaucer’s own time, when the middle classes were rapidly gaining more power in the state, Parliament legislated expressly against the frequent offences of this kind.

But the real root of the evil remained; so long as two children might, in a moment and without any religious ceremony whatever, pledge their persons and their properties for life, no legislation could be permanently effectual. From the moral side, we find Church councils fulminating desperately against the celebration of marriages in private houses or taverns, sometimes even after midnight, and with the natural concomitants of riot and excess. From the purely civil side, again, apart from runaway or irregular matches, there was also the scandalous frequency of formal child-marriages which were often the only security for the transmission of property; and here even the Church admitted the thin end of the wedge by permitting espousals “of children in their cradles,” by way of exception, “for the sake of peace.”[202] Let me quote here again from Smyth’s “Lives of the Berkeleys.” We there find, between 1288 and 1500, five marriages in which the ten contracting parties averaged less than eleven years. Maurice the Third, born in 1281, was only eight years old when he married a wife apparently of the same age; their eldest child was born before the father was fifteen; and the loyal Smyth comforts himself by reciting from Holy Scripture the still more precocious examples of Josiah and Solomon. It would be idle to multiply instances of so notorious a fact; but let us take one more case which touched all England, and must have come directly under Chaucer’s notice. When the good Queen Anne of Bohemia was dead, for whose sake Richard II. would never afterwards live in his palace of Shene, it was yet necessary for his policy to take another wife. He chose the little daughter of the French King, then only seven years old, in spite of the remonstrances of his subjects. The pair were affianced by proxy in 1395; “and then (as I have been told) it was pretty to see her, young as she was; for she very well knew already how to play the queen.” Next year, the two Kings met personally between Guines and Ardres, the later “Field of the Cloth of Gold,” and sat down to meat together. “Then said the Duc de Bourbon many joyous and merry words to make the kings laugh.... And he spake aloud, addressing himself to the King of England, ‘My Lord King of England, you should make good cheer; you have all that you desire and ask; you have your wife, or shall have; she shall be delivered to you!’ Then said the King of France, ‘Cousin of Bourbon, we would that our daughter were as old as our cousin the lady de St. Pol. She would bear the more love to our son the King of England, and it would have cost us a heavy dowry.’ The King of England heard and understood this speech; wherefore he answered, inclining himself towards the King of France (though, indeed, the word had been addressed to the Duke, since the King had made the comparison of the daughter of the Comte de St. Pol), ‘Fair father, we are well pleased with the present age of our wife, and we love not so much that she should be of great age as we take account of the love and alliance of our own selves and our kingdoms; for when we shall be at one accord and alliance together, there is no king in Christendom or elsewhere who could gainsay us.’”[203] The Royal pair proceeded at once to Calais, and the formal wedding took place three days later in the old church of St. Nicholas, which to Ruskin was a perpetual type of “the links unbroken between the past and present.”

What kings were obliged to do at one time for political purposes, they would do at other times for money; and their subjects followed suit. As one of the authors of “Piers Plowman” puts it, the marriage choice should depend on personal qualities, and Christ will then bless it with sufficient prosperity.