Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [47]
Peasant couples usually spoke their vows at the church door, the most public place in the village. Here the priest inquired whether there were any impediments, meaning kinship in a degree forbidden by the Church. The bridegroom named the dower which he would provide for his wife, giving her as a token a ring and a small sum of money to be distributed to the poor. The ring, according to a fourteenth-century preacher, must be “put and set by the husband upon the fourth finger of the woman, to show that a true love and cordial affection be between them, because, as doctors say, there is a vein coming from the heart of a woman to the fourth finger, and therefore the ring is put on the same finger, so that she should keep unity and love with him, and he with her.”38
Vows were then exchanged, and the bridal party might proceed into the church, where a nuptial Mass was celebrated. At one such Mass a fourteenth-century priest addressed the wedding party: “Most worshipful friends, we are come here at this time in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,…to join, unite, and combine these two persons by the holy sacrament of matrimony, granted to the holy dignity and order of priesthood. Which sacrament of matrimony is of this virtue and strength that these two persons who now are two bodies and two souls, during their lives together shall be…one flesh and two souls.”39
The ceremony was usually followed by a feast, a “bride ale,” in a private house or a tavern. In Warboys and some other villages, the groom was obligated to treat the manorial servants to a dinner with “bread, beer, meat or fish” on “the day on which he takes a wife.”40
Enough couples in the village, however, continued to speak their vows elsewhere—in the woods, in a tavern, in bed—to make “clandestine marriage” a universal vexation for the Church courts. Typically, a girl sued a man who disclaimed his promise, though sometimes the shoe was on the other foot. Not until the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Church’s Council of Trent in the sixteenth century was clandestine marriage effectively abolished by requiring witnesses.41
“Clandestine marriage” obviously shaded off into seduction. Robert Manning condemned men who
…beguile a woman with words;
To give her troth but lightly
For nothing but to lie by her;
With that guile thou makest her assent,
And bringest you both to cumberment.42
Court records contain numerous instances of women leaving their villages in company of men without any mention of marriage. They contain even more frequent instances of “leirwite” or “legerwite” (lecher-wite), a fine for premarital sex, literally for lying down. On some manors a separate fine called “childwite” was levied for bearing a child out of wedlock, but in Elton premarital sex and pregnancy were lumped together. Twentytwo cases of leirwite are listed in surviving Elton records between 1279 and 1342, with fines of either sixpence or twelve pence, in a single case three pence. In all but one, only the woman is named, and she paid the fine; in the single exception, in 1286, Maggie Carter and Richard Miller were fined sixpence each.43
Daughters of the elite families figure prominently among those convicted. Despite the fine, little social stigma seems to have been attached to premarital sex. One theory is that peasant women may have become pregnant as a prelude to marriage in order to prove their fertility. In Elton in 1307, Athelina Blakeman paid a leirwite of twelve pence; in the same year’s accounts her father paid two shillings merchet “for giving his daughter Athelina in marriage.”44 Premarital sex was thus followed by marriage. The village community seems to have taken a liberal attitude toward young people’s sexual activities; in 1316 an Elton jury was fined “because they had concealed all these [five] leirwites.”45
A more serious matter was adultery, a threat to the family. It lay in the province of the Church courts, but the lord exacted a fine too, usually under a curious legal rationale: the parties had “wasted the lord’s chattels in chapter.