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By Root 508 0

there is some evidence that in the fifteenth and sixteenth century in Bedfordshire, peasants left more to their daughters than to their sons.50 In eighteenth-century Ostfriesland, in Germany, farmers in stagnant populations had oddly female-biased families, whereas those in growing populations had male-biased families. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that third and fourth sons were a drain on the family unless there were new business opportunities, and were dealt with accordingly at birth resulting in female-biased sex ratios in the stagnant populations.51

But at the top of society, the opposite prejudice prevailed. Medieval lords banished many of their daughters to nunneries.52 Throughout the world, rich men have always favoured their sons, and often just one of them. A wealthy or powerful father, by leaving his status or the means to achieve it to his sons, is leaving them the wherewithal to become successful adulterers with many bastard sons. No such advantage could accrue to wealthy daughters.

This has a curious consequence. It means that the most successful thing a man or a woman can do is beget a legitimate heir to a wealthy man. Logic such as this suggests that philanderers should not be indiscriminate. They should seduce the women with the best genes, and also the women with the best husbands and therefore the potential to produce the most prolific sons. In medieval times, this was raised to an art. The cuckolding of heiresses, and the wives of great lords, was considered the highest form of courtly love. Jousting was little more than a way for potential philanderers to impress great ladies. As Erasmus Darwin put it:

Contending boars with tusks enamel’d strike,

And guard with shoulder shield the blow oblique;

While female bands attend in mute surprise,

And view the victor with admiring eyes. –

So Knight on Knight, recorded in romance,

Urged the proud steed, and couch’d the extended lance;

He, whose dread prowess with resistless force,

Bless’d, as the golden guerdon of his toils,

Bow’d to the Beauty, and receiv’d her smiles.53

At a time when the legitimate eldest son of a great lord would inherit not only his father’s wealth, but also his polygamy, the cuckolding of such lords was sport indeed. Tristan expected to inherit his uncle King Mark’s kingdom in Cornwall. While in Ireland he ignored the attentions of the beautiful Isolde until she was summoned by King Mark to be his wife. Panic-struck at the thought of losing his inheritance, but determined at least to save it for his son, he suddenly took an enormous interest in Isolde. Or at least so Laura Betzig retells the old story.54

Betzig’s analysis of medieval history includes the idea that the begetting of wealthy heirs was the principal cause of church–state controversies. A series of connected events occurred in the tenth century, or thereabouts. The power of kings declined and the power of local feudal lords increased. As a consequence, noblemen gradually became more concerned with producing legitimate heirs to succeed to their titles, as the seigneurial system of primogeniture was established. They divorced barren wives and left all to the firstborn son. Meanwhile, resurgent Christianity conquered its rivals to become the dominant religion of northern Europe. The early church was obsessively interested in matters of marriage, divorce, polygamy, adultery and incest. Moreover, in the tenth century the church began to recruit its monks and priests from among the aristocracy.55

The church’s obsession with sexual matters was very different from St Paul’s. It had little to say about polygamy or the begetting of many bastards, although both were commonplace and against doctrine. Instead, it concentrated on three things. First, divorce, remarriage and adoption. Second, wet nursing, and sex during periods when the liturgy demanded abstinence. Third, ‘incest’ between people married to within seven canonical degrees. In all three cases, the church seems to have been trying to prevent lords siring legitimate heirs. If