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RUNAWAY WIVES: HUSBAND DESERTION IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
| By Sara Butler |
Loyola University New Orleans |
| Scholars of the medieval family would generally agree that the lot of the medieval wife was not an easy one. Medieval husbands held the upper hand in the power relationship, both legally and socially. Although Lawrence Stone's view of married life in the Middle Ages as "brutal and often hostile, with little communication, [and] much wife-beating" has since been called into question, more recent historians have still painted a somewhat unflattering picture.1 Judith Bennett writes that "[m]edieval people thought of conjugality as a hierarchy headed by a husband who not only controlled his wife's financial assets and public behavior, but also freely enforced his will through physical violence."2 Indeed, she argues that wife-beating was "a normal part of marriage."3 Even Barbara Hanawalt, who has optimistically described peasant marriage in medieval England as a partnership, still concedes that occasional violence was acceptable and expected in marriage.4 What is more, the rules of coverture, which adhered to the biblical principal of husband and wife as one flesh represented at law by the husband, left a wife economically vulnerable. Because all real and movable property legally belonged to the husband as head of the household, a wife who fell out of favor with her husband might well find herself expelled from the family home, without any resources to fall back on.5 From a modern perspective, marital practices hardly provided any sense of reassurance. At a time when families, more often than individuals, took the lead in spousal selection, and inheritance and status were the chief criteria, strong bonds of affection were not guaranteed. Up against all these factors, some medieval wives might have found their fates difficult to accept. That is not to say that all medieval marriages were prisons instead of playgrounds, but the potential for prolonged marital discontent was notably higher then than it is now.6 |
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Despite this dreary image of medieval marriage, wives generally accepted their position—and not just passively. Some women actually fought to hold on to their wretched marriages, even when it was clear that their husbands were desperate for an annulment. In examining the records of marriage litigation at the consistory court of York in the 14th and 15th century, Charles Donahue, Jr. makes a number of striking observations. He notes that not only were women more persistent in suing their cases, but they were far more likely to sue to enforce a marriage than were men (even when the financial benefits "were not obvious") and far less likely to dissolve a marriage than were men.7 Andrew Finch, in his comparison of the dioceses of Hereford and Cerisy, makes a similar observation.8 Findings of this nature would seem to suggest that women would do almost anything for the security of marriage, even if it meant staying in an unhealthy marriage, or with a man who would really rather be married to someone else, as was often the case in multi-party litigation where precontract (bigamy) was the issue at contest. At any rate, Donahue's portrayal of the church courts as overwhelmingly pro-plaintiff reveals that many women got what they wanted.9 Because the medieval church was even more determined to uphold the sacrament of marriage, female plaintiffs found a powerful ally in the courts and were often successful in their suits. |
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