Marriage, a History (23 page)

The Wife of Bath, another Chaucer character, is the opposite of Griselda. A lusty, brash, and wealthy clothmaker who has been married five times, the Wife of Bath prefaces her tale with a vigorous attack on the Church’s idealization of virginity, then proceeds to tell the company her marital history. She married her first four husbands for money, she explains, and gleefully describes how she twisted them around her finger. Her fifth—“the one I took for love and not for wealth”—posed more of a problem, because she rashly handed her money and lands over to him, forgoing her chance to continue as a
feme sole.
She soon repented of this act because he began haranguing her about the proper duties of a wife and often beat her.

Finally, she got fed up with his reading her endless tales from a book about “wicked wives.” She tore the book from his hand and slapped him so hard that he fell into the fire. In a rage, he hit her back even harder, and she fell down senseless. Playing on his fear that he might be charged with murder, she managed to get him to swear he would never hit her again. Finally, the Wife of Bath reports, “we made it up together. He gave the bridle over to my hand, gave me the government of house and land . . . I made him burn that book upon the spot. . . . From that day forward there was no debate. So help me God I was as kind to him as any wife from Denmark to the rim of India, and as true. And he to me.”
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The coexistence of these contradictory and exaggerated stories illustrates the problem of describing
the
medieval marriage. Things get even more confusing when we look at the messages from the Catholic Church. Some churchmen insisted that although celibacy was the ideal, marriage was also a positive good. A thirteenth-century French handbook for priests states that a married couple “are all one body and one soul . . . and therefore should be of one heart by true love.”
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But there were many more religious books about “wicked wives” than about married couples with “one body and one soul.” In the Middle Ages women were thought to be the lustier sex, and in their campaign against clerical marriage, the Gregorian reformers were vitriolic in their denunciations of how women entangled men in “the slimy glue” of their sexuality. In the mid-eleventh century a prominent reformer wrote that women were “bitches, sows, screech-owls, night-owls, she-wolves, blood-suckers” who seduced clerical men with the “appetizing flesh of the devil.” He thundered: “Hear me, harlots, with your lascivious kisses, your wallowing places for fat pigs.” Leave your clerical husbands and lovers or face enslavement.
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In some cases, the Church attacked marriage from the woman’s point of view. One such treatise, titled “Holy Maidenhood,” tried to convince young women to become nuns. The picture it paints of marriage makes the complaints of twentieth-century feminists sound tame: “Now thou art wedded, and from so high estate alighted so low: . . . into the filth of the flesh, into the manner of a beast, into the thraldom of a man, and into the sorrows of the world. . . . When he is out, thou shalt await his homecoming with all sorrow, care, and dread. While he is at home, all thy wide dwellings seem too narrow for thee; his looking on thee makes thee aghast; his loathsome mirth and his rude behaviour fill thee with horror. He chideth and jaweth thee, as a lecher does his whore; he beateth thee and mauleth thee as his bought thrall and patrimonial slave.”
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By the sixteenth century there was a lively ongoing debate about the relative merits of women and men. But aside from humorous characters in bawdy popular literature, almost no one disputed the principle that a wife must be subordinate to her husband. Marriage was still an authority relationship as much as a personal one. Advice books warned wives not to be too familiar in the way they addressed their husbands, telling them to avoid nicknames and endearments that undermined the dignity of a man’s position. Even women in loving marriages wrote to their husbands as “sir” and signed with protestations of obedience.
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When wives failed to submit of their own free will, popular culture and actual law allowed husbands to extort obedience by force. While the charivaris of rural villages sometimes taunted men who inflicted severe injuries on their wives, they were more often directed at men who
failed
to discipline their wives. A “henpecked” man might be strapped to a cart or ridden around backward on a mule, to be booed and ridiculed for his inversion of the accepted marital hierarchy. One sixteenth-century rhyming proverb opined: “A spaniel, a woman, and a walnut tree, the more they’re beaten the better they be.” In the same century a London law forbade wife beating after 9:00 P.M., but only because the noise disturbed people’s sleep.
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As we shall see, the pace of change in marital relationships was glacially slow. There were many differences between the role of marriage in the petty kingdoms of the early Middle Ages and its place in the powerful nation-states that began to emerge in sixteenth-century Europe. But there was surprisingly little change in the basic power relations between husbands and wives right up to the early modern era. It was not until the last two hundred years that wives began to gain any real protection from abuse or that love began to be valued over obedience. Nevertheless, by the fifteenth century Western Europe had developed distinctive patterns in marriage norms and gender roles that eventually left the landscape of marriage, so unchanging for thousands of years, irrevocably transformed.

H
istorians are usually skeptical about the saying “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” We are more interested in transformations beneath the surface of daily life than in things that seem to persist throughout the ages. It’s as if we’re all sitting in the backseat of history’s car saying, “Are we there yet?”

Over the years this impatience has pushed back the dating of the origins of the love match. When I studied history as an undergraduate in the 1960s, I was taught that people didn’t begin marrying for love until the nineteenth century. In the 1970s many historians began dating the love match from the eighteenth or even the seventeenth century. Today many scholars trace the celebration of married love and companionship to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. A few even believe the basic contours of modern marriage took shape as far back as the thirteenth century.
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I believe that the older system of marrying for political and economic advantage remained the norm until the eighteenth century, five thousand years after we first encountered it in the early kingdoms and empires of the Middle East. But between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, northwestern Europe developed a unique mix of marriage behaviors and values that paved the way for the rapid changes of the 1700s.
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One distinctive feature of Western European marriage was that as early as the twelfth century, polygamy was prohibited. Many men kept mistresses, and wives were expected to ignore such behavior. But mistresses had no legal rights or social standing. By the fifteenth century the children of mistresses had lost the inheritance rights they had had in the early medieval period. A man’s heir had to be born in marriage. For a long time the Church even prohibited adoption.

The decisive victory for the Church in the battles over divorce from the ninth to the thirteenth century reinforced the importance of getting a fertile wife the first time around. Men rarely got a second chance to produce a male heir. Aristocrats could often win an exemption from prohibitions against divorce, and the lower classes frequently evaded the rules. But laws against divorce were far stricter than almost anywhere else. Even Eastern Europe was more lenient. Under Russian law, for example, a wife could divorce her husband if he raped her, went heavily into debt, or became a drunkard. In northwestern Europe, a wife had no such recourse. In most cases, marriages were truly “for better or for worse.”

At the same time, though, the principle that men and women should be able to choose or refuse a partner was more widely accepted in northwestern Europe than in most other areas of the world. There were substantial limits on people’s free choice, and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many countries passed laws that made it harder for individuals to marry as they pleased. But the traditional doctrine of consent, for all its limitations, had created fertile soil for tolerance of consensual unions and individual choice. Even as the rules for what constituted a valid marriage became stricter after the sixteenth century, the long tradition of informal marriage encouraged evasion and resistance.

Another distinctive feature of northwestern Europe was that upon marriage a couple usually established their own household. Marriage marked a sharper transition for men as well as women than in societies where the extended family or its patriarch determined the couple’s residence and work roles. Upon marriage, a husband gained authority over his wife, but she gained authority over their servants, apprentices, unwed relations, and even the older unmarried women in her neighborhood. A seventeenth-century theologian explained that marriage was “the ordinary means” to turn men and women “into masters and mistresses.” This was quite different from China, India, Japan, and much of Southern and Eastern Europe, where sons as well as daughters-in-law usually remained under the thumbs of parents or grandparents.
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In societies where a couple is incorporated into a larger family compound or productive unit, marriage and childbearing generally take place at a young age because a couple doesn’t need to be economically self-sufficient to wed. But in northwestern Europe, when a man and woman married, they were expected to work their own land or establish their own trade, rather than live as part of a larger family collective.
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Because a couple was expected to support the partners and their children, marriage had to wait until they had accumulated or inherited enough to sustain a separate household. Many guilds required journeymen and apprentices to remain single until they had passed the examination to become a master and could be assured of a steady livelihood.

As a result, people in northwestern Europe generally married later than elsewhere in the world. In England between 1500 and 1700 the median age of first marriage for women was twenty-six, which is higher than the median age of marriage for American women at any point during the twentieth century. The age of marriage was sometimes much lower for the very wealthy, especially for aristocrats, but they were a small minority of the population.
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A woman’s lack of a dowry was not always an impediment to marriage in rural areas. Neighbors often pitched in to help a couple furnish their house or acquire enough seed and animals to get started. In rural Yorkshire, England, a bride was traditionally paraded through the village in a wagon, while neighbors loaded the cart with old pots and pans and furniture or tossed in some coins. In many German villages, unmarried women would get together to sew the linens the betrothed couple needed for their new home. But often men and women left home to find work and accumulate some resources before embarking on marriage. Marriage started on a stronger financial footing when the woman as well as the man had worked for several years to accumulate some capital.

The most common way to save up for marriage was to work as a servant in someone else’s home for several years. Working as a servant was as much a rite of passage for young people in the late Middle Ages and early modern era as going off to college is today. In contrast with other societies around the world, where servants were usually a class of people doomed to servitude for their entire lives, in northwestern Europe large numbers of young people passed through a phase of service before forming their own households and working their own lands or trades. In northern Europe, anywhere between one-third and one-half of all young people put in time as servants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the early 1700s, according to one study, 60 percent of all English youths aged fifteen to twenty-four worked as servants at some point in their lives.

Girls were as likely as boys to work as servants, away from their own families, another distinctive feature of Western Europe. The expectation that young women would be servants for a period between adolescence and marriage was so widespread that the German word
Magd,
like the English word
maid,
meant both a servant and a never-married female.

In England, a servant couple had typically saved between fifty and sixty pounds by the time they married. After several years in the city an industrious French silk worker might have three or four hundred livres to help her husband set up shop. A servant girl who had saved a hundred livres could pool her resources with an apprentice butcher, baker, cook, or wine seller to set up a small business that they could run together. Or a young woman who had worked for a while in the city might simply return to her village with enough cash to buy some animals or perhaps a little land, making her an attractive catch.
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