A Good Marriage Medieval Lives: Birth, Marriage, Death

In April 1440, here at the village of Paston in Norfolk,

two bashful 18-year-olds named John Paston and Margaret Mautby

were introduced by their parents.

John and Margaret's families had been talking about the two of them

for months, testing out the ground about a possible marriage agreement.

Now, finally, after all the discussion about property and money,

they were meeting for the first time.

This was the moment

when one medieval marriage was about to be made.

All the practical arrangements were in place,

and the hope was that love might follow.

If John and Margaret DID become husband and wife,

they knew the all-important blessing of the Church would mean

they could have sex without sin,

without the fear of eternal damnation.

They say, "The past is another country.

"They do things differently there."

But just how differently did the medieval world approach

life's great rites of passage - birth, marriage and death?

BABY CRIES

The way we handle these fundamental moments of transition

in our lives reveals a lot about how we think and what we believe in.

For the people of the Middle Ages, this life mattered,

but the next one mattered more.

Heaven and Hell were real places,

and the teachings of the Catholic Church

shaped thoughts and beliefs across the whole of Western Europe.

But by the end of the Middle Ages, the Church would find itself

in the grip of momentous change.

And the rituals of birth, marriage and death

would never be quite the same again.

No-one knew for sure if John and Margaret would become man and wife,

because while birth and death are inescapable facts of life,

marriage is a rite of passage made by choice.

And in the medieval world,

it wasn't just a choice made by bride and groom.

John and Margaret were the last pieces in a puzzle put together

by their parents, with help from their family and friends,

according to rules laid down by the Church.

But how had the Church come to impose rules on the most

unpredictable human emotions of love and lust?

How were medieval marriages made?

The reason we know about John and Margaret's meeting at all

is that John was the son and heir of the Paston family.

They came from Paston village, and by the mid-15th century,

they had estates across north-eastern Norfolk,

as well as a fine town-house in Norwich.

The Pastons were wealthy, and they lived in one of the richest

and most cosmopolitan parts of the country.

Norwich was late-medieval England's second city.

But they weren't aristocrats.

They were as ordinary, or extraordinary, as any other

well-to-do family.

But what makes them unique, and why we know so much about them,

is that we still have their letters.

It's a remarkable stroke of luck that we have them,

because almost no private letters survive from this period.

Most of the Paston letters have ended up here,

in the British Library, and they form the earliest great collection

of private correspondence in the English language.

More than 1,000 documents survive,

spanning three generations of the family.

We don't know what the Pastons looked like,

and most of the houses they lived in are long gone,

but thanks to their letters, we can still hear their voices.

I've been studying these letters for 25 years,

but because they've been in print for a long time,

I very rarely get to see the real thing,

so this is thrilling

because the Pastons feel like MY medieval family.

And that's because these letter give us

glimpses of a human experience that speaks across the centuries.

The Paston family had risen rapidly

through the ranks of Norfolk society.

In just a single generation, they had gone from being

peasants to gentry. Nouveau riche, we might call them.

They had to battle to keep their place in the world,

so finding a bride of good social standing to marry John,

their eldest son and heir,

was crucial to the Paston family's future.

Unlike John, Margaret Mautby came from a well-established

gentry family.

And better still, she was the heir to her dead father's rich estates.

So their potential marriage was an important arrangement

that suited both families.

But would it become a love match?

Parents could bring the couple together,

but they couldn't force them to marry.

Everything now depended on this meeting

and what John and Margaret might think of each other.

As it turned out, they liked what they saw.

John's mother Agnes reported with relief to his father

that the signs were good.

"Blessed be God. I send you good tidings

"of the coming and the bringing home of the gentlewoman that you know of."

That's Margaret.

"As for the first acquaintance between John Paston

"and the said gentlewoman, she made him gentle cheer in gentle wise.

"She was charming, with beautiful manners.

"And so I hope there shall need no great treaty between them.

"They wouldn't take much persuading."

The plan was working

and Agnes was keen to push forward with the match.

Later in the letter,

she urges her husband to buy their son's new fiancee a gown.

She suggests "a goodly blue, or else a bright sanguine, red."

Why would she be buying a dress?

It seems likely that this prospective mother-in-law

was hoping for a wedding sooner rather than later,

and within six months

John and Margaret DID become husband and wife.

So the Pastons' plan worked.

John's marriage to Margaret had been constructed to secure

the family's future and their place in Norfolk society.

And that's exactly what it did.

Marriage, as an institution, built families.

And families were the building blocks of society.

But when it came to royal families, there was even more at stake -

not just the building of a society, but the future of a whole country.

Royal marriages weren't about personal happiness

or economic survival.

They were about the future of a kingdom,

so they were arranged by diplomats.

Husband and wife might be no more than pawns in the great game

of international politics.

And they were manipulated from the tenderest age.

Richard II was just ten years old

when he became King of England in 1377.

He was only a child, but his new crown made him

the most eligible bachelor in Europe.

And his councillors lost no time in starting the search

for a politically useful royal wife.

Within months, the offers began to arrive.

The daughters of the king of France, the king of Navarre

and the king of Scotland were all suggested as potential brides.

Another possibility was the daughter of the duke of Milan,

and two envoys, one of them

the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, were sent to Italy to negotiate.

Finally, the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, Anne of Bohemia,

emerged as the frontrunner to become Richard's queen.

It took months of painstaking negotiations,

but the marriage treaty was finally ratified in the autumn of 1381,

five years after he came to the throne.

After a lengthy journey from Prague,

Anne arrived in England that December.

On 18th January,

she was welcomed with elaborate ceremony into the City of London.

Two days after that, she was married in Westminster Abbey to Richard,

the king she'd only just met.

Bride and groom, partners in this new political alliance,

were both 15 years old.

As it turned out, Richard became a devoted husband, so much so

that when Anne died at the palace of Sheen at the age of just 28,

he was frantic with grief

and ordered that the building in which she'd taken her last breath

should be utterly destroyed.

He commissioned this beautiful tomb here at Westminster Abbey,

in which they would be laid to rest side by side.

The effigies have been damaged over the centuries,

but when they were first made,

Richard and his queen were holding hands.

Richard and Anne were lucky to find love within a marriage

made entirely by politics.

But people who didn't live in palaces didn't have to worry about

international diplomacy.

What they did have to worry about was how to support a new household

and raise a new family.

So they were just as interested in what

each party could bring to the marriage.

Judith Bennett is an expert in medieval village life,

like this one, Brigstock in Northamptonshire.

And her research into manorial records gives us a rare glimpse

into the relationships of its 14th century inhabitants.

How did the nitty-gritty get sorted out?

Are there individual examples from Brigstock that you know of?

Brigstock has one terrific example.

This particular agreement involved a man named Henry Cooke

and a woman named Beatrix Helcock.

However they came together as a couple, once a marriage

was going to be agreed between them,

what happened is that their parents clearly negotiated

and agreed on what contributions each would make to the marriage.

In Henry Cooke's case, his mother, who was a widow, gave him

the tenement that she had held with her husband.

That was a substantial tenement.

About 12 to 15 acres, with a house and a farmyard,

and rights to common pasture.

In Beatrix's case, her father gave the new couple a cow,

he gave them clothing worth 13s 4d,

the cow was worth 10s.

And he promised to pay for a wedding feast.

What about the ritual that accompanied these formal arrangements?

How did courtship happen, and what about the wedding?

In terms of marriage itself,

of course there's a lot of ritual there.

There are two levels of ritual.

There's one level that's strikingly informal,

and then another level that I think would be more familiar to us today,

that involves a priest and churches.

The striking informal level is that a couple could simply

marry each other by agreeing to marry each other.

And there is ritual there.

The people clasped the right hands together.

So if I were marrying you, we would clasp our hands together.

And then we would exchange vows.

So, if I said, "I take you to be my husband,"

and you said to me, "I take you to be my wife,"

I'll cast you as the man, that would make us married.

No witnesses needed, nothing needed at all.

In fact, we know from the court cases

that ensue from these sorts of marriages

that vows are taken in pubs, out on the road,

in hedgerows,

under trees, sometimes in bed,

that they happen all over the place.

So, by the 14th century, wherever marriage vows took place,

even if it was in a hedgerow, ritual sanctions by the Church

ensured the union was valid.

And that's because marriage wasn't only about how society

organised itself.

It was also about how society replicated itself.

Producing children involved sex,

and the potential for sex to be sinful meant that the Church

saw the need to impose rules on the relationships

within which it happened.

But the Church hadn't always had that control.

Back in 1066, England had faced a terrifying political crisis.

The king, Edward the Confessor, had died,

and the man who claimed to be his heir, Harold,

was challenged by an invader from northern France.

And the name by which the people of England knew Harold's rival?

William the Bastard.

William's father, Robert the Magnificent, was Duke of Normandy.

But his mother, Herleva, was a woman from the town of Falaise,

possibly the daughter of a tanner, and what's certain

is that the couple weren't married.

What happened on a battlefield near Hastings in 1066,

which is depicted in this copy of the famous Bayeux Tapestry in Reading Museum,

means that we remember William as the Conqueror, not the Bastard.

But the circumstances of his birth do shed light

on the process by which the medieval Church eventually

succeeded in imposing its own view of marriage on its congregations.

When William of Normandy was born in the late 1020s,

the fact that his parents weren't married didn't matter.

What mattered was that his father recognised him as his son

and that the Norman lords recognised him as heir to the duchy.

So William was able to inherit Normandy,

and go on to become king of England despite his illegitimate birth.

But just 70 years after the dramatic events of 1066,

when William the Conqueror's grandchild was about to inherit

the English throne, something very significant had changed.

William's son, King Henry I, had inherited his father's crown.

But when he died in 1135, he had only one legitimate child,

a daughter called Matilda.

The idea of a woman inheriting the throne was unprecedented

and deeply alarming.

But even though Henry had

over 20 illegitimate children, no-one suggested that one of his

bastard sons should become king, as his father William had done.

So, less than a century after William the Bastard

had become king of England,

the Church's rules about what made a legitimate marriage

now determined who could, and couldn't, inherit the crown.

This change had taken place because, in the 12th century,

the Church was swept by a powerful movement of reform,

which clarified its doctrines

and tightened its grip on the moral order of Christian society.

The behaviour of every Christian in this life would be

judged in the next.

Marriage was a rite of passage that might influence

whether your final destination was Heaven or Hell, so it was

essential for the Church to define exactly how it worked.

David D'Avray is an expert in the ecclesiastical marriage laws of medieval England.

So, how was marriage caught up in the process of reform?

Marriage came to be regarded as one of the sacraments

at a moment in which people were just beginning to define

what the sacraments were.

It was the moment in which, out of a whole series of rituals,

the Church was saying, "Which of these rituals

"are really special?"

They picked out seven, and marriage was one of the seven.

As marriage began to be affected by the reforms of the 12th century,

what did that mean in terms of the Church's teaching about what marriage was?

Well, you have to think about where they're coming from.

And where they're coming from is an idea which has deep, deep roots

that the marriage of man and woman

symbolises the marriage of Christ and the Church.

And they thought that just as the marriage of Christ and the Church

is unbreakable, so, too, should a marriage of man and woman.

What made a marriage valid in the first place?

The Church had an interest in defining what that was.

Yes, and the first part of the answer

is that it's just the consent of the man and woman.

And it has to be free consent.

Over the centuries, couples realised the power this gave them.

They only had to get away for half an hour in front of a witness

and they could get married. Think Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet is representing the medieval marriage law.

And they didn't actually need a friar to marry them.

To prove they were married afterwards,

they would need a witness, but that's all they would need,

and to be validly married they didn't even need a witness.

A valid marriage made simply by two individuals consenting to it

would be very difficult to police.

Yes, and the Church hated this.

If you got married to your first boyfriend in a pub with

a couple of your friends there as witnesses,

and then later on decided that he was a loser and that you wanted to

marry somebody serious and much more interesting,

and you got married in Canterbury Cathedral,

and then he took you to court and he could produce the friends

who were with you in the pub when you got married,

then your marriage in Canterbury Cathedral was deemed invalid.

And this was a situation really out of control.

So, Church doctrine taught that the sacrament of marriage was made

simply by the consent of a man and a woman making vows to one another.

But if the presence of a priest wasn't necessary

for this sacrament to take place, the Church would have to work hard

to make sure people followed its rules.

In the early 13th century, Church statutes were issued across England

from the cathedral here at Salisbury that instructed priests

and their parishioners on the "correct" way

in which to exchange vows of consent.

They said, for example, that...

Marriages are to be celebrated with honour and reverence,

not with laughter and ribaldry,

not in taverns, with public drinking and eating together.

Nor should anyone bind women's hands with a noose made of reed

or any other material

so as to fornicate with them more freely.

In other words, don't get married in the pub

and don't get married just to get someone into bed.

But instructions like this were as far as the Church could go

to corral people into proper matrimonial behaviour

without changing the fundamental theological principle

that consent made marriage.

So in the 12th century, the Church developed a set of rituals

to encourage its parishioners to have their marriages

solemnised by a priest, to make sure that the bride and groom

would be properly and reverently married in the eyes of God.

Books known as missals that contained songs and services for

all religious rituals were copied and distributed across Christendom,

so that priests could learn the liturgy they should be using.

This rather scruffy manuscript book was written in the 14th century.

It's not a missal, but what's lovely about it is that

it's the instructions for worship used by a working priest.

You can imagine it being pulled out and thumbed through

when he needed to check something.

Because it's working notes, it's not easy to read,

but here's the section on the marriage service.

The Ordo Ad Facienda Sponsalia, the order for making marriage.

It goes over two pages and includes snatches of the music.

This is an alleluia that the priest was required to sing.

So what did a church wedding look like?

It was a far cry from the informality of a couple

simply exchanging vows in a tavern.

And it would leave no-one in any doubt that the newly married couple,

and their married life together, belonged to God.

I've come to meet John Harper, a specialist in medieval liturgy,

who's going to talk me through the ceremony.

If I were planning my medieval wedding,

could I pick any day of the year I wanted?

No, there was about a third of the year and all the holy days

when you couldn't get married.

And what has to happen before we can get to the actual ceremony itself?

Is there planning involved?

Absolutely. Well, a bit like today, if you get married in church,

you've got to have the banns called,

and this has to be done on at least three holy days

with a weekday in between,

so normally it's on three successive Sundays, just as today.

And the function of the banns?

To make sure there are no secret marriages.

And just in the same way, when you arrive here,

as you would in a church wedding now, the priest standing in front of us

would ask if there's any reason why we shouldn't get married

or if anybody else knows why we shouldn't get married.

And that might mean we were too closely related

or that one of us was already married?

Or perhaps somebody too young, I don't know.

So, we've got to the church porch, it's the right time of the year,

the banns have been called three times and no-one's objected,

what happens now?

The priest will meet us, and he proceeds to ask me

whether I will take you to be my wife, and you'll be asked

whether you will take me to be a husband.

Does this mean the marriage is taking place in the porch?

That's right.

Then I would put some gold or silver on his book, and the ring,

and the ring would be blessed.

And then I say, and this the priest would make me do in the Latin,

"In the name of the Father and the Son."

So, it's, "In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti."

With "Amen," I place it on your fourth finger.

And it is on your right hand.

Same finger we're used to but the other hand?

The other hand, as many people on the Continent still do.

-At this stage, we are man and wife?

-That's right.

-What happens now?

Having been blessed by the priest, he's going to take us into church

and he's going to recite this lovely psalm.

Two very relevant verses, "Thy wife like the vine

"and thy children like the olive branches round about your table."

Now we're going to be taken to the altar step,

and prayers will be said over us.

And when that's over, the priest will take us

on the third part of the journey,

which is actually into the most holy of holies.

Here we are, right close to the alter.

And as the canon starts, then we're told to kneel prostrate.

At this point, we're covered with a veil.

Four people hold a veil over us.

So we're hidden. It's a bit like a monk or a nun professes.

And they lie flat before the altar and are covered,

and arise as a new person married to Christ.

So, this is a sacramental moment?

It's the end of our single lives

and the beginning of our married life together.

That's right. After the Lord's Prayer, he gives the peace.

And then he would come and kiss me, as the bridegroom,

and I would kiss you, as the bride.

But it's not the end. He hasn't seen the last of us.

We may go off to a party, but he's going to join us at the bedside.

To the bedroom?

Yes, because he's got to bless the bed and bless us in bed.

There's the final stage of the consummation of the marriage.

The blessing of the marital bed by a priest enabled the

Church's teaching to reach into this most intimate part of married life.

And the Church believed that its presence in the bedroom

was necessary because it was deeply troubled by sex.

Ever since Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden

for tasting the forbidden fruit,

sex had been tainted with the sin of lust.

But the sin of lust could be contained within a godly marriage,

a union made for the purpose of procreation.

So, surprising though it might be to us,

there was a clear dichotomy in the Church's attitude to sex.

Before marriage, it was forbidden.

But after marriage, it was compulsory.

The joining together of a man and a woman

as the liturgy said into one flesh meant that husband and wife

owed each other the marriage debt. In other words,

both sides had an obligation to have sex

whenever their spouse requested it.

And to refuse was to fail to honour that debt.

The Church believed that only a consummated marriage

perfectly represented the marriage of Christ and the Church...

..so the practice of putting a couple to bed after their wedding ceremony

ensured that the union was complete

and the marriage unquestionably valid.

One of the "putting to bed" ceremonies of which

most details survive took place on the wedding night

of Catherine of Aragon and her first husband,

Henry VIII's elder brother Arthur.

In 1501, at the age of 15,

Catherine arrived in England from her homeland of Spain

to marry Arthur, the heir to the English throne.

The young couple seemed pleased with each other's company,

even though they couldn't easily hold a conversation.

Catherine didn't speak English and Arthur didn't speak Spanish,

but they had Latin in common,

and through the interpretation of the bishops, it was reported,

the speeches of both countries by means of Latin were understood.

Arthur and Catherine were married in a lavish ceremony

at St Paul's Cathedral, and then, once the feasting was over,

came the public ritual of putting them to bed.

First Catherine was "reverently laid and disposed"

in the great bed by her ladies.

Then Arthur was escorted into the room, and into the bed,

by a cheering, rambunctious group of lords, gentlemen and clerics.

A priest gave a prayer.

Bless, O Lord, this marriage bed and those in it.

That they live in your love and multiply and grow old together.

And then, at last, Catherine and Arthur were left alone.

What happened next, or didn't happen, would become the subject

of a dispute between Catherine and Arthur's brother Henry

that would end in the Church of England splitting from the Church of Rome.

But one witness testified, at least, how keen the teenage Arthur

was to demonstrate how much of a man, a married man, he'd become.

The next morning, he called one of his gentlemen to his side,

and demanded a cup of ale.

He was thirsty, he said,

because, "I have been this night in the midst of Spain".

The medieval Church made it clear that sex was only acceptable

if it happened within marriage.

But of course,

real life didn't conform to the orderly principles of the Church.

When it came to sex, people in medieval England

were as complex as we are today.

And in response, the Church had explicit teachings,

and punishments, for those who sought sex outside marriage.

The 13th-century statutes issued from Salisbury said,

"The laity should often be inculcated through confessions and sermons

"that all intercourse between a man and a woman,

"if not excused through marriage, is a mortal sin."

These were not empty words. Local records show that fornicators

were tried and punished in the most public way

right at the heart of England's communities.

First the accused would appear in a Church court,

and if convicted, then punishment would be dealt out.

In 1300, for instance, "Roger le Gardiner

"fornicated for the seventh time with Lucy de la Lynde.

"They confessed and renounced their sin and were whipped in the usual way.

"Henry le Coupere of Birmingham fornicated repeatedly

"with Isabella, daughter of Richard le Potter.

"They were ex-communicated and whipped in the usual way."

The usual way meant being whipped publicly, often in

a crowded marketplace, as a warning against this grave carnal sin.

But despite all of the Church's efforts to control sex

and relationships,

its rules couldn't contain the messy reality of love and lust.

And, thanks to the Paston Letters,

we know all about one brave couple who used the Church's own teachings

to defy family pressure and a bishop's disapproval.

John and Margaret Paston were married for 26 years

and they had five sons and two daughters.

But their elder daughter Margery grew into a strong-willed

young woman and, in the years after John's death, in 1466,

she began to give Margaret cause for concern.

Margaret and John had done things the right way round. They'd married

a suitable partner and found that love would grow afterwards.

But as Margaret was about to find out, her daughter Margery had different ideas.

By 1469, Margery was 20 and living with her widowed mother

until a good match could be found for her.

Or so Margaret thought.

Also living in the Paston household was their bailiff,

a man named Richard Calle.

Richard was in his 30s

and had known Margery since she was a child, but as she grew into

a young woman, the two of them found themselves falling deeply in love.

Margery and Richard managed to keep their romance secret, even

in the midst of a busy household, for the best part of two years.

But in the spring of 1469, Margaret discovered what was

going on and she was horrified.

The problem wasn't the age gap and Richard was clearly a good man,

but he was the son of a shopkeeper,

and for the nouveau-riche Pastons, who were still desperately

insecure about their own social standing, that was unacceptable.

Margery's brother wrote furiously,

"He should never have my good will to make my sister sell

"candles and mustard in Framlingham."

Richard was banished to London

and Margery kept under watch in her mother's house.

But though the family could keep them apart, they couldn't

undo what Richard and Margery had done themselves before they'd been

separated - they had exchanged vows that made them husband and wife.

One of Richard's letters has survived from this period of

separation, and you can see straightaway

how he and Margery now saw the commitment between them.

"My own lady and mistress and, before God, very true wife."

This was a letter written in secret, to be smuggled

into the Paston household.

"I pray you let no creature see this letter," he says.

"As soon as you have read it, let it be burned."

But it wasn't burned - the very fact that

I can read it now shows that it was intercepted by Margery's

family, because it's survived as part of the Paston archive.

It's spine-tingling to read, not just because it's

so gracefully written, but because this is a man of complete integrity

in an agonising situation.

He's faced with the ruin of his career because of the family's opposition to this match,

but the thing that he finds hardest to bear is separation from the woman he loves.

"We that ought of very right to be most together are most asunder.

"Me seemeth it is a thousand years ago since that I spoke with you."

We don't have any of Margery's letters,

but she made her feelings equally plain.

Her mother Margaret turned to the authority of the Church

in a desperate attempt to contest Margery's secret marriage.

She dragged her daughter in front of the Bishop of Norwich to be

interrogated about exactly what she'd said to Richard and he to her.

Had they really made binding vows to each other?

It was an intimidating moment.

Now, Margery was being interrogated not just by her angry family,

but by the bishop with all the authority of the Church.

She didn't falter for an instant and in the letters,

we have an account of exactly what happened.

"She rehearsed what she'd said,

"and said if those words made it not sure,"

if she hadn't got the vows exactly right,

"She said boldly she would make it sure

"before she went thence, for she said she thought in her conscience

"she was bound," bound in marriage, "Whatsoever the words were."

It was clear that Margery would defend her marriage, no matter what.

And what Margery knew was that, by the Church's own law,

consent made a marriage, however much her appalled mother protested.

Margaret had no choice.

If Margery and Richard both insisted the vows had been made,

there was nothing that she or the Bishop of Norwich could do.

Margaret never forgave her daughter for her disobedience

and the damage she'd done to the family name, but for Margery,

a drop in status was a small price to pay to be with the man she loved.

So if a man and a woman had mutually consented to a marriage,

the Church had to support them.

But what happened

if a couple changed their minds about the vows they had exchanged?

The Church's position was clear. If the marriage between a man

and a woman represented the sacred union of Christ

and the Church, it had to be everlasting.

So while it was easy for people to get into marriage,

the Church made sure it was impossible to get out of.

Marriage vows were taken, after all, "till death us depart".

What might have been a simple principle for medieval

theologians was no easy matter for the husbands

and wives who were trapped in unhappy marriages.

If death was the only release, then the answer for many

lay in contesting whether they were actually married in the first place.

There were two kinds of law in medieval England -

the King's law, and the law of the Church.

The King's courts dealt with crime and property,

but the Church courts, which sat in every diocese in England,

dealt with spiritual matters including marriage disputes.

The highest Church court for the north of England sat at York

and one of the richest archives of medieval Church court

records can be found at the University's Borthwick Institute.

'A huge proportion of this archive is concerned with marriage

'litigation, and Bronach Kane has studied the cases in detail.'

How many cases altogether survive in this archive here in York,

and how many of them are marriage cases?

We're talking about a level of about a third

of all cases that come before the ecclesiastical courts

-referred to marriage.

-A third of all the cases?

Yeah, for the 14th and 15th century, yes.

So, out of about 600, marriage cases make up just over 200.

So quite a proportion.

What kind of issues about the making of marriages

were being brought to the courts?

Well, sex and procreation were absolutely central.

That was the purpose of marriage at this point

and you see it coming up in lots of different types of cases,

but primarily in suits that attempted to test

whether or not the husband was able to perform in the bedroom,

because under Canon Law,

wives could bring suits to annul marriages

if the husband was impotent.

But did it ever get tested in court?

Yes, one of the more common practices that you see coming up

in the York courts

is groups of sex workers, prostitutes,

being empanelled and called by the courts

to come and examine a husband,

perhaps in an upper room in a tavern and physically test him,

palpate his member, as they say.

They are technical experts called in...

Exactly, and that aspect of expertise was central to it.

These were supposed to be women who were experts in conjugal matters.

And they would then report back to the courts, give official testimony

on whether he had indeed been able to perform?

Exactly, and the testimony is very graphic.

We see people using the courts in a variety of ways.

Perhaps six or seven out of ten

relate to whether a valid marriage actually occurred in the first place.

This case is one of the most fascinating marriage suits

for this period.

And it's also huge!

Yeah, it runs at over 60 documents.

It's one of the longest marriage cases that we have.

Without even counting, you can see the size of the pile there.

So this is the case of Agnes Huntington...

It's a really interesting case cos we only really found out about Agnes'

would-be first husband through this suit,

that is effectively a dispute between Agnes

and her, as she claims, second husband.

Agnes Huntington was a young woman who lived with her

family in the Stonegate area of York in the 14th century.

Her father had died when she was young, leaving her with money

and land in his will and soon after,

Agnes' mother remarried a wealthy merchant.

Agnes had started a relationship with the son of one of her

neighbours, a young man named John Bristol.

The chaos that ensued shows the reality of what the Church

was up against, thanks to its own law that consent made a marriage.

By the beginning of 1339, the romance between Agnes

and John had swept both of them off their feet.

But Agnes' mother and stepfather didn't approve.

The family lived in the shadow of York Minster

the seat of the archbishop of northern England.

And now, instead of helping to arrange a wedding, Agnes'

parents called in the Church authorities to find

out what the young couple had been up to.

Agnes and John were determined to be together, and they knew that

if they could exchange the vows that would make them husband

and wife in front of a witness, there would be

nothing their families or the Church could do to separate them.

The witness they had in mind was Margaret Foxholes,

a servant in Agnes' mother's household.

And the young lovers tried to trick her into being in the wrong

place at the wrong time.

Margaret, who clearly knew Agnes very well, was deeply alarmed.

"Alas, alas, what are you doing here?", she said.

And her suspicions were right.

Agnes' plan was to make Margaret an unwilling witness to her marriage.

She took John's right hand and said, "Here, I take you John as my husband

"to have and to hold for better or worse for the rest of my life."

Margaret didn't want to hear any more.

And the evidence suggests that she didn't in fact hear John

make his vows in return.

So were John and Agnes truly married?

The young couple certainly believed they were,

and they tried desperately to persuade their parents

and the court to recognise their marriage.

But Agnes' mother was implacable.

She said her daughter would find herself on the receiving end

of a mother's curse if she carried on claiming she was married to John.

And when a clerk of the court did a little too well at finding

evidence in favour of the marriage,

Agnes' mother said she'd have his legs broken.

Agnes was headstrong, but her mother was stronger.

In the end, it was Agnes who backed down.

And if she and John were no longer telling the same story

about the vows they had taken, the marriage couldn't stand.

But this wasn't the end of Agnes' story.

Whether she was browbeaten by her mother,

or whether she simply had a change of heart,

within a year, Agnes had married another neighbour.

And this relationship brought her to court for a second time.

So, this is the story of Agnes Huntington's marital career,

but the man who seems to be mentioned here is Simon,

son of Roger de Monckton. Who is he?

Yes, Simon de Monckton is the second man that she, at least publicly,

tries to marry and initially everything is going quite well

for the two of them.

They have a child, and then,

at some point in 1345, 1344,

he begins to behave quite violently towards her.

He tries to get her to sell some family lands

that she has inherited,

she refuses and he beats her incredibly badly.

One of her witnesses says that blood was running from her nose and ears,

so you get a sense of how badly he must have treated her at that point.

And it's interesting,

because his witnesses don't deny that level of violence.

They simply excuse it and downplay it saying, well,

she may have been adulterous with another man or

she was speaking to him in an insolent tone.

And deserved that correction.

Exactly, yes and correction and chastisement is the way it is

couched in terms of how it's described.

So, in trying to get away from Simon, she was claiming

-she had always been married to John.

-Exactly. And that's the second

argument that she puts forward.

The first one is that he is incredibly violent,

abusive, but also my marriage to him in the first place is not valid,

because some years beforehand, she married this other man,

John de Bristol.

Although, at the time, she had agreed to give him up

-under pressure from her family.

-Exactly, exactly.

-It's a very sad story.

-It is indeed, yes.

-Do we know what happened in the end?

-Unfortunately, we don't.

As with many other cases in the Church courts

for this period, the sentence doesn't survive.

So, were there any grounds on which a medieval marriage could be ended?

Under Church law, it was only possible to get out of a marriage

by disproving its validity.

In that case, the Church court could grant an annulment,

meaning that the marriage had never existed.

But, unsurprisingly, the grounds on which the Church would do this

were extremely limited.

You had to prove that you were already married,

you'd been forced into marriage,

you were insane at the point of marriage,

you were too closely related to your spouse,

or that consummation hadn't happened.

But what if there was no questioning the validity of your marriage?

Was there really no way out?

The court records show that the people of the Middle Ages,

just like us, did their best to escape unhappy marriages,

despite the limitations imposed by the Church.

In 15th-century London,

a woman named Alice Hobbes

appealed to the Church court at Old St Paul's,

which stood on the same site as the new cathedral,

to be released from a marriage to her philandering husband, William.

And this time, we do know the result.

Alice and William Hobbes were married for 20 years

and they had five children together.

But the only reason we know anything

about this particular medieval marriage

is that by 1476, when they came to the court

that sat here at, St Paul's,

their relationship had reached breaking point.

William was a doctor of medicine and a surgeon,

who had a highly respected place in society.

He was principal surgeon to the king, Edward IV,

so it perhaps comes as no surprise

that the sordid nature of the allegations

about his marriage attracted some attention.

Alice was suing him for divorce on the grounds of adultery

and there were plenty of witnesses to support her case.

Stews in the Middle Ages were brothels

and there were lots of them

on the other side of the river, in Southwark.

It was a good place for a working girl to make a living,

close to the city of London but outside its jurisdiction.

So Stew Lane was probably the place

to catch a boat over to the brothels

and one of their customers was William Hobbes.

How do we know that?

Because one fellow surgeon at the Hobbes' divorce case

testified that, when they'd been together

on Edward IV's military campaign in France,

he had seen William visiting prostitutes.

And, clearly, he didn't keep his sexual activities to trips abroad.

Two more surgeons testified that they'd been called to a brothel

in Southwark to treat someone who'd been injured in a fight.

While they worked, they happened to glance through a hole in a wall

and spotted their colleague William

lying naked on a bed in the arms of a young prostitute.

Alice knew nothing of all this

until, at Christmas 1475, her neighbours finally told her

what he'd been up to.

After hearing all the sordid details of William's infidelities,

the court sided with Alice.

However strict the Church was,

it did recognise that some couples just couldn't live together

in the state of mutual support that marriage was supposed to create.

And if that was the case, then they could be allowed to separate

"a mensa et thoro" - from bed and board.

In other words, to live apart.

So Alice got her divorce.

But it wasn't a divorce in the sense that we would understand it.

They had permission to live apart, but they were still married

and neither of them could marry again.

For 300 years, the Church had made sure

that the ending of any marriage

was a rare and difficult thing to achieve.

But in the 16th century,

the Church was about to meet its match.

Consumed by all of the human desires

that the Church had been trying to contain,

a king asked for an annulment.

In fact, this particular matrimonial dispute proved to be

so complex that it would change both Church and State

in England for ever,

because that king was Henry VIII.

Henry had been married for 17 years when he fell madly in love,

or lust, with a bewitching young woman named Anne Boleyn.

Other kings had taken women they'd fallen in love with as mistresses.

But Anne refused to go to bed with her king unless they were married

and Henry wasn't free to marry her.

As far as the Church was concerned, that should have been the end of it.

But Henry was in the grip of irresistible emotion

and a monstrous ego, which told him that

if the Church was standing in his way,

then the Church must be wrong.

Henry's argument rested on events

that had taken place two decades earlier.

After his brother Arthur died and Henry had become king,

the Pope agreed to bend the rules of the Church to allow Henry

to marry his brother's widow,

Catherine of Aragon,

despite the fact that, in theory, they were too closely related.

Their marriage produced a daughter, Mary,

but no longed-for male heir.

Henry now decided that this was proof

of God's condemnation of his marriage.

The Pope, he said, should never have allowed him to marry

his brother's wife and the marriage should therefore be annulled.

Catherine wasn't prepared to go quietly.

For all of Arthur's boasting

about having been "in Spain" on their wedding night,

she insisted their marriage hadn't been consummated

and therefore she had never truly been his wife.

When a papal envoy came to England to hold a hearing in 1529,

Catherine appeared before the court, only to kneel at Henry's feet

to give an impassioned defence of their marriage.

"I take God and all the world to witness that I have been to you

"a true, humble and obedient wife

"and when ye had me at first, I take God as my judge,

"I was a true maid, without touch of man."

The Church was used to bending the rules for kings.

That's what it had done, after all, when Henry married Catherine.

But, this time, Pope Clement VII was under the influence

of a more powerful king than Henry -

Charles V of Spain,

who happened to be Catherine's nephew.

Charles was furious that Henry wanted to cast his aunt aside

and he put pressure on the Pope to refuse Henry's argument

that his marriage to Catherine was invalid.

So, if husband and wife couldn't agree on the grounds for annulment

and the Pope wouldn't come to the conclusion Henry wanted,

Henry decided that there was only one possible solution left -

to get rid of the Pope as the supreme authority

of the English Church.

And that's exactly what Henry did.

At the beginning of 1533, he went ahead without the Pope's permission

and married Anne Boleyn.

And just a year later, Parliament passed an Act of Supremacy,

which declared that Henry was the only supreme head on Earth

of the Church of England.

Because the Church of Rome had worked so hard

to claim marriage for itself,

the only way around its rules for a king in a fix

was to reject its authority altogether.

The ending of Henry's medieval marriage

would end up changing the religion of his people for ever.

Henry had broken from the Catholic Church of Rome,

the Church that believed, and still believes,

that the sacrament of marriage is made for ever.

It would take centuries more for divorce to become possible

for the ordinary people of England,

but the door had at least been unlocked.

And the Reformation had huge consequences

for the last great rite of passage -

death.

So next time,

between the hope of heaven and the fear of hell,

how did death shape life for the people of the Middle Ages?

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