Love in the medieval world

Happy Valentine’s Day, lovers

In 1861 a young French philologist by the name of Paul Meyer made an incredible discovery while going through a collection at Sotheby’s . The work he found had been in the possession of Sir John Saville, an antiquarian in the reign of Elizabeth I, and it contained a long biographical poem in medieval French which would become crucial to our understanding of the Middle Ages – The Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal

It wasn’t a smooth journey. Meyer then lost track of the poem and spent the next 20 years tracking it down, but when he did it would be worth it. Many of our ideas about the medieval period would come to be influenced by the life of William Marshal, an extraordinary knight who served four kings and who played a crucial role in saving Magna Carta.

Marshal came to epitomise the chivalric ideal, a code of conduct and way of life heavily tied up to romantic ideas both of honour and of love. The romances of the 12^th century, which in part originated at the court of the Count of Champagne under the patronage of Marie of France, idealised doomed romance, often between men and women of different social stations who could never fulfil their urges. 

Marshal had served the countess’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and her son Henry the Young King at the start of an extraordinary career, and his great renown as a tournament fighter and loyal servant of King Henry II earned him enormous rewards – including the hand of one of the richest heiresses in the kingdom.

After Marshal’s death his five sons commissioned a biographical work which glorified their father as the chivalric ideal, claiming that ‘his body was so well-fashioned that, even if he had been created by the sculptor’s chisel, his limbs would not have been so handsome’; he also had ‘fine feet and hands’ and ‘a crotch so large.... that no noble could be his peer.’ This was probably a reference to the width of his hips and horse-riding ability, according to biographer Thomas Asbridge, although few men would object to the misunderstanding.

Yet there is one passage that to modern eyes seems jarring, and says a lot about medieval ideas of love, and why our modern concept of romance is so weird – and indeed WEIRD. On the road one day the heroic knight came across a young man and woman who had eloped because they were in love, but their respective families disapproved. Marshal, the poem boasts, took the couple’s money at the point of the sword, and, the reader is supposed to see, rightly so.

This episode says much about popular attitudes at the time, and explains why people in medieval Europe often behaved so differently. The individualism we take for granted, and which motivates our actions, was largely alien to people in the past, and this was heavily tied up with ideas about love and marriage.

The Greeks and Romans essentially saw romantic love as a mental illness, ‘a sickness, a fever, a source of pain’ in the words of Nigel Saul, and only in the later medieval period did love between a man and a woman begin to be seen as something to celebrate.  Yet even at this time the idea of marrying for love was rare, certainly among the nobility, and this had a profound bearing on how people viewed the world. 

In medieval Europe aristocrats rarely chose their spouses, and when they did it was viewed as unwise; the parents of the bride and groom would instead arrange a match, and this was heavily influenced by financial or dynastic concerns, although the attractiveness and temperament of the partner also came into it (Edward I insisted on learning the size of his bride-to-be’s waist and, strangely, her feet). 

Marriages were business contracts and business opportunities. Great kings used their children as assets with which to make deals, one of the most determined being Henry II, who had his heir Henry wed when he was five and his bride, the daughter of the king of France, just two. This is a more extreme example, but it was common for children to be betrothed at a very early age: the German Emperor Ludwig IV had his daughter engaged before she was old enough to talk, and people took it as some sort of divine punishment when she grew up to be mute.

When noblemen chose to marry for love or lust, the results could be devastating, in the case of Edward IV and Elizabeth of Woodville triggering the renewal of the War of the Roses and the eventual downfall of the House of York. 

European society was ‘patrilocal’, so that after a marriage it was the bride who went to live with the groom’s family, as had been the case almost everywhere on the continent as far back as antiquity and beyond. Most people married someone close to them geographically, but in the case of aristocrats a young girl could expect at a young age to be sent away to a country whose language she was unfamiliar with and whose ways were strange.

 

If she was lucky she would have a small retinue with her, but she might very well never see her family again. This experience of extreme dislocation was the case with Henry IV’s daughter Philippa, who went to Denmark to marry Eric VII, aged just 12; her father said goodbye to her during a trip to the shrine at Walsingham in Norfolk and they would never see each other again; Philippa died in her mid-30s, a year after giving birth to a stillborn boy. In extreme cases a girl could be sent to a far less culturally sophisticated nation, such as the Byzantine princess Anna Porphyrogenita, forced to marry a Viking Rus leader.

Medieval weddings might seem very alien to us, the most startling aspect being that they contained so many more obvious sexual undertones. A church service was followed by a feast in the groom’s great hall ‘after which the bride’s maids finally prepared [her] for her waiting husband, and the priest blessed the bed to ensure fertility,’ as Eric Jager wrote in The Last Duel. Clerics would sometimes come into the bridal room where the couple were in bed ‘to bless them and sign them with the cross’.

In the Champagne region, Graham Robb wrote in The Discovery of France ‘On her wedding night, the young people of her husband’s village break down the door, in the traditional manner, and make the couple drink mulled wine from a chamber pot and inspect the sheets for signs that the marriage will be blessed.’

From the 15th century there were common rituals, a public, formal contract at the home of the parents of one spouse, followed by vows at the church door. Afterwards there was a marriage meal and later ‘the blessing of the marriage bed and sometimes viewing the married couple getting into bed’. In Russian weddings of the time relatives would take the couple to bed and help them undress, adding yet another layer of awkwardness onto an already stressful day.

Wedding feasts among the wealthy urban merchant class were ‘gargantuan, with wine by the barrel, legs of beef, mutton, veal and venison, capons, ducklings, chicken, rabbits’ and a boar’s head or swan to put it off, according to Frances and Joseph Gies’s Life in a Medieval City. Later, more food was consumed and, after the priest had blessed it, the bride’s mother inspected the bed to make sure that ‘no ill-wisher has secreted anything there that may impede conjugal relations, such as two halves of an acorn or granulated beans.’

Royal weddings were naturally even more extravagant; at the union of Duke Philippe of Burgundy to Isabel, daughter of the king of Portugal, ‘the piece de resistance was a vast pie out of which burst a live sheep, its wool dyed blue and its horns gilded, along with a man dressed as a wild beast who ran the length of the table while the terrified animal dived beneath it’, in the words of Helen Castor.

People were married earlier higher up the social ladder, since they had the money to secure a match, and a woman not married by her third decade might get a hard time from her relatives; when Elizabeth Paston of the famous East Anglian gentry family returned home unwed after working in another household ‘her mother made life such a hell for her that her cousin wrote her brother begging him quickly to find Elizabeth a marriage because she was beaten weekly or oftener and so severely that on the last occasion her head was broken in two or three places’ (she did get married eventually).

Many people were pressured into marriage, but at least in England happily married couples might win the ‘Dunmow Flitch’ - a side, or flitch, of bacon awarded to any pair who could come to Dunmow in Essex after a year of being wed and truthfully swear that they never quarrelled and would do it over again if given the chance.

Under the Catholic Church divorce was impossible and annulment difficult, except in rare cases, among them impotence. Unfortunately, it also had to be proven, ‘and examples exist of authorities testing the husband's ability to get an erection by exposing him to other women’, according to Martyn Whittock’s A Brief History of Life in the Middle Ages

A 12th century manual said there should be a physical examination of man’s genitals by ‘wise matrons’ to see if he was impotent. Witnesses were then summoned to observe his failed organ and ‘A man and a woman are to be placed together in one bed and wise women are to be summoned around the bed for many nights. And if the man’s member is always found useless and as if dead, the couple are well able to be separated.’ 

This is what happened to poor Walter de Fonte of Canterbury when in 1292 his wife complained of his sexual inadequacy - 12 women ‘of good reputation and honest life’ examined and testified that his ‘virile member [was] useless’. All of which must have been a hugely enjoyable experience for him.

Adultery was even more serious, and at least in one part of France adulterous lovers could be chased through the streets, naked and bound together. The common punishment for infidelity recorded in the 13th century was to be whipped naked through town, and women could expect more terrible consequences, for the obvious reason that it invited the risk of cuckoldry. Committing adultery against the wife of the king or prince, or against the unmarried eldest daughter of the monarch, was high treason and punishable by a gruesome death, as stated in the Treason Act of 1352. Men were also allowed to castrate anyone they found having sex with their wives, even if the lover were a clerk otherwise protected by Benefit of Clergy.

Likewise, with their daughters; a knight called Godfrey de Millers entered the house of another knight ‘for the purpose of lying with his daughter’ but was seized and castrated by her father. Matthew Paris called it ‘an inhuman and merciless crime’ and ‘a deed of enormous cruelty’, and the chronicler entirely blamed the daughter, ‘a harlot and adulteress’.

For men, of course, compulsive womanising was seen as essentially harmless, a double-standard that has been a constant through the ages. A Gascon lord of the 14th century left 100 livres in his will to ‘those whom I deflowered, if they can be found’, not sounding especially remorseful about it. Although aristocratic men may have sired bastards before their marriage the virginity of maidens was highly prized, and premarital sex was very risky, although the chastity belt was a later fantasy, and those found in museums have all turned out to be frauds.

The romantic love that troubadours sang about in 12^th century France was an aspiration, and one that was always doomed, but in the centuries that followed Europe went through what was called ‘the Romeo and Juliet revolution’, so that increasingly people were free to make their own decisions in regard to marriage.

This change was largely downstream of the Catholic Church’s emphasis on consent, which ensured that willing partners over a certain age could marry even against their parent’s wishes – a revolutionary idea.

Marriages had once involved participants who were disturbingly young. In the 12th century Pope Alexander III dealt with a man from Hereford who was betrothed to a girl ‘in the cradle’ but later married her mother instead. The pontiff ruled that if the couple were affianced when she was under the age of seven then it was invalid; later the age of 12 was made the critical age at which people could choose to get married.

This was a product of the 11^th century Gregorian Reform Movement, which on top of prohibiting priests from marrying also insisted that marriage was a religious sacrament, rather than just a legal statement, and therefore had to be carried out consensually. The Church even banned kidnappers from marrying victims even if - as often happens - the couple had fallen in love, because of its strict rules about consent.

This had a wider political effect on ideas of individualism, and the modern assumption that a person must be free to make their own life choices, rather than doing what is right for social norms or their clan.

But individualism was also influenced by the Church’s increasingly strict rules about marrying relatives. At one point people could not even wed relations ‘to the seventh degree’ – that is sixth cousins, which in rural societies would have severely limited the available pool of spouses (although an exemption could often be obtained). The prohibition also applied to the relatives of their dead spouses, and godparents too. The 11th century French king Robert the Pious was excommunicated after marrying a widow for whom he had acted as godfather; they then had a child who was born with ‘the head of a goose’, which people took as divine punishment. Robert then had her put in a convent - no ‘happy ever after’ for them.

The western Church’s rules on cousin marriage drastically changed behaviour and social attitudes, reducing the strength and cohesion of clans. Once people were forced to marry out, their loyalty to their family declined in relation to wider society, making individualism possible. Indeed according to one study, ‘countries with strong extended families as characterized by a high level of cousin marriages exhibit a weak rule of law and are more likely autocratic’, and it was ‘the Churches’ marriage rules - by destroying extended kin-groups – [that] led Europe on its special path of institutional and democratic development.’ The replacement of clans with nuclear families paved the way for individualism, as did the emphasis on consent.  

Romantic freedom was a revolutionary idea. From being a society where marriage was strictly arranged according to the political and economic interests of the two families, men and women could now choose to marry simply because they loved them, although parents could always exert financial pressure on offspring intent on unsuitable choices.

The moral principles we hold today, based around the idea of the freedom of the individual and the universal rights of all men and women, ultimately stem from radical new ideas about marriage and love, an idea of love we celebrate each February 14.