Love and Lust in Later Medieval England: Exploring Powerful Emotions and Power Dynamics in Disputed Marriage Cases One of the most valuable sources used by scholars to investigate the culture of marriage making in later medieval England are the records of matrimonial litigation within the Church courts. In particular it the depositions made by witnesses testifying for one or other party that offer an apparently vivid window onto the words and actions of all those involved. Thus we learn of couples who speak affectionately to one another and kiss tenderly, of men motivated by carnal desire rather than matrimony, or of couples made to marry only after beatings or the threat of death. Depositions thus offer unusually direct evidence for emotions and specifically the emotions of love and of lust that are our principal concern here. To read these emotions out of the necessarily fictive and sometimes dramatized accounts derived from the testimony of always partial witnesses is, however, fraught with difficulty. Indeed there is a paradox in looking to evidence derived from the tiny proportion of marriages that were subject to litigation in order to make observations about the social practice of marriage formation within society at larger during the course of the later Middle Ages. We need to confront this paradox before we attempt to make sense of the evidence in relation to the study of emotions. Records of the proceedings of various consistory and related courts in respect of marriage litigation have survived somewhat patchily. Only for the dioceses of Canterbury, London, and York do these records include substantial numbers of depositions. This paper will draw upon such evidence from the diocese if York and London. The largest body of extant depositions spanning the entirety of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries survive from the ecclesiastical Court of York. For the diocese of London there survive two books of depositions dating from towards the end of the fifteenth century. Unlike the York material these lack any of the supporting evidence in the form of libels, articles, judgements and the like, so the circumstances of the cases can only be surmised from the depositions. Despite these caveats, this is a rich body of material that pertains to marriages contracted in both town and country, between women and men of different social ranks, and over a span of two centuries. Although beyond the scope of this paper to discuss in any depth, certain broad patterns have been noticed, notably by Shannon McSheffrey writing about the London evidence, and in my own analysis of the York evidence. Young people, especially those working as live-in servants, seem to have enjoyed the greatest initiative and autonomy in marriage decisions in urban society and in the century following the Black Death. By the later fifteenth century in London and York young women were invariably expected to seek paternal or equivalent approval for their marriages, a pattern that prevailed in the countryside over a much longer period. In some contexts, notably among the aristocracy and sometimes the better-off peasantry familial involvement shaded into arranged marriage and even to actual coercion, particularly of women. It may be that the litigation evidence in some ways accentuates broader social trends. Thus familial pressure to make a marriage was at risk of generating actions for the annulment of marriage on grounds of force and fear. Likewise the apparent relative autonomy allowed to York servants in the decades following the Black Death is associated with a propensity towards multi-party actions where the court was asked to decide between competing matrimonial claims. For example, in 1394 the Court of York was asked to decide between the competing claims of Margery Spuret, who had worked as a servant in the same household as Thomas Hornby, junior, whom she claimed to have contracted five years earlier, and Beatrix de Gillyng, who also claimed him in marriage citing a more recent, but also more robust contract. The Church courts operated according to canon law. From the later twelfth century the Church had taught that consent expressed verbally between the contracting parties was what made a marriage. This teaching was formally laid down in the canons of the Fourth Lateran council. Ideally forthcoming marriages were to be publicised in advance through the pronouncement of banns and the marriage itself was to be solemnised in facie ecclesie, that is at the church door, in the presence of a priest. Because marriage was rooted in consent, contracts made under duress were liable to be annulled. Similarly the parties contracted had to be of sufficient age to understand the implication of their actions and so exercise informed consent. This was deemed to be fourteen years for boys, but only twelve for girls, ages at which of course young people were still liable to be economically and emotionally dependent on their natal families. Couples were also required not to be too closely related by ties of blood, affinity, or spiritual kinship. Since Church courts were called upon to arbitrate the validity of matrimonial contracts where dispute had arisen, it follows that the primary focus of the evidence presented is on such matters as the precise words allegedly exchanged, when these words were exchanged and who had witnessed them, whether the parties had said these words willingly or under threat, whether the parties were of sufficient age, or whether they were too closely related. Where the alleged words expressed only an intention to be wed at some future time, evidence of subsequent consummation, deemed to express a desire to make immediately binding what had previously been a future intent, was also looked for.  It follows that most of the evidence presented in depositions in support of alleged contracts of marriage focus on the words spoken and, since canon law required as the minimum yardstick of proof at least two witnesses to a contract, the witnesses present. Marriage, understood in sacramental terms, is presented as a finite moment and not in social terms as a process. Thus the larger narrative of how a couple came together, whether by choice or arrangement, is often largely absent. Sometimes it may be glimpsed since the giving and acceptance of gifts was sometimes used as circumstantial evidence of an intention to matrimony or of consent. The youthful Alice de Rouclif seen in a York case of 1366 was reported to have accepted gifts of clothing and of cloth to make other clothing from her intended, but to have expressed disappointment that he did not send a wedding veil. Likewise, we may learn of negotiations around dowry and the like that are indicative of arranged marriages. In a London case from 1487, for example, Robert Rokewode testified how he had discussed dowry and marriage gifts in respect of his daughter Alice with the grandfather of Peter, her intended, before the couple exchanged words of contract. The presumably youthful Peter apparently contested the contract on the grands that he only exchanged words of consent under duress. The absence of the sort of boy meets girl narrative that is the staple of romantic fiction leaves limited room for recording expressions of love, but this is not to say that such expressions cannot be found. Though consent rather than desire or affection was the legal basis for marriage, expressions of love could be used to signify a willingness to marry and hence consent. Love was, moreover, evidently part of the social rhetoric of marriage making. Writing in London at the very beginning of the fifteenth century, Thomas Hoccleve castigated an aristocratic model of marriage arranged for wealth and social advantage – or ‘for muk and good’ as he puts it – upholding instead a bourgeois ideal of love.1 Marriage contracts were apparently usually concluded by the couple kissing and then sharing a drink together. The idea of love is gestured towards in the setting for the contract between John Bedeman and Agnes Nicholas observed in a London case from 1470. After details of the couple’s marriage had been negotiated with Agnes’s parents, the couple were asked in turn if they each could ‘find it his / her heart’ to marry the other. Once both parties had assented, all went into the garden where beneath a vine each was once more asked to find it in their heart to marry the other.2 1 Hoccleve, Regiment of Princes, ll. 1632-3 2 McSeffrey, Love and Marriage, 41  Testimony contained in depositions was made in answer to predetermined questions drawn up with a view to make the case for one or other party. The questions, which sometimes survive for York cases, but are lost for London cases, thus acted as prompts to elicit an appropriate response from the witness. In some instances witnesses may also have been ‘prepped’ in terms of what to say and indeed what to omit. It follows that there was little room for witnesses to digress from the matters prompted by the question. Conversely, much of what was taken down through a process of translation and editing, whereby first person vernacular testimony was reconstructed as third person Latin deposition, was noticed by the witness and documented by the clerk for good reason. This is true of statements indicative of love or other emotions as of remembrances of words or actions. The primary reason why expressions of affection or even love are noticed is simply to make credible testimony relating to consent. Thus Alice de Mistreton testified in a case from Richmond, Yorks., dated 1351, to having heard John say of one Isabel Roll that he wanted to do all in his power to marry ‘such a lovely and good woman [bellam ita bonam mulierem]’. Similarly recollections of sadness or even tearfulness are deployed to suggest an absence of consent as most dramatically recounted in a case from Lancashire in 1477. Here a witness testified to how he and his companion walking by the River Ribble from Whalley Abbey to Ribchester were alerted to events unfolding in a building used to store tanners’ bark when they heard the sound of a woman weeping (‘vocem lamentabilem mulieris’). On investigating they saw through the wattle of the building one Alice Townley surrounded by a group of men, one of whom held a towel round her neck and was threatening her: ‘Withoute thou will consent to have me to þi husband and that I may lye with þe I shall throtill the with this tewell’.3 This last alerts us to the skill with which testimonies may be constructed. The reference to the crying woman serves two purposes simultaneously. On the one hand it explains how happenings that were clearly designed to be secret – Alice was held in an out- of-the-way outbuilding in a rural location – came to be witnessed. On the other it alerts the reader – since it was the written depositions and not the oral testimony that were used by the presiding Official to determine the case – to the fact that the woman was in distress even before the narrative moves on to describe the threats made against her. It may also reflect well on the character and hence credibility of the witness – he heard a woman screaming and went to investigate. Implicitly he and his companion might have intervened had they not been so obviously outnumbered. Of course, as always in litigation records where each party tells 3 CP.F.257 essentially conflicting stories, we cannot even be sure that the incident in the outbuilding by the Ribble ever in fact took place. Alice’s screams may only have existed on parchment. Irrespective of their historicity, they tap into a cultural understanding that a woman will scream when threatened or scared. Expressions of love and lust that are likewise found in deposition material must be understood in like terms. Immediately after Margaret Graunt entered into a contract of marriage with John Serle in the hall of John Clerk, Margaret’s grandfather’s house in Pickhill, a Richmonshire village close by the Great North Road, the couple allegedly kissed one another. This, as noted, was as much a ritual action to symbolise the union of the couple as specific evidence of affection. William Serle’s testimony, however, specifically notes that when the couple kissed, Margaret did so ‘freely with a joyful and happy face [gratanter leto et hillari vultu]’. The clear implication of William Serle’s testimony is that Margaret contracted willingly, i.e. she consented, and indeed cheerfully. This, however, was an action to enforce a contract which was contested. John Clerk, Margaret’s grandfather, himself testified that he would have beaten Margaret at the time of the alleged contract if the other women presented had not prevented him. Her aunt, the vowess Dame Margaret FitzRandal, apparently also beat her with ‘a gud bigge walking staff’. Dame Margaret deposed that her niece was only fourteen at the time of the contract. That there had been a contract appears not to be contested. Margaret’s youth would have made her especially vulnerable to family pressure, but ultimately we cannot know whether Margaret willingly went along with an arranged marriage that the family subsequently thought better of or whether she resisted all along. She may or may not have shown a ‘joyful and happy face’ and willingly kissed her partner, but ultimately the joy and happiness she supposedly radiated is recorded as a rhetorical strategy designed to convince the court of the validity of the contract. We may discern, somewhat unremarkably, that such emotions were understood to be manifested in facial expression, but we cannot know whether Margaret kissed her fiancé willingly and lovingly or solely because her aunt had beaten her and her grandfather had beaten her and would do again if she resisted. We may cite other expressions of love or affection are used strategically to help make the case for one or other party. For example Emmota, the wife of Thomas Cokfeld, described how Margaret Graystones and her nephew, Thomas del Dale, came separately to her home in Wackerfield near Darlington, Thomas to talk to his uncle, Margaret to see Emmota. They both ended up staying the night. Thomas got into bed with his uncle, also Thomas, and Margaret bedded down in another bed with Emmota. During the night Thomas del Dale got up from his bed and joined Margaret in the bed with Emmota, who implicitly was well placed to listen in on their long conversation. The coupled addressed one another in the most loving terms and in due course contracted themselves in matrimony. Thomas told Margaret that there was ‘no woman in this land I so much love [tantum diligo] to have for my wife as you’, to which Margaret similarly replied that she wanted to him as a husband ‘more than all the men in this country [in patria ista]’.4 Margaret used Emmota’s testimony in order to try to persuade the consistory of Durham of the validity of their marriage despite apparently having just the one witness to the contract itself. Emmota’s capacity to remember the conversation in detail and specifically to make the couple’s desire to be wed appear compelling by reason of the protestations of affections they made to one another was thus all the more necessary given the failure to produce the second witness normally required as the minimum yardstick of proof. In fact Margaret’s claim was initially successful. The case was, however, subsequently appealed to York where the court was asked to judge it alongside the competing claims of a much more formally solemnised contract of marriage.5 In her action from 1372 to enforce a contract of marriage against one John Beek, a York saddler, Marjory Taliour produced three witnesses to the contract that had allegedly occurred the previous year in Marjory’s employer’s house.6 The witnesses testified to the couple exchanging (comparatively formal) words of present consent clearly signifying a binding marriage and as such sufficient to make a very strong case. Two of the witnesses also added that John placed a garland of field flowers round Marjory’s head and kissed her through the garland. Joan del Grene, then a fourteen-year-old fellow servant of Marjory’s, particularly remembered them as comprising cowslips and maiden grass (‘cousloppis et [m]aydengris’).7 The two witnesses’ notice of the garland serves as a useful mnemonic detail, but the specific description of the types of the flowers used by the teenage servant girl, a witness whose gender and extreme youth make her a less than ideal witness, offers a precision that renders her testimony the more credible. It also suggests both real affection and forward planning on the part of John that entirely accords with a narrative that has him come to the house in order to pledge himself to his beloved. Narratives of love and affection, irrespective of their historicity, are deployed 4 CP.E.215 Pedersen, Marriage Disputes, p. 66 5 Pedersen Donahue, 206-7 6 CP.E.121 7 The left hand margin is torn away, hence the first letter of maiden grass is lost. MED under cǒu-slippe (n.). Donahue suggests foxgloves on the basis of a dialect term documented from the nineteenth century, but since the noun fox-glọ̄ ve is listed in MED and the term Donahue cites appears to be a Devonshire usage, his reading seems unlikely. strategically. The same may be argued of narratives of lust that seem particularly commonplace in the London deposition books from the last decades of the fifteenth century. One particularly blatant example is that of Robert Allerton who testified on his own behalf that ‘he often knew Katherine carnally and by her conceived a daughter, who is still alive’, but he denied that various items given – he ‘deposited’ certain gold rings with Katherine – or received – including some further gold rings – signified tokens of love or of an actual contract. He went on to claim that ‘he never received them from her, however, as from his wife or gave other things to her as to his wife, but only because of desire of his body and satisfying his lust’.8 Robert’s claim seems singularly brazen, but similar defences against suits to enforce contracts of marriage can be found in other cases. John Fynke likewise confessed to having fathered a child by Joan Munden, but he denied that the two groats, the silk laces, and the pair of gloves he is alleged to have given her as gifts held any matrimonial significance. He asserted ‘that he gave Joan two groats in order to know her and not otherwise, not for the sake of marriage, but because she was a whore she allowed herself to be known carnally by him.’9 Whereas two groats or 8d. might very plausibly be payment for sex, John ignored the gloves that he had allegedly given since gloves were symbolic of precisely the sort of agreement or contract that he denied. A year later in 1494 an almost identical position was taken by John Sabbe against Alice Barneby’s petition: ‘he says that he never gave Alice any gifts or tokens for the sake of making marriage between them, but many times he gave her certain monies for the sake of knowing her carnally … he says that many times this witness knew [her] carnally but not for the sake of marriage, but as a whore [non occasione matrimonii sed affectu meretricis]’.10 A like strategy is suggested by the testimony of John Remyngton on his own behalf in a fragmentary London case dated 1493. John’s account admits that he had often had sex with one Alice – her surname is not recorded – but only because she frequently came to the bed in which he was sleeping. This, he claimed constituted ‘magis culpa dicte Alicie’, i.e. Alice was more to blame than he. He told of three different occasions that she spent the whole night with him, ‘on the first night John Clerk being in the same bed with this witness, on the second night Robert Wheler, and on the third night Robert Bullok. And he says that on each of those nights those people could have had sex with Alice just as this witness did, but whether in fact they did he doubts’. John Remyngton’s narrative is too well crafted to be his handiwork 8 McSheffrey, trans., Love and Marriage, p. 43 9 Munden c. Fynke, 1493 10 Barneby c. Sabbe, 1494 alone. It presents Alice, not as a wife wanting to share her bed with her spouse, but as a shameless hussy willing to have sex with any man who would have her – note that John deposed that he doubted if any of the men with whom he shared, as was the custom, the bed had sex with her. He did not say he doubted if she would have permitted them to have sex with her. As for the pair of gloves Alice patently claimed as symbolic evidence that the two had contracted together, he had an easy response. She had stolen them from his chest. Though he does not say it, we are to understand the sort of woman who was so misgoverned of her body that she allows herself to be known carnally by a man who is not her husband is also the sort of woman that steals and lies without compunction, indeed precisely the sort of woman a man might fornicate with, but not the sort of woman he would marry.11 As Shannon McSheffrey has shown, in late fifteenth-century London family was routinely involved in the process of marriage making. Much the same appears to have been true of York at much the same period. Young women in particular seem routinely to have claimed that their consent to marriage was conditional upon the approval of a father or sometimes another male relative or a master. When Elena Couper of Welton, a village west of Hull, told her mother that she was contracted to John Wystow, she responded ‘thow filth and harlot, why art þow handfast wt John Wistow? When þy fadre knows it he wylle dynge þe and myschew the’. Elena subsequently confronted her father, telling him that she asked no inheritance of him, but only his blessing.12 Though Elena’s determination provoked strong emotions, these may understood to be historically contingent. Young women and men in service in the century following the plague seem to have enjoyed a comparatively high degree of autonomy in terms of courtship and marriage. By the later fifteenth century, however, well-behaved daughters were dutifully minded not to enter into marriages their fathers would not approve of, hence Elena’s mother’s rebuke that she was ‘filth and harlot’. It follows that such young women who did enter into courtship relationships and even into sexual relationships, albeit against promises of marriage, entered hazardous territory if they did not also enjoy close family involvement or oversight. If the young woman who presumed to make marital arrangements without family involvement and approval could be deemed ‘filth and harlot’, so it became open to unscrupulous young men to claim that when they had sex with such a woman, they did so for lust, not love and that any money or other material goods given were not tokens of love or signifiers of contract, but 11 Alice [--] c. Remyngton, 1493 12 CP.F.280 (1491) payment for services rendered. The woman who behaved like a whore might credibly be taken for a whore. In this context the testimony of the likes of Robert Allerton, John Fynke, and John Sabbe betrays not so much a cynical and cavalier attitude to women – though it may signal that as well – but rather a strategically rational ploy to extricate themselves from commitments they no longer wished to make. The initial promise of deposition evidence as a window onto the emotions of love and of lust has not been realised. To the question how far we can read erotic love or simply lust out of the material, we may answer that these are tropes that are strategically deployed by witnesses in the Church courts. They are not necessarily empty tropes. There is every likelihood that some couples might enjoy real affection or love for one another, whether that love was rewarded or subsequently frustrated. We need not discount the action of the man who garlanded his beloved with cowslips and maiden grass as a rhetorical fiction. When a York barber’s servant testified how one of the witnesses to the alleged contract between Agnes Barebour and John Thweng remarked, ‘by my faith, I wish more than twenty nobles [i.e. nearly seven pounds sterling] that I and another woman that I know were so well matched as you two are’, he was lending credibility to his testimony of a contract.13 This is not a reason to doubt the veracity or historicity of the words allegedly spoken, but spoken or otherwise they suggest a cultural context – here earlier fifteenth-century York – that held partnership between a man and a woman as an ideal, very much the sentiment that Hoccleve had articulated a couple of decades earlier in his Regiment of Princes. Similarly when John and Agnes, the London couple noted in a case from 1470, went into the garden to recite their words of consent under a vine, they may not have felt especial love for one another – we simply cannot know – but they were following a cultural convention that love and romance were supposed to be associated with matrimony. Following from this last, can we discern the degree to which a romantic discourse might have facilitated the expression of desire or alternatively provided a veneer of respectability to the business of transferring women from paternal to marital control. Again, we cannot know, but in the case of John and Agnes the rendezvous beneath the vine followed immediately from family negotiations. The venue begins to look more contrived than romantic. The garland of cowslips and maiden grass was, by its nature, no less contrived, but we may suppose – or are meant to suppose – more genuine romantic intent on the part of the 13 ‘per fidem meam mallem citius quam xxti nobilia quod ego et una alia mulier quam nosco haberemus quam invicem quantum vos duo habetis’: CP.F.182 (1438-9) giver, at least at the time. But the gesture only has such a meaning in a culture that sees the giving of flowers by a man to a woman as a gesture of affection. Maiden grass grows through the year and its long leaves would easily bind into a garland. Cowslips on the other hand only flower in the springtime. One is reminded of the iconographic conventions of the months which can include a young man holding flowers to represent May.14 More specifically, the garland of cowslips and maiden grass perhaps symbolised more than a young man giving flowers to his sweetheart. It can be understood within the tradition of the May garland such as is made by Chaucer’s Emilie in the Court of Love or is depicted being worn by the noble company who represent May in the calendar sequence from Les Très Riches Heures. It symbolises spring, freshness, purity, youth, romance and love. 14 Cf. misericord at Great Malvern