Marriage and European Views Fertility

The couple's marriage covenant had several dimensions—first there was the settlement of material goods and landed property; second there was the public trothplight by which the couple announced their intentions; and third there was the wedding in the Church and the ring ceremony. In most cases, these three stages followed one another in an orderly succession. However there was no need for a settlement, a public trothplight, or a clerically sanctioned wedding. In terms of both the common law and the Church, a private agreement between the two partners was sufficient to constitute a legal, Christian marriage.

Why, then, did publicity surround each and every one of the three stages? First marriage was a rite of passage—from dependency to adulthood in the eyes of the couple's family and the wider community; second publicity sanctioned the match and was a means of granting approval to it; third publicity eliminated hidden impediments to a successful marriage, such as previous agreements and duplicitous scheming, by bringing the agreement into full view; fourth publicity and approval gave the match both legal and moral standing before the law and the Church; fifth publicity legitimated all subsequent children of their union; and sixth publicity and communal approval enabled the servile population to enlist the Church on their side in the event that seignorial authorities tried to thwart their choice of marriage partners.

It is stretching matters to suggest that peasant marriages were characterized by "rough equality" (Power, p 75). The peasants' marital economy was a "partnership in which each person contribute[d] a specialized skill that complements the other" (Hanawalt, p. 17). These women were expected to do a double day of labor and were without independent civil rights within the peasant community. It was, for all intents and purposes, impossible for women to act in the public sphere. If this was a "partnership," then it was an unequal one. The expectation of "partnership" played a significant role in joining together men and women of roughly similar ages. And, most likely, this expectation was a crucial ingredient in making consent on the part of the prospective husband and wife something more than lip service. Bad as it was, gendered inequality in feudal society was still an improvement for women compared to the earlier situation in pre-Christian antiquity when monogamy was uncommon, adultery was frequent, and divorce was routine. Furthermore for the unfree, marital breakup was subject to the impulse of the spouses' masters, while the servile population surrendered humiliating payments for "wife-rent" to their lords.