Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. Sara McDougall
of this chapter and the chapters that follow, to a detailed study of the crisis of marriage in late medieval Troyes. As we have seen, men and women who sought confirmation of their remarriages at the papal penitentiary were not permitted to remain married to a second spouse; those who asked permission from the pope were refused. However, sometimes spouses in southern Germany found more sympathetic officials, and even in northern France and Cambrai exceptions were made for women married to long-absent spouses. Most often, people probably remarried much more quietly, without asking a judicial officer to interfere. A crisis emerged only when officials not only refused to tolerate more quiet acts of bigamy but also dissolved or suspended any suspect marriages and made spectacular examples of some of the male offenders found to be bigamous. Crises only emerged when and where the laws were upheld in their strictest sense. Such a crisis is found in fifteenth-century Troyes.
The sources that lie at the heart of this inquiry belong to the Archives Départmentales de l’Aube, in the city of Troyes, ancient capital of the Champagne region. These fifteenth-century registers are among the earliest surviving records of the bishop of Troyes’ judicial court, known as an officiality in honor of its judge, the official, who held the delegated judicial powers of the bishop. In northern France, ecclesiastical court procedure made use of a figure much less present elsewhere, the promotor, a sort of public prosecutor acting on behalf of the court.149 A promotor could bring cases before the court at the court’s own initiative, ex officio, without any outside accusation. The active use of these promotors to bring “office” cases against alleged offenders gave northern French and Burgundian officialities a distinctly different character than the relatively more litigant friendly courts of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England or Italy, and probably Spanish and German courts as well.150
The surviving records of the medieval officiality of Troyes can be divided into four main categories. First we have registers involving testaments, goods, and legal separations. Only one such register survives, covering the period of the last decade of the fourteenth century. For the fifteenth century we have two registers of sentences, warnings, and agreements called assecurationes (asseurements in French). We also have fifteen registers covering the daily business of the court, called “cause registers.” These cause registers begin in 1455 and continue with few interruptions into the sixteenth century, for which many more registers survive. We also have several registers describing fines collected by the officiality, from the early decades of the fifteenth century and again from midcentury. Most of these entries offer only the name of an individual and the sum paid, but some of the earliest registers also describe the offense individuals were accused of having committed. This book is based largely upon extensive analysis of four of the earliest surviving registers: the two registers of sentences and other matters, G4171 (1423–76) and G4172 (1426–47), and the two earliest cause registers, G4173 (1455) and G4174 (1456). I also draw upon the registers of fines, a number of additional cause registers, and various other records kept by the officiality and by the bishop of Troyes.
Reading the register of sentences, one is overwhelmed first by the scrawled handwriting, seemingly indecipherable—and perhaps intentionally so—and then by the sheer number of cases instigated by this court. Hundreds of men and women suspected of illegal relationships are ordered to quit each other’s company, to avoid causing further scandal. In some cases, they are fined for illegal cohabitation, for fornication, for adultery, or for concubinage. In the course of the century couples faced warnings, orders, fines, detention in prison, and even excommunication and terms of imprisonment if they did not separate. The officiality made a considerable effort, it seems, to summon and fine anyone in the diocese suspected of partaking in a nonmarital male-female relationship that caused scandal.
In some cases, those accused of adulterous relationships faced additional orders to return to their spouses and resume married life, on penalty of excommunication, imprisonment, and heavy fines. These orders, however, were issued rarely, in perhaps only a dozen cases over the course of the century. The implications of the difference in numbers between the few thousands of men, women, and couples ordered to abandon an illicit relationship and the very few ordered to resume married life merit further study. It seems at least possible that informal separation was tolerated in Troyes, as it seems to have been in so many other places in Christian Europe, as long as neither husband nor wife went on to engage in an extramarital relationship, which did, by contrast, seem to draw the attention and energy of the court.
In addition to policing sex and marriage, the court often served as a venue for redress of violence or for dispute resolution. We find case after case of alleged violent attack, men fighting men and women, women fighting women and men, laymen and women fighting with clergy, and clergy fighting with all manner of persons. Additionally, hundreds of men and some women came before the court to swear oaths to not harm others. All this suggests an environment of feud, an impression that builds as we find additionally several investigations of defamation or insults that often led to violence, violence that often involved members of the clergy and sometimes took place on sacred ground, in the church or at the cemetery.
We find as well a hundred or so cases that stand out. They draw our attention first of all because they are written relatively carefully and well, even attractively. This extra effort on the part of these notaries suggests that these cases were important, that the notaries thought they might be read in the future. Second, these cases stand out because of their relative length. The typical entry found in these registers is a few lines or so, but these hundred-odd cases take up one or even several sides of the folios, if unfortunately—for our purposes—never more than that. Third, and most important, these entries document the spectacular punishments of the crimes considered most serious by the court: heresy, brigandage, perjury, false testimony, clerical brigandage, sacrilege, … and bigamy.
The prominence of bigamy in these records is noted first of all in the extensive and even sensationalist inventories prepared by the historian, philologist, and archivist Marie Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville.151 Beatrice Gottlieb also noticed the importance of these cases.152 Gottlieb went to the archives in Champagne intending to determine whether Luther’s complaints about clandestine marriage and ecclesiastical courts had any resemblance to what the surviving court records describe. Instead, she found little evidence that bore out the main complaints voiced in the sixteenth century. Gottlieb argued, and probably quite rightly, that many of these sixteenth-century objections had more to do with political concerns than with widespread social practice.153 While she observed that bigamy met with harsh punishment, she did not understand the full significance of that punishment, nor did she notice that the court made a practice of dissolving any bigamous engagements or marriages that it found. Well over a hundred investigations of bigamy emerge from analysis of the few registers described above. Most cases were resolved with the annulment or suspension of any suspicious engagement or marriage, an order to separate on penalty of excommunication, and the payment of a fine. Twenty cases we know to have resulted in harsh punishment. The chapters that follow in this book present the practice and prosecution of bigamy in Troyes in detail. Here, to begin, is an example:
In 1423, in the diocese of Troyes, in northeastern France, a man called Étienne “Languedoc” was condemned to public exposure on the ladder of the scaffold in front of the cathedral, where he would be attached to the rungs of the ladder by his wrists, standing there for one Sunday or feast day, a day when the largest number of people might come to hear mass and to see who had been set out to be punished on the scaffold. After his ordeal, Étienne was to spend six months in the bishop’s prison, on bread and water and in chains.154
As explained in the sentence passed against him, Étienne was not native to Troyes. Despite his nickname of “Languedoc” he came from the neighboring diocese of Langres, in Burgundy, where some fourteen years before he had married a woman named Isabelle. They had married with the blessing of the parish priest at the doors of the parish church in a village of that diocese. About nine years later, Étienne sought to marry again, this time in the diocese of Troyes. As a stranger to the diocese, Étienne was asked about his marital status before he was allowed to contract a marriage. The synodal statutes of Troyes required as much, and Étienne’s new parish priest seems to have fulfilled this duty. Étienne duly went to the bishop’s court and claimed that his wife, Isabelle, had died. Accepted as a widower, Étienne was given