What Happened On A Medieval Wedding Night?

Summary

Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Episode Title: What Happened On A Medieval Wedding Night?
Host: Kate Lister
Guest: Professor Jacqueline Murray, University of Guelph, Author of From Texts to Bodies, Sexes, Genders and Sexualities in Pre Modern Europe
Release Date: April 22, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of Betwixt The Sheets, host Kate Lister delves into the intricate and often misunderstood world of medieval weddings. Joined by historian Professor Jacqueline Murray, they explore the customs, societal expectations, and personal dynamics that defined matrimonial practices between the 12th and 15th centuries.

The Foundations of Medieval Marriage

[02:25] Kate Lister:
Kate sets the stage by highlighting the complexity of medieval marriage, emphasizing its deep-rooted ties to religious doctrine and societal norms.

[05:10] Jacqueline Murray:
Jacqueline recounts her journey into studying medieval marriage, explaining, "Families were basically never mentioned at all" in early sources, which led her to focus on the Church's role in shaping marital norms.

Church Influence and the Sanctification of Marriage

[06:55] Jacqueline Murray:
Jacqueline explains the Church's pivotal role: "Sex was considered problematic at best, sinful most of all. And the only legitimate context for male and female sexual intercourse was within a legitimate marriage."

[10:04] Kate Lister:
Kate probes deeper: "Why did the Church care about marriage?"

[10:55] Jacqueline Murray:
She elaborates on St. Augustine's three goods of marriage—faith, children, and the extension of the Christian church—underscoring how these principles transformed marriage into a sacrament.

Economic and Social Dynamics

[16:16] Kate Lister:
Kate shifts focus to the economic implications, noting, "marriage was also an economic necessity, especially for women."

[16:16] Jacqueline Murray:
Jacqueline agrees, detailing how marriages among the elite were strategic alliances: "Two great families would marry in together and be allies." For the lower classes, marriage was the backbone of the household economy, with each partner contributing significantly to daily survival.

Emotional Connections and the Absence of Romantic Love

[21:05] Kate Lister:
Curious about emotional bonds, Kate asks, "Do you think love came into it?"

[21:28] Jacqueline Murray:
Jacqueline responds, "I think there is marital affection... but I don't think romantic love comes in until later in the period." She distinguishes between practical partnership and the modern concept of romantic love.

Consummation and Wedding Night Practices

[34:51] Jacqueline Murray:
Delving into the wedding night, Jacqueline states, "There were records where couples were being challenged in court," highlighting societal oversight to ensure consummation.

[39:09] Jacqueline Murray:
Addressing the specifics, she clarifies, "There has to be an ejaculation of semen into the woman's vagina" for consummation to be recognized, debunking myths like the Hollywood-invented Prima Nocte.

Divorce, Separation, and Marital Dissolution

[43:02] Jacqueline Murray:
Jacqueline discusses the arduous process of divorce or separation: "There were two reasons a marriage could be dissolved... consanguinity and non-consummation."

[42:57] Jacqueline Murray:
She paints a vivid picture of public examinations to confirm impotence: "They had to figure out a way that was a legitimate proof for the court to make a decision."

Resistance and Autonomy in Marriage Arrangements

[25:27] Jacqueline Murray:
Jacqueline shares compelling cases from the Paston family, illustrating instances where individuals resisted forced marriages: "Elizabeth Paston... was having none of it... but still she refused. But then the marriage never happened anyway."

[26:32] Kate Lister:
Kate connects these historical accounts to modern misconceptions, saying, "Braveheart's Prima Nocte... Has that ever, ever been a thing, or is that Hollywood nonsense?"

[27:00] Jacqueline Murray:
Jacqueline confirms, "Never. It was never law, ever. And it was never really custom either."

The Legacy of Medieval Marriage in Modern Times

[47:08] Jacqueline Murray:
Reflecting on contemporary practices, Jacqueline muses, "I think that it is a holdover from the Victorian period and their romance with the idea of the family and the loving couple."

[48:04] Katherine Lister:
Kate questions the persistence of marriage today, considering its historical roots rooted in economic and strategic alliances.

Conclusion

The episode wraps up with reflections on how medieval matrimonial practices have shaped, and in some ways still influence, modern perceptions of marriage. While the economic and strategic imperatives of the past have largely faded, the vestiges of arranged and strategic marriages linger in societal norms and expectations around marriage today.

[48:16] Jacqueline Murray:
"For more insights into medieval marriages and other historical topics, listeners can find me at the University of Guelph's website."

Key Takeaways

• Church's Role: The medieval Church was instrumental in defining marriage as a sacrament, emphasizing its spiritual and reproductive purposes.
• Economic Necessity: Marriage served as an economic and political tool, especially crucial for women who had limited means of economic independence.
• Emotional Bonds: While practical affection existed, the concept of romantic love in marriage developed much later.
• Consummation as Validation: Ensuring marital consummation was vital for the legitimacy of the marriage, often enforced through societal and legal scrutiny.
• Modern Influences: Contemporary marriage practices owe much to medieval and Victorian ideals, blending spiritual, emotional, and social dimensions.

Notable Quotes

• Jacqueline Murray [05:18]:
  "I was supposed to be looking at marriage and family... but families were basically never mentioned at all."

• Jacqueline Murray [10:55]:
  "St. Augustine said... there are three goods of marriage that make it an honorable institution: Faith, Children, and Extension of the Christian church."

• Jacqueline Murray [21:28]:
  "I think there is marital affection... but I don't think romantic love comes in until later in the period."

• Jacqueline Murray [27:37]:
  "Virginity was a way of guaranteeing a legitimate lineage. Children inherited property, children inherited kingdoms..."

• Jacqueline Murray [34:51]:
  "Our single most important examples that give us evidence of what real people were doing are records where a couple is being challenged one way or another in court."

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This detailed exploration of medieval weddings sheds light on the complex interplay between religion, economy, and personal relationships during the Middle Ages, offering listeners a nuanced understanding of how these ancient practices continue to echo in today's matrimonial customs.

Transcript

[Kate Lister]

Hi, I'm your host Kate Lister. If you would like Betwixt the Sheets ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every single week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

This podcast is brought to you by Sony Pictures Classics presenting on Swift Horses starring Daisy Edgar Jones, Jacob Elordi, Will Poulter, Diego Calva and Sasha Calle. Muriel and her husband Lee are beginning a bright new life in California when he returns from the Korean War. But their newfound stability is upended by the arrival of Lee's charismatic brother, Julius, a wayward gambler with a secret past. A dangerous love triangle quickly forms when Julius takes off in search of the young card sheet he's fallen for.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Mary.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

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[Kate Lister]

Hello my lovely betwixters. It's me, Cait Lister. I am me, you are you and you are listening to betwixther sheets and we are all very, very relieved that you are doing so. But before we can go any further together, I do have to tell you this is an adult podcast. Spoke about adults to other adults, about adultery things in an adultery way. Covering our age adults with Brixton, you should be an adult too. We call that the fair do's warning. Because if you listen to that and then you listening and something upset you, well, fair dues, we did warn you, right? On with the show. Don't you just love a wedding. All the traditions playing out, the family bust ups, the maid of honor crying into the cake. It's such a beautiful sight here at a medieval wedding. Though we have got other things going on. Everybody has made their way into the couple's bedchamber and are now having a right old song and dance about the happy couple getting down to do it. There are people throwing stockings at the bride, a priest chucking grain on the bed. I'm telling you, it's all kicking off around here. In fact, we'd better be on our way and leave the newlyweds to it. But what else went down at a medieval wedding? Let's find out.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Why do you look for the math?

[Kate Lister]

Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it off and pushing the button. ERA now. ERA yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Goodness, what a beautiful dance.

[Kate Lister]

Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Foreign.

[Kate Lister]

Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Wedding ceremonies have long been steeped in tradition, or rather, we like to think that they are. And let's be obvious, they're pretty patriarchal ones at that. But how different was a medieval wedding ceremony? What expectations were there for the wedding night? Under what conditions could the couple get a divorce? Especially at the time when the church was all seeing and all powerful. Well, joining me today to take us back to the medieval wedding is Jacqueline Murray, professor of history at the University of Guelph in Canada. Elaborate hats and chastity belts at the ready. Let's do this. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Jacqueline Murray. How are you doing?

[Jacqueline Murray]

Oh, Kate, I'm thriving. And I'm so excited to be here to talk to you about things between.

[Kate Lister]

The Sheets, medieval sheets, because this is your area of expertise. You are the author of, well, many things, but you are the author of From Texts to Bodies, Sexes, Genders and Sexualities in Pre Modern Europe.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Yes.

[Kate Lister]

Oh. So, as a first question, why medieval? What brought you to this area of study? Do you remember what your origin story is? The first time you thought this is for me?

[Jacqueline Murray]

Well, I was actually led to it by my sources for my dissertation. I was supposed to be looking at marriage and family, which remains one of my subspecialties, in manuals written for how to teach priests to hear confession. And my supervisor and I thought we'd hear all kinds of things about the relationship between Husbands and wives and how to deal with your children and so on. Not so. Families were basically never mentioned at all.

[Kate Lister]

Wow.

[Jacqueline Murray]

The sources only wanted to talk about marriage and how to create a legitimate marriage and human sexuality and when it was legitimate and when it wasn't. And. And so the sources themselves drew me into questions of sexuality. I've moved further along from manuals for confessors, but that brought me into the history of sexuality in the Middle Ages, and I've tried to broaden my scope as a result.

[Kate Lister]

I love those. The penitentials. That's what they're called, right? The texts, the kind of index. There's some insane stuff in there.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Yes. And if you move into the early 13th century, they take on a different tone because they stop being lists and they start being authors, writing about what they think and how you should greet a penitent and how to wiggle out of them. Confessions of their deep and darkest sexual sins, like fornication or masturbation. You really get a glimpse into what churchmen thought people were doing and why it was bad. And so they're quite fascinating, aren't they?

[Kate Lister]

But I'm gonna get distracted if we start talking about this. So we should talk about marriage, I suppose. The first. Before we even get to marriage, it's always useful to remember that the medieval period is a phenomenally long span of history. How do you define it? What's the kind of cutoff dates?

[Jacqueline Murray]

My Middle Ages runs roughly from around 500 to 1500. But if we want to talk about marriage in the Middle Ages, it really needs to be given a small foundation. And then we can look at it from about the year 1200-1500 as a kind of regularized institution. In the early Middle Ages, there were lots of different Germanic peoples coming into Europe, and there was the Christian church and so on. They all had different ideas about marriage and sexuality. And the church spent roughly those years trying to convince Germanic peoples to follow Christian beliefs, in particular, to stop practicing polygamy and divorce. And the church was promoting monogamy and indissoluble barrages. Once it had been made, it was for life. And so that gets itself sorted out by around the year 1200, and the appropriate ceremonies and so on appear at that time and are widely embraced.

[Kate Lister]

When we think of marriage today and a wedding, we have loads of customs, and it's very much a social norm. And we sort of need to remember it was very much not always the case. You know, the idea that you'd get married in a church, that a priest had to be there, that you had to announce these things. That all had to become formalized at some point, Right?

[Jacqueline Murray]

That's right. And that's what was done in the late 12th century. And we can see clearly in the early 13th century. And what is most remarkable is the ideas that were set down then you still see reflected in contemporary marriage ceremonies.

[Kate Lister]

Wow.

[Jacqueline Murray]

I know. It's an incredibly stable practice and ideology. One of the things that we always think of is the exchange of the ring.

[Kate Lister]

Yes.

[Jacqueline Murray]

That we have evidence for from the 9th century when Pope Nicholas wrote to a king of the Bulgarians describing how marriage was practiced in the west because the king was just converting to Christianity. And one of the things that he mentions in the 9th century is the exchange of rings. It's crazy.

[Kate Lister]

Like, there could have been marriages where that wasn't happening. And of course, that had to be introduced. I suppose a good place to start would be to ask, why did the Church care about marriage? Why did the Church feel the need to get involved in marriage?

[Jacqueline Murray]

The Church wanted to get involved in marriage because the Church was heavily involved in human sexuality.

[Kate Lister]

There we go.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Sex was considered problematic at best, sinful most of all. And the only legitimate context for male and female sexual intercourse was within a legitimate marriage. St. Augustine said, @ a time when every early Christian writer was condemning marriage because it was the locus of sex and sex was sinful and we had to eradicate sin. Augustine said, wait a minute. There was the possibility of human sexual activity within the Garden of Eden, where it would have occurred without sin. And he said, there are three goods of marriage that make it an honorable institution. Faith, which is the couple agreeing to an indissoluble bond for life, Children, for the procreation of the race, and the extension of the Christian church and sacrament, which is suggesting that marriage parallels the relationship of Christ and the Church. That's kind of how marriage becomes a sacrament. The last and seventh of the sacraments is through these kinds of beliefs of indissoluble bond and the relationship of Christ and the Church. And that takes a long time to take hold of. And then what we see in practice by the early 13th century is people agreeing. A couple exchanges vows for an indissoluble marriage unless they can figure out how to get it annulled in the future. And so they work very hard in figuring that out. And there were two easy outs. A marriage had to have the capacity to have children. And so if a marriage could not be consummated, it was considered null. The main issue with marriage is the husband and wife consenting between them, but the marriage also had to be consummated.

[Kate Lister]

The medieval church seems to have got itself in a proper twist around sexual pleasure, which seems to be a relatively new addition. It's not that sex was a completely hang up, free affair in the ancient world, but I think if you'd said to a Greek or a Roman person pre Christianity that pleasure itself is bad, they would have been quite confused. But that seems to be something that the Church, they get themselves into a right state until they can only come up with, well, all right, but you can do it as long as you're married, and then only within these certain conditions as well.

[Jacqueline Murray]

So one of the issues behind that is that the early church fathers were all educated as any elite Roman man would have been educated with the Greek philosophers and so on. And a lot of the early influences, asceticism that Christianity developed was in fact rooted in Stoic philosophy. So the pagans gave it to us and then it was incorporated and they had to figure a way out. So there's a lot of debate about whether if a husband and wife are having sex, whether or not it's allowed for them to have pleasure. And one of the prevailing medical views at the time insisted that both the man and the woman had to experience pleasure and an orgasm in order that they both release their seeds so that procreation could occur. So the idea was, lie back, think about procreating children, and if there's a little bit of fun in the process, well, so be it.

[Kate Lister]

So marriage kind of develops as this formulized panic around sex. Really in the Middle Ages, yes.

[Jacqueline Murray]

And it's formulated then, and it's preserved and reified then at a time when they're also, for example, denouncing unnatural sexual activities such as masturbation or bestiality and so on. So there's a kind of flip side. They try and make marriage a lovely institution. There's writers who say that husbands and wives should love each other with marital affection, almost be like best friends, you know, they're a partnership in it together. And indeed they were, because they were economic partnership as well as a kind of a spiritual partnership.

[Kate Lister]

I was just about to ask you about the economics of this because it's. There seems to be so many different strands to the idea of marriage. On the one hand, you've got the church talking about spiritual salvation and procreation and all of these things and how important it is to God, but on the ground, it's also an economic necessity, especially for women. Who are going to struggle to earn their own money and support themselves, that they sort of. They have to get married. Right. And it was. It's been that way for a very long time in our history.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Yes, it has. There were very few options for women of any rank at the highest levels of society. They were a means by which economic and political relationships were grounded. Two great families would marry in together and be allies. It was actually one of the only reasons that the theologians believed that consent was expendable between the couple was if it was for a peace treaty between warring nations. So even the elites and men, as much as women in the elites, were kind of used as pawns in marriage. And at the lower levels. Quite right. The economy was based on the family as the economic unit. If you lived in rural society in particular, it was a wife contributed as much to the household economy as did a husband. And they needed children to help out, too. So he might plow the fields. She collected eggs and sold them at the market, and the children looked after the sheep in the field. And that was a very tight economic unit. And the importance of children is indicated by the fact that sometimes we see in these areas individual cases. We don't have great swaths of evidence, but individual cases where a couple didn't formally marry until a woman were pregnant in order that he could be assured that he have the children that he needed to run his farm and his piece of land.

[Kate Lister]

I'll be back with Jacqueline after this short break.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

This podcast is brought to you by Sony Pictures Classics. Presenting on Swift Horses starring Daisy Edgar Jones, Jacob Elordi, Will Poulter, Diego Calva and Sasha Calle. Muriel and her husband Lee, are beginning a bright new life in California when he returns from the Korean War. But their newfound stability is upended by the arrival of Lee's charismatic brother, Julius, a wayward gambler with a secret past. A dangerous love triangle quickly forms when Julius takes off in search of the young card cheat he's fallen for. Muriel's longing for something more propels her into a secret life of her own, gambling on racehorses and exploring a love she never dreamed possible. On Swift horses. Opens April 25th. Only in theaters. Get tickets now at onswifthorses.com we all belong outside.

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[Kate Lister]

Do you think love came into it? Because I have heard it argued by people and I've never been entirely convinced by this, but romantic love is a very modern invention that it came in with the Victorians, that until this point it was all business, it was all, you know, how many cows do you have? I've got two goats and a chicken. All right, then we'll get married. Do you think that. Well, from your research, where does romantic love figure into this arrangement?

[Jacqueline Murray]

I'm not sure romantic love comes in until later in the period, but I think there is marital affection. And so a couple cares for each other, prays for each other's souls, does the best they can for each other. And some of the language that we see in court cases or coroner's records or so on uses the language of my dearly beloved wife who, you know, fell into a ditch and drowned.

[Kate Lister]

Jesus Christ.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Yeah, there were a lot of ditches in the Middle Ages, it seems, and you hear real regret. Or another place that you can see this affection is if one of them falls ill, the lengths to which another goes not only to get medical treatment, but perhaps to them to a pilgrimage site like Canterbury, where Thomas Becket was known to perform miracles at his tomb. And there's recordings of the people who supervised pilgrimage sites about the lengths at which parents and children and children and parents and spouses went to try and achieve cures for their family members.

[Kate Lister]

Would these have been arranged Marriages. I assume that if you were very rich and if you were in the Middle Ages getting married, this would have been set up. But would that have been the case for poorer people, too?

[Jacqueline Murray]

Well, both in the sense that marriage was done rationally, at, say, the village level, because of the rules of consanguinity. You couldn't marry people who were too near to you because you might be related by blood.

[Kate Lister]

Right.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Often they might marry someone from the next village, but there was a dowry. The woman needed to bring a dowry. And so there was an economic aspect to it. The man had to give, endow the woman with a certain dower that she would have use of for life should he pre decease her. So people were sensible. And also, and we see this particularly in the cities among the urban artisan glass, people listened to their friends and their family. And there are court cases that show a woman saying, I'm not sure I can accept your proposal. I'll have to check with my friends. And that would include family members. And the other side of it is because the theologians said marriage could not be coerced and consent had to be freely given. We actually find the occasional case of someone, sometimes a man, but mostly a woman, resisting and saying, I will not marry the person that you have selected for me. We have two cases of this within the famous Paston family of merchants. In the 15th century, Elizabeth Paston was supposed to be married by her family to Steven Scrope, and she was having none of it. And some of the reports say that she was locked in her room for weeks and beaten twice a day, and her head had been broken open and bleeding. Wow. But still she refused. In the end, her resistance was broken down and she agreed. But then the marriage never happened anyway. Maybe Scrope got the idea.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah, you would.

[Jacqueline Murray]

By the way, he was 50 and she was 20 at the time.

[Kate Lister]

Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah.

[Jacqueline Murray]

But really interesting to see a young woman of that age living with her family, exercising that resistance and being strong about it.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Wow.

[Jacqueline Murray]

The other Paston was Marjorie Paston, who married privately and secretly, a clandestine marriage with the family's estate manager. And we have two pieces of information that's very interesting. One is a letter from Richard to Marjorie when she's being kept and locked up by her family and they're saying, you can't marry him. That's not what's happening. Talking to her as my own beloved, dear wife, my dear who is my wife before God, and so on, because they had secretly exchanged consent. And then there's Marjorie's mother's letter that says she was so defiant. But she went before the bishop. She repeated the words she had said to Richard, and the bishop had no choice but to agree that they were married. So sometimes people rebelled, and sometimes quite successfully. That marriage between Marjorie and Richard lasted their lifetime.

[Kate Lister]

On a slightly unrelated note, I found myself watching Braveheart the other night. I don't know why I was doing that, but they have that strange part in the beginning where the nobles of medieval Scotland, the English nobles, go, we're going to introduce prima nocte, which is where any lord can take a common girl into his bed on the night of her wedding. And then there's this like, oh, if we can't get them out, we'll breed them out. And I just wondered, has that ever, ever been a thing, or is that Hollywood nonsense? Was there ever any law?

[Jacqueline Murray]

Hollywood nonsense? Never.

[Kate Lister]

I knew it.

[Jacqueline Murray]

It was never law, ever. And it was never really custom either. I don't know the roots of it, but I know that there is a book written that absolutely denounces that notion. That's a Victorian.

[Kate Lister]

It would be, wouldn't it? Yeah. Along with chastity belts and everything else that they came up with. That never made any sense. But that does lead me on quite nicely to talk about the importance of virginity in marriage, which, you know, thankfully, that's. We're not placing a big premium on that nowadays, although some cultures do. But it was a big deal in.

[Jacqueline Murray]

The past, true enough. And as my earlier example suggested, in the lower levels of society, virginity was not as important, but it certainly was in the middle ranks of society because it was based on family honor. And this was also true in the higher ranks. It was the honor of the family, particularly the father, that the daughter was a virgin when she married. And it was absolutely critical if it were amongst the royalty and nobility. And this is mostly not because the hymen was so special and important, but because it was a way of guaranteeing a legitimate lineage. Children inherited property, children inherited kingdoms, and the father needed to make sure that the child was his. So if a woman were not a virgin, then it's all up for grabs. It could be anybody's kid. And the honor of the family and the way that they passed down their goods through the male line and so on was critical, and that's really the focus of virginity. Although the Church theology also wanted people to be virgins, but that's because they were anti sex, basically.

[Kate Lister]

Were they ever interested in men being virgins as well? Has the emphasis always been that it has to be the woman. Has there ever been a point where they were like, we're gonna test this man for his virginity?

[Jacqueline Murray]

Well, that they could. Unfortunately, it's virtually impossible to tell if a man is a virgin.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, and a woman too. The World Health Organization has recently spoken out about that. Today you can't tell that with these so called virginity tests. But they thought they could.

[Jacqueline Murray]

They thought they could. The only time that virginity for men has seemed important was within the context of monasteries where men were supposed to be chaste and repress their sexuality. And so within some areas of monasticism, you wanted to know if a man was a virgin, but you can never really tell.

[Kate Lister]

No. Well, let's say that we're in the Middle Ages and I'm gonna get married. What would a medieval wedding. I'm definitely not a virgin. I'm a bit too old for this. I think my ship has well sailed. But let's just pretend that I am. What would the celebrations be like?

[Jacqueline Murray]

You could be a widow.

[Kate Lister]

I could be a widow. I could be a widow.

[Jacqueline Murray]

That's how you get out of having to be a virgin at marriage.

[Kate Lister]

Nice.

[Jacqueline Murray]

So take sort of an urban, middle class kind of family or just that social level. The parents of the woman would have looked around for an appropriate husband and suggested it to her. They get to meet, and if they both consent, they agree in words of the future tense that I will take you as my husband. I will take you as my wife. Which means at some point in the future, we're going to get married. That's the betrothal. And then the bans would be read out by the church on three consecutive weeks saying that John Smith and Joan Gray are going to be married. And the purpose of that was because it was so hard in these communities to know if people were related to each other, particularly in rural communities where there was very little social mobility. And people might know, someone else in the congregation might remember that John's great grandfather, in fact, was married to Joan's great grandmother, something like that. And that union would be considered consanguineous. And so they were not legitimately able to marry. Or the other reason was because a lot of times one spouse would desert another and go and move to a different city city or a different village and want to take up with a different partner. And so someone might be able to say, wait a minute, I was a peddler passing through that village. I know this man was already married. So we get that out of the way. And couples would be married formally on the steps of the church, the priest does not marry and in fact, now does not marry them. He is not the actor. The couple exchange the vows between themselves. They make their promises to each other, and that is what forms the sacramental bond of marriage. So everyone's standing around outside the church door. Then they'd go in and have a mass, and following that, they'd have a feast and dances scene and so on. Then the couple would go off and spend the night together, or everyone else would just stay and have a good party. Now, that's formal marriage. And that was often too expensive or the priests weren't available or whatever. You had to pay the priest to give his time to Mary. And so people wedding informally, they might be sitting at a friend's house with a bunch of their friends and have decided that they wanted to get married. And just with their friends there, they might exchange vows. Or sometimes we even hear that they're in a tavern, they've been drinking.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, that's a nightmare.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Then they exchange their consent and everyone goes on drinking. But what's interesting about these informal marriages, Kate, is that people without a priest knew the critical formulaic words to say to form that sacramental bond, I will take you as my wife. I will take you as my husband. And that's all I needed to do. The witnesses are there just to confirm that it happened. If there's some question about the marriage in the future. Usually the man gives a woman a little gold ring, although sometimes it might be a silver belt I saw in one case recently, but a gift that's part of symbolically endowing her and bringing her, sharing his goods with her, which was one of the focuses of marriage.

[Kate Lister]

And then there's the wedding night, and I've heard all manner of things about this. From there would have to be bloodied, sheets hung up the next day to prove there'd been consummation. I've heard people say, oh, there would have been. People stood around watching a newly married couple having sex. I'm not sure about that. Well, what does your research say?

[Jacqueline Murray]

Well, a lot of the evidence doesn't take us to the bedroom door, to be honest, because our single most important examples that give us evidence of what real people were doing are records where a couple is being challenged one way or another in court. Occasional examples from literature and so on. And literature, we don't know how reflective that is. But there was, in the very early Middle Ages, the notion of. Of blessing the bed of the couple. And this became Christianized. So there's a famous picture of a priest blessing the conjugal bed with the couple inside it and they put grain on it and the priest says a few prayers that they're all praying for fecundity and for the couple to have children. And sometimes there might be a charivari. All the guests at the wedding are getting a bit too drunk and so they all decide to burst into the bedroom and see what's happening. And then at the highest levels of society where it's so important that a the woman be a virgin and b the marriage be consummated, members of the court would stand around and watch so that they could confirm that the marriage had been consummated. And I don't think, given that those couples frequently may not have met before the wedding day, I'm guessing that that wasn't a very pleasant experience for either of them.

[Kate Lister]

I'll be back with Jacqueline after this short break.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

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[Kate Lister]

It's not medieval, but the marriage of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI wasn't allegedly consummated for seven years. There's various reasons to this, but it seems that they just didn't quite know what to do with one another. Marie Antoinette's brother got to the bottom of it and he said that what had been happening was that Louis had been coming in, inserting himself for a few minutes, staying perfectly still, and then withdrawing without reaching an end, bless them. But that made me think of that. I was like, what counts as consummation then? Like, I know that this is, like, we're now into weird theological territory, but would the Medieval or the Church in general have counted that as an act of consummation? Or does there have to be an orgasm?

[Jacqueline Murray]

It's not so much there has to be an orgasm. There has to be an ejaculation of semen into the woman's vagina.

[Kate Lister]

I knew it. Yes. That was what I thought as well. Cause I couldn't work out why they were saying it hadn't been consummated. Even if Louis had been doing this weird. Just sort of lie in there, not.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Doing anything, bless him, anything else wouldn't count as consummation. Or interestingly enough, sometimes even as sex. Anal sex didn't count as fornication and adultery.

[Kate Lister]

See, that's some small print.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Oh, yeah, I know, I know. But in addition to getting married, one of the couple's challenges was, what do we do if we want a divorce now that the Church won't let us divorce? And we see many cases in which one spouse simply moves to a different place and sets up a new family and household and life and friends and gets married. And then somehow the other spouse finds this out and goes and demands that the church return the spouse. And we find both the wife and the husband doing this. Sometimes it's the husband wanting to get his wife back. Sometimes it's the wife wanting to get her husband back. But basically they've gone on and set up new marital arrangements, but they wouldn't have been legitimate marriages because they were already vowed. And I think that that's really interesting. There are more cases like that than there are cases wanting the dissolution of marriage. There were two reasons a marriage could be dissolved. One was whether they were too closely related. And so they'd get out the genealogy charts and count if they were related. In that case, they were allowed to separate. For example, that's why Eleanor of Aquitaine and King Louis of France were able to separate, so that Eleanor could go on and marry Henry ii. And then we get the lion in winter. But the other reason would be non consummation of marriage. So this is where your Marie Antoinette question becomes very relevant. The couple had to have the capacity to procreate for the marriage to be legitimate. So one of the only reasons was for Separation was impotence of the man, non consummation of the marriage. And that theoretically, they believed that it might be the woman's fault. But in practice, it was impotence. And we find a bizarre number of cases, and in some of these, it's very clear that an unhappy husband and wife are colluding in order to separate.

[Kate Lister]

They would. You would, wouldn't you?

[Jacqueline Murray]

And in other cases, it's the wife just trying to get rid of the husband by alleging he's been impotent ever since they got married. And there's an elaborate ecclesiastical framework for adjudicating this that goes as far as having the man's body examined by women, midwives or married women.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, no.

[Jacqueline Murray]

And then public attempts at intercourse.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, no. Oh, if you were just colluding with the missus because you were both fed up and what. That is really committing to it. So the man would be. Basically, they try and make him have an erection in public, basically.

[Jacqueline Murray]

That would be less likely to happen if both the couple agreed.

[Kate Lister]

Right.

[Jacqueline Murray]

That often happened, though. If the wife said, I have not been able to conceive children. We've been married three years, he can't do it. And then the husband, of course, is shamed and wants to. And the courts are confused. The husband wants to say, no, no, I am potent. And the courts need ev. And these ecclesiastical courts were rigorous followers of Roman law and the law of evidence. And so they couldn't just accept the whispers of the neighbors who say, yeah, yeah, they never did it, and had to figure out a way that was a legitimate proof for the court to make a decision. So that's the underlying logic behind that. Because if they had consummated the marriage and made the sacramental vow, if they went off with other people or whatever, they'd be committing a mortal sin. And that's why the Church was so concerned about adjudicating marriage and exercising surveillance over how it was done. Because people could unwittingly be married and go and marry other people, or they could do it deliberately and their immortal souls were at risk.

[Kate Lister]

Were there ever any women that were accused of, well, not impotence, but not.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Being able to perform that was a theoretical possibility. You see it in both canon law and theology as a possibility. Sometimes you see it as an accusation. And again, it's just an attempt to get out of a marriage. Given that it is my understanding that it is physiologically impossible, they thought the woman would be too narrow to admit the man's penis.

[Kate Lister]

I see.

[Jacqueline Murray]

And the physicians of the time said, well, let's go in and have some surgery and widen her up.

[Kate Lister]

Oh, God.

[Jacqueline Murray]

So, in fact, I take it mostly as a theoretical debate between men in an elite, educated class who are all vowed to celibacy, who really are just theorizing.

[Kate Lister]

So it sounds like once you got into this thing, then, which is quite terrifying, given that you can get married at the pub after a few jars with your friends, it's very difficult to get out of this once you're in.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Yes, it is.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Wow.

[Jacqueline Murray]

This is what we know, that they went to the pub because they appear before the court trying to either deny that a marriage occurred, or a third party is intervening and saying, that's actually my wife. And so there's a bit of court information, and one thing the witnesses would have been asked is, who was there? When did it happen? What words did they say? What was the context? And, you know, sometimes me and my friends were sitting on the trunk in the hallway or having jars in the pub and, you know, all these different places. It took place in a garden. And we asked John Foster to come and. And be a witness to our vows. And that, incidentally, is what the priest is. The priest is the primary witness to the vows in the formal marriage ceremony.

[Kate Lister]

So, as a final question, then, listening to everything that you've said, medieval marriage makes sense for many, many, many reasons. It sounds a bit mad and very difficult to get out of, but I can understand why they're doing this. It's spiritual, but also economic, and it's, you know, alliances. And I'm wondering what you think about the institution of marriage to this very day. Because we don't have to get married, because otherwise I'm gonna be out on the street if I don't have a husband to look after me. Nobody's interested in marrying me to cement an alliance with Spain. We're not doing that anymore. Why do you think we still continue to get married?

[Jacqueline Murray]

I think that it is a holdover from the Victorian period and their romance with the idea of the family and the loving couple. I mean, the Victor really played that up. So it enters into the 20th and the 50s, of course, with marriage and the suburbs and children keeps it going. But honestly, Kate, I have no idea why people want to get married now unless they are faithful believers in a religion that mandates marriage and that encourages marriage, and that if marriage now really has probably gone back to being a spiritual relationship within a religious context or it's just something you do to throw.

[Kate Lister]

A big party, people still doing it down the pub because they've had a few too many. Jacqueline, you have been incredible to talk to. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

[Jacqueline Murray]

They can find me at Jacqueline Murray, Ca. I'm at the University of Guelph and you can find me on the website there.

[Kate Lister]

Thank you so much. I've thoroughly enjoyed talking to you.

[Jacqueline Murray]

Thank you Kate. It was great fun.

[Kate Lister]

Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Jacqueline for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. I know everybody asks you to do it, but it does actually help us out. And if you wanted to email us to say hi or suggest an episode, then you can do [e-mail] Coming up, we have got the final episode in our limited series, History's Worst Fuckboys and perhaps the ultimate example, Henry viii and an episode on the Greek Myths of Medusa. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagi and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

This podcast is brought to you by Sony Pictures Classics. Presenting on Swift Horses starring Daisy Edgar Jones, Jacob Elordi, Will Poulter, Diego Calva and Sasha Calle. Muriel and her husband Lee are beginning a bright new life in California when he returns from the Korean War. But their newfound stability is upended by the arrival of Lee's charismatic brother, Julius, a wayward gambler with a secret past. A dangerous love triangle quickly forms when Julius takes off in search of the young card sheet he's fallen for. Muriel's longing for something more propels her into a secret life of her own, gambling on racehorses and exploring a love she never dreamed possible. On Swift horses. Opens April 25th. Only in theaters. Get tickets now at onswifthorses.com Moms deserve our very best, especially on Mother's Day. There's only one place I trust to deliver high quality mom approved rose bouquets, 1-800-flowers.com this year, 1-800-flowers wants to make sure all the mothers in your life get the best with double the roses for free. When you buy one dozen, they'll double your bouquet to two dozen roses. To claim the double roses offer, go to 1-800-flowers.com-cast. That's 1-800-flowers. Com-cast, the official florist of Mother's Day.