with public punishment, enacted on the “scala.”100 As explained in Ducange’s glossary of medieval Latin101 and as illustrated in images such as those identified by Barbara Morel,102 this tool of punishment was the ladder leading up to the scaffold. Such public display on the ladder was used to punish those found guilty of bigamy, of false testimony, of blasphemy, or public scandal of some kind.
So at least the statutes declared. We can and should distinguish between laws that mention this type of punishment and actual evidence of its use. In fact, we know of no bigamists actually placed on the ladder of the scaffold in Tours or Château-Gontier. Indeed, we know of no case in which such punishments were carried out for such an offense in any part of Europe before the fifteenth century. The court records of the fifteenth century are often the earliest surviving sources. As a result, when exactly enforcement of these rules began remains a question we cannot satisfactorily answer.
Nonetheless, we do find scattered evidence of use beginning in the fourteenth century. Bigamists were punished on the ladder in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Troyes and, if evidently less often, in Paris, Senlis, Rouen, Malines, Pamiers,103 and in the fourteenth century in Marseilles.104 In the south, this punishment came at the hands of secular rather than ecclesiastical officials. Returning north, we can also point to similar proceedings against bigamists that resulted in different punishments, such as penitential processions, pilgrimage, or imprisonment, from Châlons, Cambrai, Bourges, Paris, and Brussels.105 Secular court records from Dijon include fines levied against bigamists in the fourteenth century, possibly if not necessarily part of a process that also included ecclesiastical prosecution and punishment,106 and in 1520 the prévôt of Sens, a secular official, sentenced a bigamist to be whipped before sending him on to the official of Sens, presumably for annulment of the second marriage and for some form of ecclesiastical punishment.107 The surviving synodal statutes from Paris, Rouen, and Troyes, unlike Tours and Château-Gontier, do not specify the use of the punishment of the ladder for bigamy, or indeed any other punishment. Nevertheless, these courts certainly made use of both the ladder of the scaffold and the bishop’s prison as instruments of punishment for bigamy throughout the fifteenth century. As we will see in the final chapter, the officiality in Troyes used these punishments for a variety of offenses in Troyes, and bigamy ranked among them. In fact, the laity of the diocese met punishment on the ladder for no other crime so often as bigamy.
Indeed, between 1426 and 1468 we have remarkably consistent evidence of use, in Troyes, of the ladder and the prison to punish bigamy. The combination of exposure on the ladder and imprisonment was used against those seen to have most grossly violated the norms of the community: bigamists and clerics who became brigands, clerics who not only bore arms but fought battles and attacked noncombatants, stole, pillaged, killed, and raped. Also of great importance is the contemporary context of these prosecutions. In the fifteenth century, we find evidence of such handling of bigamy in northern France and Burgundian territories. We find scattered cases from throughout these dioceses in which bigamists met with harsh punishment. The punishments are always the harshest handed down for any matrimonial offense. The largest number of cases has so far been found in records from Troyes.
It seems, therefore, that Troyes stood alone among local courts in its handling of bigamy. Harsh punishments aside, only one other venue, by no means local, has been shown by current scholarship to have adhered to the same standards for preventing potentially bigamous remarriage as found in Troyes and throughout northern France and Burgundian lands. As Ludwig Schmugge has shown, the papal penitentiary seemed to be in agreement with the standards of proof before remarriage required most notably by the officiality of Troyes, found seemingly nowhere else in Christian Europe in the fifteenth century.
At the level of the papal penitentiary, which considered petitions for annulments and dispensations, granted with the pope’s delegated jurisdiction, Schmugge has found a number of petitions related to bigamy.108 Schmugge identifies, first, cases of missing persons and, second, cases of marriages contracted bigamously. These cases demonstrate that the laws governing remarriage were consistently upheld. In these cases, the penitentiary did not allow spouses of a missing husband or wife to remarry without proof, no matter how long they had waited. Those who had contracted a bigamous marriage found that second marriage dissolved by the penitentiary. Interestingly, if this first spouse subsequently died, the bigamists were often successful in their petitions to remarry the spouse they had previously married bigamously. This was the only concession the penitentiary allowed those who had contracted concurrent marriages.109 If Troyes was in fact the only fifteenth-century court to punish bigamists so frequently, the court’s efforts at preventing and dissolving bigamous marriages, more broadly present in northern France and Burgundian lands, were in accord with the actions of the papal penitentiary.
Our current scholarship thus suggests that northern France and the papal penitentiary stood alone in their strict attitude toward potentially bigamous remarriages and that Troyes stood completely alone in consistently inflicting harsh punishment on certain male bigamists. Perhaps that is the case. The matter, however, is not quite so clear, for there are too many silences and lacunae in our current understanding of the surviving sources. All this raises once more the question of the evident exceptionality of the handling of bigamy in fifteenth-century Troyes.
How exceptional was the prosecution of bigamy found in Troyes? Modern scholarship on fifteenth-century officiality records seems to show that bigamy was of slight concern elsewhere in Europe. Scholarship on England, Germany, Spain, and Italy particularly encourages this perception. To be sure, in all of these places many people seem to have married more often, or at least more confusedly, than they should have. Their ecclesiastical courts, however, do not seem to have been interested in punishing bigamous offenders beyond a fine or the requirement that any prior bond be recognized as the valid marriage.110 That the officiality of Troyes prosecuted and punished bigamists stands out as exceptional. However, this evident exceptionality requires some qualification and may require some revision.
On the surface, it seems to be the case for England, Italy, Germany, and Spain that ecclesiastical courts did not subject bigamists to criminal prosecution or punishment. Instead, as Martine Charageat explains for Saragossa, in the fifteenth century bigamy was treated more as a civil matter, as a violation of a contract, than as a crime against the sacrament of marriage.111 Beginning in the last decades of the fifteenth century in Spain and in the first decades of the sixteenth century in Italy, bigamy began to be prosecuted as a crime against the sacrament.112 Only in fifteenth-century Troyes can we find the sort of criminal prosecution and punishment of bigamy that is otherwise a feature of the sixteenth or seventeenth century in Catholic lands. We must recognize, however, that we currently have at best an incomplete knowledge of ecclesiastical court criminal proceedings in Spain, Italy, and Germany, and our knowledge even of the extensively studied English criminal cases is limited with respect to bigamy.
To begin with Italy and Spain, scholars have located and studied Italian medieval officiality records only from Lucca, Venice, and Pisa; and only Saragossa and Barcelona for Spain.113 With the exception of Barcelona—and it is a limited exception—criminal cases do not form a part of these studies. Even the scholarship on Barcelona cannot tell us much, since only a handful of fifteenth-century criminal records from the ecclesiastical court have survived. The criminal cases of Saragossa, meanwhile, remain sealed. The cases in Lucca have only just been made available to scholars. For Venice, criminal records from the fifteenth century have not survived. The Pisan records date to the thirteenth century and are not concerned with criminal matters.114 All this certainly implies that bigamists could have been punished by officialities in Italy or Spain; secular courts may well also have done some punishing. This should not be taken to mean, however, that ecclesiastical courts would have fully ceded jurisdiction. Even in the sixteenth century in Spain, some bigamy cases made their way to ecclesiastical courts rather than to the Inquisition (and sometimes in addition to the Inquisition).115
The case of Spain is particularly important, because of the evidence we have for
