secular sanctions for bigamy, as well as evidence for harsh sanctions on the part of the secular courts. Additionally, if only beginning at the very close of the fifteenth century, it is in Spain that we find the earliest evidence of the enforcement of these punishments for bigamists by secular courts. In Aragon, convicted bigamists typically faced imprisonment.116 In Castile, bigamists met a punishment derived from Roman law, banishment to an island, and sometimes also the punishment of branding on the face with a q (or maybe not a q but a b or a cross, or two parallel lines, or a 10).117 For this, too, we have evidence of enforcement, but not before the final decades of the fifteenth century.118
German officialities, meanwhile, appear on the other end of a spectrum from the criminal prosecutions found in Troyes. These courts may well not have punished bigamy largely because they, if Augsburg is any example, lacked jurisdiction over all criminal matters.119 As explained above, it is also from Germany, from the court in Regensburg, that we have evidence of the most open attitude toward potentially bigamous marriage found in any surviving ecclesiastical court records.120 German courts, then, might be assumed to have had the least interest in punishing bigamy as a crime, either because they could not, as with Augsburg, or because they did not think of bigamy as a crime, as, perhaps, with Regensburg.
It seems most likely, then, based on the current state of research, to assume that bigamy prosecutions and punishments in ecclesiastical courts at least possibly happened in Spain and Italy and that they were far less likely to have taken place in German courts.
English courts, best-known of all medieval officialities, offer a more complicated story. Scholarship on medieval marriage litigation in England, particularly that of Charles Donahue, has on the whole presented ecclesiastical courts as user-friendly and rather gentle in their handling of the matrimonial projects of the laity, especially as compared to their counterparts in northern France or Cambrai and Brussels. There is certainly something to this comparison—indeed, a great deal to it.121 However, it is important to recognize that scholars have focused on different kinds of cases and brought different concerns to the study of officialities in England and in France. This has perhaps exaggerated the differences between the courts of the two countries. Even as most of the scholarship on marriage litigation presents a friendly picture of the English ecclesiastical courts, many of these courts assigned penalties of fines or other penances, including a not inconsiderable amount of corporal punishment, largely for sexual offenses. This sort of punitive behavior does not appear to have so often directly involved marriage cases as found in northern France or Cambrai, but it did take place and was certainly sometimes attached to marriage suits. There is therefore some cause for caution in maintaining the description of English and northern French litigation as so very different, especially if we broaden our view to include sexual offenses alongside the marriage litigation so skillfully analyzed by Donahue. Civil suits involving marriage certainly came before English courts at the behest of parties who did not seem to suffer for it as much or as often as they would have in northern France, but there is nevertheless more to this English story, including some strong hints of a much more punitive side to English ecclesiastical justice, certainly more focused on sexual offenses but nevertheless also touching on marriage.
The work of a handful of scholars, including L. R. Poos and Richard Wunderli, offers discussion of much more regulatory and intrusive English ecclesiastical court action, with much of that action aimed at the marital as well as the sexual practices of the laity.122 Scholarship that focuses more exclusively on marriage litigation also makes at least occasional references to punishment for marital or sexual offenses.123 As Helmholz explains, some marriage litigation involved couples accused of fornication, who risked “humiliating public penance” if they did not marry or at least promise to be automatically married if they ever slept together again.124 In the thirteenth century, church courts punished adultery and fornication with a whipping around the parish church or market, or both, practices that persisted into the fourteenth century in the diocese of Rochester.125 In the fifteenth century, in Canterbury and Rochester, we find instead the use of public procession on a Sunday or Sundays, barefoot and in sackcloth, carrying a burning candle. This punishment does not seem to have been universal in late medieval England: whipping for sexual offenses appears in records from York and Hereford in the late fifteenth century, and we see the use of fines as well, at least for adultery.126 Fines seem to have been made use of most prominently in London: Shannon McSheffrey and Richard Wunderli show the widespread use of fines as punishment for a range of marital and sexual infractions.127
Drawing on records from across England spanning the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, Poos points to attempts on the part of various local courts—sometimes clearly working in tandem with visitation records—to regulate marriage, suspect cohabitation, and adultery or fornication. Much as in northern France, couples were ordered to separate until they could prove that an absent spouse had died or otherwise prove their marriage was valid.128 For marital and sexual infractions, Poos identifies penance and excommunication as punishment. Sheehan also offers an example of the punishments of excommunication and penance in Ely (and that it was performed, whatever it was).129 In London, according to Wunderli, the commissary court normally punished offenders with public or pecuniary penance. Here, as in fifteenth-century Canterbury and Rochester, public meant a public procession leading to the church, with the penitent in sackcloth and carrying a lighted candle. Public punishment was often commuted to fines, which ranged at a judge’s discretion depending on the wealth of the individual and the severity of the crime.130
As alluded to already, the fourteenth-century court of Bishop Hamo of Rochester punished offenders with beatings or whippings around the church and/or around the market. These punishments are extremely difficult to parse, but for what it is worth it seems on the whole that the court punished “simple” fornication as well as fornication related to clandestine marriage with whippings around the church (only), while adultery and some other marital offenses, meanwhile, often included whippings around both the church and the market. Johnson posits that poor and low-status persons faced beatings, while higher-status persons were punished instead by fines and pilgrimages.131 We can add to that distinction that the court also punished clergy found guilty of sexual offenses with fines and pilgrimages rather than public physical punishment. Lindsay Bryan made use of Bishop Hamo’s register to study 124 cases involving marriage and sexual morals, including a number of ex-officio cases, cases brought ostensibly on accusation, rumor, or as a result of an episcopal visitation.132 Fornication was punished by a fine or by a public beating three times around the church. Adultery was punished by two or three beatings around the market and the church. Sorcery met with six beatings around the church and the market, usury three around the church and one around the market.133 Looking to late medieval Durham, we find once again an emphasis on the prosecution of sexual rather than marital offenses and the use of the archdeacon’s court. In Durham, the prior’s archdeaconal court seems to have done the sentencing and whipping for sexual delicts, delicts that often had ties to marriage and more than a whiff of bigamy about them. To be sure, bigamy is not the focus of the investigation or the explicit reason for punishment in the bulk or even mass of cases studied thus far.134
All this makes England look something more like northern France in its general character and handling of the laity. One difference lies in the English use of whipping or beating, which may well have happened in northern France but is not mentioned in the northern French court records.135 There is additionally a difference in focus, with English courts seemingly more preoccupied with the punishment of sexual offenses, while northern France regulated and punished both illegal marriages and sexual offenses. There are potentially real differences in the numbers, but that is difficult to access. As for public punishment, what Helmholz and Wunderli describe as public penance, the penitent processing to church with a candle, resembles what we sometimes see in Cambrai and Rouen.
All this took place alongside the cases studied by Donahue, civil cases that dissolved bigamous unions and made no discernible mention of prosecuting or punishing the guilty bigamist. It is as if we have visited two
