punished marital and sexual offenses and one in which they did not. There are many reasons for this. Donahue, for example, could not discuss punishment in any detail for the cases from York, because the sentences did not usually survive. Donahue found only a few references to sentences, but not what any punishment was, and some mention of penance for perjury related to a marriage case.136 The court in Ely studied by Donahue kept a separate register of fines, so some offenders in Ely were presumably fined, or at least could have been fined, but those fines do not play a role in Donahue’s analysis of marriage litigation at Ely, and so we cannot bring them into this discussion. Donahue’s description of court activity does give a vague sense that in Ely the archdeacon did the punishing (or at least warning) when couples lived together and should not (or lived apart and should not), but that the bishop of Ely claimed jurisdiction over defining a marriage as legitimate or not.137 Perhaps even in those latter cases further punishment beyond any fines recorded in the bishop’s register of fines was also handled by the archdeaconal courts. The bishop sentenced to penance a chaplain involved in an illegal solemnization of a marriage (illegal because of a known prior bond).138 According to Donahue, the Ely court imposed a penance for no office cases involving informal marriage. The court did impose penance for a confession of fornication, but “the court did not think that its job was to punish people for having contracted informally.” As Donahue adds, however, there must at the very least have been fees, as all medieval courts, except evidently in Sweden, charged fees.139
All this said, where did bigamy—as found in both marital litigation and adultery prosecution—fit in between these brighter and darker sides of English ecclesiastical justice? We know from Bishop Hamo’s register that a bigamist, like an adulterer, might face the punishment of whipping. Bishop Hamo’s register also includes a handful of precontract cases that do not seem to have resulted in any penances.140 These were usually cases in which the banns of a marriage were interrupted with a claim of a prior bond that the court would subsequently investigate and rule on. There are a few other cases, however, that look something more like punishment for bigamy, though they could easily fall into the broader category of punishment for fornication or adultery, or—if perhaps less frequently—a consummated clandestine marriage. For example, Alice, who had contracted marriage with John and consummated it, later contracted marriage and consummated it with Ralf. The court ordered Alice and John to solemnize their marriage on penalty of excommunication and stipulated that Alice have no communication with Ralf. The court punished John and Alice with three whippings.141 Another example of a bigamy case that resulted in punishment begins with the excommunication of one John, who had failed to perform the required penance for adultery. The court also investigated his “marital projects” with three different women. He admitted that the first marriage was clandestine and that he had also married the next two women in some fashion. John was ordered to solemnize his first marriage and to be whipped three times around the market and the church.142
In short, apart from these few examples, punishment for bigamy is difficult to find in records from medieval England. Moreover, it is, in fact, difficult to say if these punishments noted above did not have more to do with fornication or adultery than bigamy. It is even more difficult to find descriptions of punishment, as well as explicit statements that punishment was absent, in scholarship on bigamy in medieval England. Even scholars who worked expressly on bigamy in England do not offer us a great deal of guidance in this matter. Philippa Maddern, writing on bigamous marriages, analyzed records from London, York, Canterbury, Norwich, Rochester, and Wisbech, ranging from 1350 to 1500. She found 75 cases in which litigants sued for divorce on the grounds of an existing prior marriage, 53 additional cases involving bigamy or adultery brought to court, and 91 ex-officio accusations of bigamy. At least sixteen confessed. Some people, seeking to avoid detection, traveled considerable distances from the place they were known to be married, even to the Continent.143 However, one matter that Maddern does not address is how, if at all, the courts punished those bigamists found to be guilty.144
Sara Butler, writing on husband desertion, found that in her 121 selected cases a number of wives remarried. For example, five out of seventeen wives brought before the court of Canterbury were accused of bigamous remarriage. We do not know if or how the court punished them. Butler does explain that deserting wives faced the threat of excommunication and imprisonment and also risked exposing anyone who aided them to accusations of ravishment or abduction. Wives who agreed to return home often did so on penalty of a fine and beatings around the marketplace.145 Butler describes these judgments as “typical.” All this leaves us, then, with the idea that bigamy took place rather often in England. Courts may well have regularly punished bigamous offenders, even those detected in the course of civil marriage litigation, but we simply do not know at present. We can assert that some punishment for some bigamous marriages is at least a real possibility, at the very least as a kind of adultery and possibly as a more serious violation of the sacrament of marriage. We do not know, however, if or how the courts punished bigamists, but I would argue that we have some reason to suspect that they, like the officiality in Rochester, well might have done so. Nevertheless, scholarship on English officialities taken as a whole does not encourage the view that bigamy mattered a great deal to church court officials in late medieval England. Courts seem to have been much more intent on punishing sexual offenses, and the few bigamists we see punished appear to have been punished more for their adultery than for their multiple marriages.
At present, therefore, we can assert that bigamy seemed to matter in Troyes as it mattered nowhere else in the fifteenth century. We must, however, remember that the sources from Spain, Italy, and perhaps also Germany and England may yet have a good deal more to say on the matter; they await future scholarship. Nevertheless, at least for the present, scholarship on other local courts does not tell anything like the tale about bigamy found in Troyes. In other parts of late medieval Europe bigamy does seem, to return to Charageat’s useful distinction, more a matter of contract violation than a crime against the sacrament of marriage.
That does not mean that bigamy did not matter at all in these other parts of Western Christendom. Punishment is not the only issue. Prevention offers further evidence of concern over bigamy, and evidence for prevention is far more widespread. In northern France and arguably in other parts of Europe, we find assiduous efforts to prevent bigamous marriage. Indeed, the prevention of bigamy was one of the main reasons church officials acted to punish—if not invalidate—clandestine marriage. Certainly it was one of the reasons the northern French dioceses studied by Carole Avignon made such assiduous efforts to require letters proving freedom to marry from all strangers to the diocese or parish. An outsider to a community was far more likely to be a potential bigamist than a distant relative of a prospective spouse.
Having attempted to assess the evident lack of bigamy prosecutions elsewhere, we must also return to Troyes itself and seek out the limits of what the surviving sources permit us to know about the prosecution of bigamy there. To continue, then, on to another issue that lies at the margins of what we can learn about bigamy prosecutions, we have the thorny question of when the prosecution of bigamy actually began in Troyes. Chronology is a major concern in attempting to describe how bigamy came to be perceived as a crime that called for prosecution and punishment in an ecclesiastical court in northern France. Evidence for the subjection of bigamists to public punishment of some kind emerges only in the fifteenth century with any consistency. In particular, records detailing an ecclesiastical court’s use of the ladder of the scaffold and of prison to punish bigamists appear only beginning in the fifteenth century. That evidence of this handling of bigamy emerges only from fifteenth-century records, however, does not mean that bigamy was not already so prosecuted in earlier centuries. As explained above, the punishment of exposure on the ladder of the scaffold for bigamy dates to the thirteenth century in some northern French synodal statutes. Even as the description of a punishment must always be kept apart from any assumption that it may have been applied, the possibility of application nevertheless exists from the thirteenth century. We also have no clear date to mark as the beginnings of the officiality of Troyes’s proactive regulation of the sex, marriage, and violence of their laity and clergy. Court records on this subject, evidence of court action, again date to the fifteenth century. In the fourteenth
