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 permission to marry in the diocese and married one Marguerite, herself a widow. However, it seems that Étienne’s first wife was still alive, still living back in the diocese of Langres where Étienne had abandoned her. Moreover, Étienne had known that she was probably alive at the time he married, or in any event had made no effort to find out for certain. He had nonetheless sworn that he was a widower and free to marry Marguerite. All this was revealed in the course of Étienne’s prosecution at the hands of the bishop’s delegated judicial official, three years after his marriage to Marguerite. In consequence of his acts he met one of the harsher punishments handed down by this court.
Étienne’s case was one of many. From 1423 to 1468 the bishop’s court in Troyes so prosecuted nineteen men and one woman for knowingly contracting two concurrent marriages. These men and one woman came from various dioceses across northern France. They had, on the whole, left a spouse behind in another diocese and come to Troyes, where they married again. Others were native to Troyes and had left wives behind there before moving on to remarry. Still others married twice without leaving Troyes at all. Some men had been abandoned first by their wives, rather than the other way around. Regardless, all were punished for bigamy.
The activities of this court in so prosecuting bigamous offenders are incomprehensible without knowledge of the theological and legal traditions of bigamy found in Christian marriage law and traced in this chapter. The language of the judgments found in these records makes this clear. The ecclesiastical judges in Troyes perceived in the crime of bigamy not only perjury, deception, and fraud but also an attack on the very nature of sacramental marriage. For example, here are the terms in which Étienne was condemned. The court accused Étienne of having “vilified the state of marriage,” a thing created, as the court reminded Étienne, “in the terrestrial paradise, instituted by Jesus Christ.”155 Étienne’s fraudulent marriage defied the model marriages of Adam and Eve and Christ and the Church. Further, “he had shown contempt for the people of the holy church militant, above all his deceived second wife.” That is to say, Étienne’s act was not a private violation but a public action, an attack on the Christian community. These crimes had been committed publicly and against the body public and thus, implicitly, deserved public punishment. And so, Étienne was sentenced to exposure on the ladder and after that to prison. As with Étienne, so with the other convicted bigamists. Such was the punishment for these violations of the obligations of what the court records refer to as the “order of matrimony.”
To conclude, the insistence upon marriage as monogamous had ancient roots in Christianity. Looking to the eleventh century, it is not going too far to link Christian insistence on indissoluble monogamy to the requirement for priestly celibacy.156 Married to the Church, fully ordained clergy could have no other spouse. As for the laity, they married each other, but this bond too had to mirror the bond of Adam and Eve or Christ and Church. These ideas had important consequences for how all Christians were meant to conduct their lives at the end of the Middle Ages, and we see the earliest signs of this in fifteenth-century northern France and Burgundian lands.
All of this was not just theological theorizing; in Troyes it became part of an active judicial court practice. By investigating bigamy as prosecuted in the diocese of Troyes we learn about the role of theology and law in prosecution, about the priorities and attitudes of ecclesiastical judges in late medieval northeastern France. Moreover, in studying the prosecution of bigamy, we learn not only about the role of law and theology in court practice but also about the behavior of ordinary Christians. We learn that we are in a world that attributed great importance to getting married. The people prosecuted in Troyes knew they ran tremendous risks in committing bigamy, in this sort of imposture, which was a threat to salvation and to the legitimacy of their marriages, a threat to family property and inheritance, to social status, to honor in their communities. Nevertheless, they remarried.
We can only understand their motives if we understand the broader religious and cultural world in which they lived. Marriage removed much of the sin from a sexual relationship; it accorded legitimacy to any children. Marriage provided legal protections and benefits. It provided social standing and participation in a holy sacrament. Only married women were allowed to partake in certain blessings such as reentry into a church after the birth of a child. Only married women could have children without fear of prosecution for adultery. Only married men could be sure that their children would have the full benefits of whatever inheritance or position in the world their fathers might confer.
To be sure, those who remarried bigamously only seemingly gained these advantages: their marriages had no real legitimacy
