Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. Sara McDougall

      Bigamous Husbands

      Between 1423 and 1468, the officiality of Troyes convicted twenty men including one Franciscan friar for the crime of willfully marrying “de facto, cum de jure non posset”; in fact only, as not legally permissible. Who were these men, and why did the court in Troyes prosecute them? The second half of that question is a more appropriate topic for Chapter 5, “Why Prosecute Bigamy?” In this chapter we will seek out what information we can gather about who these men were, what common identity, if any, they shared, and what about them as a group led to their denunciation, prosecution, and conviction. Learning as much as we can about the men prosecuted and convicted for bigamy will thus further inform our reading, in the final chapter, of why the court chose to prosecute these men in particular.

      Almost all of the information we have about these men is drawn from the sentences passed against them by the court. Indeed, the court’s record of the sentence is usually the only opportunity we have to encounter these men in the sources; almost no other surviving records offer any information about them. As with the sentence passed against Étienne “Languedoc” described at the close of the previous chapter, these sentences gave the date, listed the court officials present at the sentencing, and then proceeded to describe the convicted bigamist and some details of the first and second marriages. These sentences declared that two marriages had taken place during the lifetime of a first spouse and that the bigamist either did not seek out proof of death or else provided fraudulent proof before remarrying. Such, it seems, was sufficient to define a crime.

      We have, then, usually, at least that much information to work with. Some of the sentences offer more details than others. A few sentences provide information about where the first wife resided at the time of prosecution; others mention children born to the first or second marriages, or both. All of this contributes to a rough understanding of who these men were and how they came to marry twice. These records can offer important clues about these men, how they set about marrying and remarrying, and the deeper questions of why they acted as they had, and why the court responded as it did.

      To begin with a caveat, accepting the information provided in these sentences as true or factual requires something of a leap of faith. It is quite possible that these men lied to the court. They may have lied about where they were from, about their names, and also about the details of their prior marital histories. After all, these men had almost all attempted to pass themselves off as widowers, or in any case as men free to marry, while in reality they had a living wife, occasionally children, and other familial and social ties that they had concealed. They are patently not a class of inherently trustworthy witnesses to their own activities. How to correct for further potential falsehoods in their “confessions” of bigamy? In point of fact, it is hard to say what scholars might do to extract “truth” from these records.

      In dealing with this problem, which makes it difficult to study either testimony or litigation, we must follow the example of John Arnold in his critical reading of the sorts of stories told to inquisitorial judges.¹ We must read these legal depositions more as a source of narrative, of carefully constructed narrative, than fact. A man might claim he had married seven years before in Chartres and have in fact married ten years before in Paris. We must do our best with what information we have. If that information is not a true rendering of events, it does at least show the sorts of narratives that the men being punished by the officiality told about themselves or that the court had garnered in interrogating witnesses and collecting depositions. We can additionally read these records on the presumption that the information contained therein is at least plausible, if not the whole truth. These men probably did not venture too far afield from what would have made for a plausible life history in late medieval Champagne.

      That said, let us begin our analysis and categorization of the twenty men convicted of “de facto” marriages. We can set one man apart from the beginning. Nineteen of the men were still married to living wives at the time of their second marriages. One man, a friar and deacon, had abandoned his religious habit and the religious life in favor of matrimony,² an act that canon law treated as a symbolic doubling of marriage vows. Married to the Church, he could not abandon his Spouse and marry a woman.³ For this crime he faced a year’s imprisonment. His punishment, notably, differed from the nineteen other men’s but matched that applied to the only woman convicted of bigamy, whose sentence is analyzed in the following chapter on abandoned wives. All the other convicted bigamists, all male, minor clergy and laity alike, faced both public punishment on the ladder of the scaffold and imprisonment. The friar’s case, which had very different motivations and issues than these other cases, we will exclude from the rest of the chapter and focus instead on the nineteen men who married twice.

      Setting aside our friar, the other nineteen men also share something else in common. They seem to have limited their excessive marriage to bigamy rather than trigamy or more. While we have no cases of men who married more than two wives in succession from the officiality of Troyes, court records from other dioceses, such as those of Senlis and Paris, yield investigations of men alleged to have married three wives in succession.⁴ As for the bigamists in Troyes, in addition to the fact of bigamy, their most obvious shared characteristic was their gender.

      What should we make of this clear predominance of men in the prosecution—and especially punishment—of bigamy? In a way it is not surprising that these men bore the brunt of the punishment, as men generally were the focus of late medieval justice.⁵ This does not mean, however, that we should not try for a deeper or more nuanced understanding of why men served as the main targets of this form of prosecution. After all, not all crimes were necessarily associated with male behavior. Some crimes had associations with female behavior, such as infanticide or witchcraft. Other crimes seemed to involve the regulation of both male and female activity.