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Indissolubility 91
anyone who received the kiss of peace from the ‘priestess’ had no
part in the Mass. Even at the relatively elevated level of canonries,
however, marriage or de facto marriage was respectable deep into the
twelfth century. Christopher Brooke has described the period 1090
to 1130 as ‘the heyday of the married canons’ at St Paul’s Cathedral.
In Hereford it took longer for celibacy to take hold: until the
end of the twelfth century. Still, by the time Innocent III became
pope the men who ran the Church mostly lived without women
and sex. That was bound to make a di·erence to their attitude, to
make them less indulgent towards the serial polygamy of patriarchal
males. This is not the sort of explanation one can footnote.
Without it, however, one is left with an unsolved problem. It may
also appeal to those who think that social practice and ‘forms of life’
a·ect the intensity with which attitudes are held.
The establishment of celibacy coincided with the crystallization
and professionalization of ecclesiastical courts, and it is the combination
which was to be so deadly to polygyny. It was argued above
that kings and nobles might have resisted church jurisdiction over
marriage if they had not had the ‘forbidden degrees’ escape route
to fall back on. When Innocent III put a stop to that, the church
courts’ control of suits about whether a marriage was firmly in place
was taken for granted.
Divorce and law c.900–c.1200: the survival of patriarchal patterns
The change in attitude on the part of the Church establishment
did not, however, succeed in changing the noble and royal habit of
changing wives until the thirteenth century, and this time lag can
be adequately explained. The following schema is another oversimplification,
in that there were surely individuals who do not
fit the crude generalizations: but it is close enough to the myriad
facts on the ground, irrecoverable in all their details, to explain why
the principle of monogamy and social practice stayed far apart until
D. L. d’Avray and M. Tausche, ‘Marriage Sermons in ad status Collections
of the Central Middle Ages’, in N. B‹eriou and D. L. d’Avray (with P. Cole, J.
Riley-Smith, and M. Tausche), Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons: Essays
on Marriage, Death, History and Sanctity (Spoleto etc., 1994), 77–134 at 126 n. 204.
Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage, 84.
J. Barrow, ‘Hereford Bishops and Married Clergy c.1130–1240’, Historical Research
[formerly Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research], 60 (1987), 1–8. The
cases she studies ‘suggest that marriage of the higher clergy continued in parts of
England to as late as 1200, a date about fifty years later than that suggested as the
latest date for marriage among the higher clergy by Professor Brooke’ (ibid. 4).