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Indissolubility 95
gree’ laws. The more church justice blocked the path to divorce,
the more the magnates tended to choose marriages which they knew
could be annulled at need—whether or not by coincidence, perhaps
with a half-awareness midway between innocence and calculation.
The Church did not control the point of entry into a marriage. At
the risk of a little disingenuity, the great laymen had it both ways:
they could change wives and get religious legitimation.
It is worth pausing to reflect on these frequent annulments, which
made the system look two-faced: unbreakable monogamy in principle,
but a popular loophole to facilitate changing wives. How can
this be squared with a very eminent specialist’s statement that ‘If
you take the rough with the smooth—if you take a wider view of the
nature of inheritance than just the production of a ceaseless flow of
male heirs—the doctrine of legitimate monogamy [i.e. the medieval
Church’s model, including the ban on divorce] may produce very
satisfactory results.’ Brooke is calling in question the assumption
that easy divorce was in the interest, even the pragmatic interest,
of medieval kings and nobles. Now it is true in a sense that indissoluble
monogamy was arguably just as good for the class as a
whole even in pragmatic terms: Brooke’s insight is valid. However,
the issue falls into a large class of cases where the willingness of
some individuals to risk a sacrifice produces an aggregate and average
advantage. His argument is structurally similar to ‘everyone
is better o· if individuals don’t cheat in paying taxes’, ‘waiting is
more ecient in an orderly queue’, ‘interrogated prisoners will get
lighter sentences if they manage not to inform on each other’ (the
famous ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’). The problem that bedevils the ‘rational
choice theorists’ who devote themselves to such issues is that
this undoubted aggregate advantage will not necessarily be enough
to make an individual accept a sacrifice. It can actually be in the
individual interest of the toughest man in the queue to push his
way to the front. You may know that another family’s good fortune
in acquiring your lands balances your unhappy awareness that
‘In the eleventh century . . . [the greatest noble families] began to marry cousins,
not first cousins or even generally second cousins, but often third cousins—the same
degree of relationship as that between Louis and Eleanor’ (Bouchard, ‘Eleanor’s
Divorce from Louis VII’, 225). Bouchard notes that ‘several such unions ...were
dissolved against the wishes of the principals’ (ibid.).
C. N. L. Brooke, Europe in the Central Middle Ages, 962–1154, 3rd edn. (Harlow,
2000), 151. The first edition of this book was published in 1964, and already included
a substantial discussion of the history of marriage. Brooke was in advance of the wave
of scholarship from the 1970s on.