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106 Chapter 2
because it had been so hard to reconstruct genealogies linking sixth
cousins going back to great-great-great-great-great-grandparents:
now it was still allowed, but rigorous requirements had to be observed.
For a certain tolerance of less than rigorous evidence had been
acceptable when dealing with the distant past, rather as scholars
nowadays allow a little more leeway to early than to late medieval
historians when it comes to rigorous demonstration. Reduction of
the forbidden degrees to four brought the family facts in question
nearer to the present. A couple related in the fourth degree
would have a great-great-grandparent in common, and they might
even be still alive. In noble families couples could a·ord to marry
shortly after puberty. An elementary calculation brings the implications
home. Pregnancy and childbirth at 16 were possible and
respectable. Suppose this happened in two lines coming down from
a common ancestor. A woman could be a great-great-grandmother
at 64. Seven years later her great-great-great-grandchildren might
be the subject of marriage negotiations. (Betrothal was acceptable
after the age of reason had been reached.)Atthatpointthefamilies
involved could consider whether there were any canonical impediments.
The common ancestor linking the couple in the fourth
degree of consanguinity could be alive.
It is unlikely that common ancestors of fourth-degree relatives
often actually lived to see an annulment process between their
great-great-grandchildren. Suppose that the young couple became
engaged without anyone bothering about the impediment, and married
without the banns being read (or without anyone being so tactless
as to protest). The great-great-grandmother would be elderly
by the time they got married. Possibly she would be dead by then.
If the husband sought an annulment a few years later (perhaps because
he wanted to make a new political marriage alliance), more
time still would have elapsed and our great-great-grand-maternal
common ancestor would very probably be dead. Even so, many
people alive would have known her and they could have sworn to
the genealogy at first hand, with no need for hearsay evidence.
Not all ‘forbidden degree’ cases would have presented so few
‘Aquinas’, Supplement to Summa theologica, 43. 2, in Sancti Thomae Aquinatis
. . . opera omnia, iussu . . . Leonis XIII P.M. edita, xii (Rome, 1906), 83–4
(‘Supplementum’ section, which is separately paginated): an interesting essay in
developmental child psychology.