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112 Chapter 2
guessed. The educated guess is surely that he must have had some
influence because of his great status, but could not have worked a
transformation on his own. However that may be, there is a good
deal of evidence that the ‘forbidden degrees’ loophole was no longer
a popular escape route from marriage in the fourteenth century, in
the areas where ecclesiastical court record evidence has survived
and has been studied.
Records of real cases from local church courts
Most of the evidence survives (or is known to survive) in England,
and the English evidence for marriage litigation has been the subject
of several fine studies. It is worth quoting some of the conclusions:
Helmholz: ‘It is all but irresistible to conclude that divorces were
often procured under the system of kinship disqualification. The
Church court records, however, do not support that conclusion.
The hard fact is that there were few divorces on these grounds.’
Helmholz provides various explanations: people tried to avoid marrying
kin, they looked for wives outside their community, forbidden
degrees were hard to prove under the tough conditions of evidence
(ibid. 79–85).
Sheehan (writing about a late fourteenth-century Ely consistory
court register): ‘the court’s principal activity was the vindication
and defence of the marriage bond; pleas of annulment occurred
infrequently’; ‘It becomes evident that marriages were not especially
threatened by impediments of consanguinity and anity’
(ibid. 75); ‘the court was primarily a body for the proof and defence
of marriage rather than an instrument of easy annulment’ (ibid. 76).
Ingram:
Today the bulk of matrimonial litigation . . . relates to divorce. In late
medieval and early modern England the situation was very di·erent. It is
true that, although legal divorce in the modern sense was unknown, it was
possible on rigorously specified grounds to bring actions for the annulment
of marriage or for separation from bed and board. However, all the available
evidence indicates that, throughout the period from the fourteenth to
Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England, 79.
M. M. Sheehan, ‘The Formation and Stability of Marriage in Fourteenth-
Century England: Evidence of an Ely Register’ (1971), repr. in id., Marriage, Family,
and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies, ed. J. K. Farge (Cardi·, 1996), 38–76
at 74.