Untitled

Indissolubility 119
case was an act of homage to the clergy’s idea that marriage was
unbreakable. These cases spoke a di·erent language from the forbidden
degrees cases of the twelfth century.
The big di·erence between such cases and annulments on
grounds of forbidden degrees in the twelfth century is this: in the
twelfth century laymen used the canon law against itself. The structure
of the law sent conflicting signals, not in theory but in practice.
The forbidden degrees loophole made it look as though the Church
did not really mean what it said about indissolubility. To many it
must have seemed like an ideal to which one had to pay lip-service,
while working around it to achieve a realistic flexibility adapted
to human weakness. Though the wide extension of the forbidden
degrees had not actually come about to facilitate serial monogamy,
that was the appearance. They had in fact arisen out of the reforming
zeal of men like Peter Damian, who would have been shocked
at the way they were used. Later reformers like Peter the Chanter,
the academic, and Innocent III, the man in power, were evidently
shocked too and did something about it.
Wherever there is a law that seriously aims to change behaviour,
people will find ways to frustrate its intentions. The measures put
in place under Innocent III to make marriages lifelong are no
exception—the scam invented by Raymundus Barellus has already
been noted. So: if you wanted to leave your spouse you could try
to persuade a church court that you had been married to someone
else first. (This would work especially well if you did actually want
to marry that person.) We have remarked that this happened; it
may have been common. There is an exemplum about a man who
married a woman and then did not want to take her as his wife. She
took him to a church court with witnesses, proving her case. He
countered by claiming that he had been married before to another
woman. A date was set for him to prove it. On the day before the
verbal consent: which implies the assumption by the Church that verbal consent
without a blessing was enough for the sacrament of marriage (special cases like
mutes are not in the picture here.) The other case that Peters cites (71) does not
seem to be an abjuration in the strict sense. John Pyrye is giving information about
opinions he had learnt from the condemned heretic William White, one of which
was ‘quod solus mutuus consensus inter virum et mulierem sucit ad sacramentum
matrimonii sui’. Clearly this is regarded by the authorities as a bad idea. Could this
simply be because the obligation to marry in church was heavily emphasized by the
late medieval English Church, as a matter of positive law?
See above, p. 116.