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Bigamy 159
This first point about minor orders is a modest one: a hypothesis
that marriage symbolism had an indirect e·ect on French royal
diplomatic practice. It presupposes the findings about ‘bigamy’
and symbolism set out in the first two sections, especially the first.
The sequence of thought is: marriage symbolism put ‘bigamous’
clerics in a bad light so far as the Church was concerned, French
kings knew this, so they put an e·ective rhetorical spin on requests
to the pope by making an unnecessary allusion to bigamous clerics.
The ruling of the Second Council of Lyons and its origins
The next point relates to a larger issue: in 1274 ‘bigamous’ clerics in
minor orders were stripped of the privileges of their clerical status
by the Second Council of Lyons, a decision that had major social
consequences. As should by now be predictable, the decree groups
together men who had remarried after their first wife’s death and
men who had married widows. As we shall see, its force could also
be extended to clerics who married a woman who was not a virgin.
However, a cleric in minor orders who had been married only once,
and to a virgin, could continue to enjoy clerical privileges. Here
we have a legal situation that makes absolutely no sense from the
outside.
Up to a point it can be explained by the desire of kings, especially
the king of France, to extend royal jurisdiction as far as possible.
(Just before the council Philip III had obtained from the pope an
instruction to the French bishops to treat the ‘bigamous’ as laymen,
but there had been a loophole in this preliminary document.)The
death of Becket had turned the tide in favour of clerical immunity,
but this does not mean that monarchs were happy with the development.
Married clerics especially were less likely than beneficed
priests and the like to be deterred by purely ecclesiastical justice:
an excommunication by a church court could cut a man o· from
the income from his benefice and block his career, but none of that
applied to clerics in minor orders. In e·ect they fell between two
stools if they were not subject to secular justice either. They were a
potentially disruptive element.
B. Roberg, Das zweite Konzil von Lyon [1274] (Paderborn etc., 1990), 319–21.
Ibid. 320.
For the consequences of excommunication, the great sanction of ecclesiastical
justice, for benefice holders and career prospects, see E. Vodola, Excommunication
in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1986), 58.