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Bigamy 165
Advantages beyond ‘benefit of clergy’: bulls to French kings and
Penitentiary evidence
In slightly di·erent language, Documents 3. 5–7 below suggest
much the same. In these cases a pope writes to a French king who
has clearly asked for the bull in question; and the bulls (1273, 1317,
and 1322) follow the same pattern. The king has drawn the pope’s
attention to an abuse. Clerics ‘both bigamous and monogamous’ in
his land have given up their tonsure and have taken on secular jobs,
acting as ‹echevins and the like in towns and other places and as baillis
etc. of princes. The popes reel o· a list of names of secular oces
which could involve the shedding of blood (which was forbidden
to clerics). Now, we may note in passing that the king has apparently
used the device discussed above of mentioning that some of
the clerics are bigamous, presumably to get the pope’s sympathy.
Nevertheless, it is what follows that mainly concerns us: they use
their clerical status as a pretext to deprive the king of consuetae
iustitiae and debita servitia, customary ‘justices’ and due ‘services’.
What are these ‘services’? It sounds as though they are financial
but in any case it looks like a perk for being a cleric in addition to
exemption from trial in a secular court.
Some much later documents about bigamy confirm the impression
that the advantages of being a cleric transcended ‘benefit of
clergy’ as normally understood. They are early sixteenth-century
requests by bigamous clerics to the papal Penitentiary to grant dispensations
so that they could retain their clerical status. Though
a negative is hard to prove, it looks as though such dispensations
were not part of the Penitentiary’s business much before the date
of these entries in the Penitentiary registers. It is not known why
the papacy started granting such dispensations around this time.
There is reason to think that bishops could grant ‘bigamy’ dispensations
to clerics in minor orders when there was grave cause.
On the registers of the Penitenzieria apostolica seee.g.L.Schmugge,P.Hersperger,
and B. Wiggenhauser, Die Supplikenregister der p•apstlichen P•onitentiarie aus
der Zeit Pius’ II. (1458–1464) (T •ubingen, 1996), and K. Salonen, The Penitentiary
as a Well of Grace in the Late Middle Ages: The Example of the Province of Uppsala
1448–1527 (Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, 313; Helsinki, 2001).
I have asked excellent specialists in the pre-1500 Penitentiary (Prof. Ludwig
Schmugge, Dr Kirsi Salonen, Dr Peter Clarke) if they have noticed such cases in
the registers on which they have worked, and they do not remember doing so.
See the following papal Penitentiary regulations relating to clerical ‘irregularity’:
‘≈ Qui duas uxores simul vel successive habuerit. . . . ≈ Qui contrahit cum vidua
vel corrupta . . . ≈ Et nota quod qui duxit viduam a primo viro intactam vel qui