Untitled

Consummation 183
sent were exchanged. Henry was seeking a dispensation from the
impediment, and dropped the attempt when the marriage ceased to
seem desirable. It is significant that he nevertheless stressed during
the annulment proceedings that the marriage had not been consummated.
Dowry and delay
Other reasons will be illustrated as the data are presented below:
the bridegroom might delay consummation until the bride’s father
had paid the dowry; consent might be exchanged during one of
the liturgical periods when marriages could not be celebrated, or
consummation postponed until after a church wedding. Whatever
the reasons, there is plenty of evidence that sexual intercourse by
no means always followed quickly on the exchange of consent, even
though a couple were married from that point on.
At least so far as Italy is concerned, the convention of a gap between
consent and consummation has already been noted by some
historians. Following earlier studies, Brundage notes that couples
commonly had to wait until the dowry had been paid before sleeping
with each other. According to another study, there might be
a gap of at least a year between the exchange of present consent in
front of a notary and the church ceremony. In the interval the bride
continued to live with her parents, presumably without sleeping
with her husband. To this one might add the throwaway line by
Hostiensis, to the e·ect that it had been normal in Modena for
a second, consummated marriage to out-trump a first, unconsummated
one (see Document 4. 1). This comment makes no sense if a
time lag had not been fairly common in the city.
Three English cases
These fairly firm findings can be complemented with evidence from
England, at the other end of Europe. The twelfth-century Anstey
Line 33 of the papal bull.
J. A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago
and London, 1987), 504: ‘Consummation was also frequently linked to property
considerations. In Italian towns couples often initiated conjugal relations only when
the dowry had been paid’ (he gives further references to works by C. Klapisch-Zuber
and J. Heers).
E. Hall, The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van
Eyck’s Double Portrait (Berkeley etc., 1994), 53.
Alluding to X. 4. 4. 5, as Patrick Nold kindly pointed out to me.