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186 Chapter 4
procedure when her husband would not let her come to live with
him after the marriage had been contracted. All these situations
imply a time lag. The Audientia evidence shows that something
could be done about a time lag unwelcome to one partner, but the
remedy would hardly have been rapid.
The evidence that consummation did not always follow swiftly
on marriage by present consent may be concluded with two cases
from Spain, from the very end of the medieval period. They come
from the registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary, and both read like
one-paragraph novels.
Cases from the papal Penitentiary registers
The first (Document 4. 7) also raises complex legal issues. It was
handled in 1499. The petitioner and central figure was a woman
called Constance of Padilla, who was in the service of a nobleman
named Bonadilla. This man seems to have taken violent exception
to a marriage that she had contracted by words of the present tense,
and acted before the couple could consummate it. A likely scenario
is that her new husband was someone of higher social status, for
whom her noble master had other plans. This would explain why
the couple did not live together after getting married. If Bonadilla
had been informed in advance, presumably he would have tried
to prevent the exchange of consent. However, the rule that consent
alone was enough for a valid marriage made it hard to stop a
determined couple. Bonadilla’s solution was to force Constance to
enter a Conceptionist nunnery (the Conceptionists were a branch
of the Franciscan order). As we shall see, it would be crucial to
Constance’s case that she had been compelled to join the Conceptionists:
it was not a free choice. Nevertheless, she made the normal
profession as a nun. She could not tolerate the religious life, however,
and she left. By this time the man she had married by ‘present
ipso contra iustitiam non patitur se traduci patre mulieris eiusdem id presumente
temere impedire.—mandamus, quatinus, si est ita, prefatam mulierem, ut se ab
eodem viro suo, ut tenetur, libere traduci permittat, et prefatum patrem eius, quod ab
huiusmodi impedimento desistat, monitione premissa per censuram ecclesiasticam
appellatione remota previa ratione compellas’ (ibid., K 154, ii. 299–300).
‘Episcopo. Sua nobis B. de . . mulier petitione monstravit, quod, cum I. de . .
laicus tue diocesis cum ipsa legitime matrimonium per verba contraxerit de presenti,
idem tamen I. eam non curat, ut tenetur, traducere in uxorem (vel aliter: eam non
curat traducere, ut tenetur).—mandamus, quatinus, si est ita, dictum I., ut eam
traducere studeat, monitione premissa per censuram ecclesiasticam, sicut iustum
fuerit, appellatione remota compellas’ (ibid., K 156, ii. 301–2).