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Consummation 187
consent’ had remarried, and this time he had consummated the
union. Yet when Constance ran away from her life as a nun, he
clearly wanted her still: the whole point of the case is to allow them
to live as man and wife.
How could this possibly be allowed in church law? One would
have thought that Alexander III’s rulings stood against it: entry
into a religious order would have dissolved the first unconsummated
marriage, the second marriage was consummated and so
indissoluble. The key to her case, however, is that she entered the
order under compulsion. Becoming a nun was like getting married
in that true freedom of choice was required and the lack of it
made the decision void. Constance’s case was that she did not truly
consent to the religious life, so that her first marriage had after
all never been dissolved, with the consequence that her husband’s
second marriage was invalid. The whole story makes vivid another
way in which the consummation of a marriage might be delayed, as
well as the interaction of Alexander’s decision in the twelfth century
with social life centuries later (and with another canon-law
principle: free consent before lifelong commitment to a religious
order). The case was committed to judges delegate. If they found
the facts to be as stated, and if her husband got his second marriage
annulled, the judges were to give her the means of authenticating
her marriage to any ignorant persons who called it into question.
The second case (Document 4. 8) concerns a Juan Sams (?)
of Burgos diocese. He had married Catherine, daughter of Juan
Gomez. They did not consummate the marriage immediately, and
in the interval she slept with another man. Evidently this changed
everything, and ‘induced by penitence or for some other reason’ she
entered the Order of the Holy Trinity. At least, she made profession
of the rule of the order without entering one of its monasteries, but
it must have been enough to bring her within the scope of Alexander
III’s decrees. Juan Sams had got as far as getting engaged to a
woman who is named in the petition. However, he wanted something
to show the ignorant that he could go ahead and marry her
validly. This is yet another scenario of how Alexander III’s judgment
might be applied in practice.
It should be clear from the above that non-consummation cases
were di·erent socially, as well as legally, from impotence cases. The
legal di·erence was in itself profound. Where permanent impotence
could be established, the marriage would be annulled. That