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Indissolubility 79
lation of church councils was not unanimous against divorce and
remarriage: the Council of Angers in 453 permitted men to remarry
and the Council of Vannes (465) accepted it apparently for
either husband or wife if adultery was demonstrated. In the following
century the opposition of the Church to divorce was limp
and in 506 the Council of Agde admitted the principle. The early
penitentials—a curious genre whose influence and setting in life
are not easy to determine—are rigorous but ‘in the seventh century
Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury, allowed divorce on
grounds of adultery, desire to enter religion, desertion for five years,
the reduction of either partner to slavery, or the wife’s abduction
into captivity’.
If churchmen were not of one voice in condemning divorce, we
should not expect greater rigour from lay authorities and do not
find it. According to P. L. Reynolds, the law codes of the Germanic
successor states ‘contain remarkably little on the subject of
the dissolution of marriage’, but this ‘may be due to the ease with
which persons (especially men) could dissolve their marriages’.
For women, divorce after a properly formalized marriage may have
become harder than in Roman times (ibid. 99–100). ‘If an unfortunate
Burgundian woman attempted to divorce her husband
she was to be smothered in mire.’ Possibly it was easier in early
ciet›a altomedievale (2 vols.; Settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi sull’alto
medieoevo, 24; Spoleto, 1977), ii. 603–30, esp. 623–6; J.-A. McNamara and S. F.
Wemple, ‘Marriage and Divorce in the Frankish Kingdom’, in S. M. Stuard (ed.),
Women in Medieval Society (Philadelphia, 1976), 96–124; J. Gaudemet, ‘Deuxi›eme
partie: les incertitudes du haut Moyen ^Age’, in id., Le Mariage en Occident: les
m¥urs et le droit (Paris, 1987), 93–132; R. Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir dans le monde
franc (VIIe–Xe si›ecle): essai d’anthropologie sociale (Paris, 1995), 277–85; and A. Esmyol,
Geliebte oder Ehefrau: Konkubinen im fr•uhen Mittelalter (Beihefte zum Archiv
f•ur Kulturgeschichte, 52; Cologne etc., 2002). The main thesis of the last-named
work is to expose as a myth the idea of a type of marriage (‘Friedelehe’) between
‘Muntehe’ on the one hand (where a free woman passed from her family’s control
to her husband’s with a corresponding property transaction) and concubinage on
the other: which would normally be between a free man and an unfree woman, so
that a free woman’s status was drastically diminished if she entered into such a
union.
McNamara and Wemple, ‘Marriage and Divorce in the Frankish Kingdom’,
97–8. Ibid. 100.
P. Sta·ord, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers: The King’s Wife in the Early
Middle Ages (London, 1983; repr. London etc., 1998), 80.
Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, 99.
McNamara and Wemple, ‘Marriage and Divorce in the Frankish Kingdom’,
100.