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Indissolubility 83
of course fit the same trend, but there is no clear-cut direction:
not long afterwards we find Charles the Bald making his son Louis
the Stammerer divorce his wife Ansgard and marry a Burgundian
noblewoman named Adelaide. As we shall see, royal marriages
continued to be very breakable after the Carolingian era.
The secular and church legislation also sent mixed signals. It
may or may not seem paradoxical that Charlemagne legislated in
favour of indissolubility. Under his successor, in 829, a council
at Paris said that for a cuckolded husband to remarry was another
adultery. On the other hand, the council of Compi›egne in 757
permitted divorce in the modern sense of allowing remarriage.
It is the same story with the penitentials. The Jesuit scholar Joyce
even thought that a penitential tradition deriving from Theodore,
the Greek archbishop of Canterbury, was responsible for a growing
tolerance for divorce. Joyce was an impressive historian but
almost certainly wrong on this point: he surely underestimated the
prevalence of divorce with remarriage before Theodore. But still,
a very soft line on indissolubility is characteristic of penitentials
from around 700. On the other hand, some late penitentials were
more supportive of indissolubility.
Mixed signals came even from Rome. On the one hand, two
mid-eighth-century popes were strongly for indissolubility. A letter
of Pope Zachary to Pippin took a hard line. His successor
Nelson, Charles the Bald, 232; Sta·ord, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 75.
Bishops gathered by Charlemagne at Friuli ruled that adultery did not end a
marriage, and ‘This legislation was later incorporated into the Capitulary to the
Missi in 802 extending it to the whole empire’ (McNamara and Wemple, ‘Marriage
and Divorce in the Frankish Kingdom’, 104). The Admonitio Generalis of 789
contained an indissolubility canon deriving from the Dionysio-Hadriana canonlaw
collection which had been sent by the pope in 774: Fahrner, Geschichte des
Unaufl•oslichkeitsprinzips und der vollkommenen Scheidung der Ehe, 82.
McNamara and Wemple, ‘Marriage and Divorce in the Frankish Kingdom’,
105.
Ibid. 103; J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (Oxford, 1983), 171;
Sta·ord, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 80. See also Fahrner, Geschichte des
Unaufl•oslichkeitsprinzips und der vollkommenen Scheidung der Ehe, 75–7.
G. H. Joyce, Christian Marriage: An Historical and Doctrinal Study (London
etc., 1933), 337–41.
Gaudemet, Le Mariage en Occident, 132; P. Daudet, ‹Etudes sur l’histoire de
la juridiction matrimoniale: les origines carolingiennes de la comp‹etence exclusive de
l’ ‹Eglise — France et Germanie (Paris, 1933), 62–4.
Gaudemet, Le mariage en Occident, 132; Daudet, ‹Etudes sur l’histoire de la
juridiction matrimoniale, 64.
Gaudemet, Le Mariage en Occident, 120 (note the error of ixE for viiiE); McNa-