Reflecting this general lack of sentimentality toward matrimony, it’s not surprising that European Christians married privately, in their own homes, in their everyday clothing. The big romantic white weddings that we now think of as “traditional” didn’t come into being until the nineteenth century-not until a teenaged Queen Victoria walked down the aisle in a fluffy white gown, thereby setting a fashion trend that has never gone out of style since. Before that, though, your average European wedding day wasn’t all that much different from any other day of the week. Couples exchanged vows in impromptu ceremonies that generally lasted only a few moments. Witnesses became important on wedding days only so that later there would be no argument in the courts as to whether or not this couple had really consented to marriage-a vital question when money, land, or children were at stake. The reason the courts were involved at all was only in the interest of upholding a certain degree of social order. As the historian Nancy Cott has put it, “marriage prescribed duties and dispensed privileges,” distributing clear roles and responsibilities among the citizenry.
For the most part, this is still true in modern Western society. Even today, pretty much the only things the law cares about when it comes to your marriage are your money, your property, and your offspring. Granted, your priest, your rabbi, your neighbors, or your parents may have other ideas about marriage, but in the eyes of modern secular law, the only reason marriage matters is that two people have come together and produced something in their union (children, assets, businesses, debts), and these things all need to be managed so that civil society can proceed in a methodical fashion and governments will not be stuck with the messy business of raising abandoned babies or supporting bankrupted ex-spouses.
When I began divorce proceedings in 2002, for instance, the judge had no interest whatsoever in myself or my then-husband as emotional or moral beings. She didn’t care about our sentimental grievances or our shattered hearts or any holy vows that may or may not have been broken. She certainly didn’t care about our mortal souls. What she cared about was the deed to our house and who was going to hold it. She cared about our taxes. She cared about the six months remaining on our car’s lease, and who would be obligated to make the monthly payments. She cared about who had the rights to my future book royalties. If we’d had any children together (which we did not have, mercifully), the judge would’ve cared very much about who was obligated to provide for their schooling and medical care and housing and babysitting. Thus-through the power invested in her by the State of New York-she kept our little corner of civil society tidy and organized. In so doing, that judge in the year 2002 was hearkening back to a medieval understanding of marriage: namely, that this is a civil/secular affair, not a religious/moral one. Her rulings would not have been out of place in a tenth-century European courtroom.
To me, though, the most striking feature of these early European marriages (and divorces, I should add) was their looseness. People got married for economic and personal reasons, but they also separated for economic and personal reasons-and fairly easily, compared to what would soon come. Civil society back then seemed to understand that, while human hearts make many promises, human minds can change. And business deals can change, too. In medieval Germany, the courts even went so far as to create two different kinds of legal marriage: Muntehe, a heavily binding permanent life contract, and Friedelehe, which basically translates as “marriage-lite”-a more casual living arrangement between two consenting adults which took no account whatsoever of dowry requirements or inheritance law, and which could be dissolved by either party at any time.
By the thirteenth century, though, all that looseness was about to change because the church got involved in the business of matrimony again-or rather, for the first time. The utopian dreams of early Christianity were long over. Church fathers were no longer monkish scholars intent on re-creating heaven on earth, but were now mighty political figures very much invested in controlling their growing empire. One of the biggest administrative challenges the church now faced was managing the European royalty, whose marriages and divorces often made and broke political alliances in ways that were not always agreeable to various popes.
In the year 1215, then, the church took control of matrimony forever, laying down rigid new edicts about what would henceforth constitute legitimate marriage. Before 1215, a spoken vow between two consenting adults had always been considered contract enough in the eyes of the law, but the church now insisted that this was unacceptable. The new dogma declared: “We absolutely prohibit clandestine marriages.” (Translation: We absolutely prohibit any marriage that takes place behind our backs.) Any prince or aristocrat who now dared to marry against the wishes of the church could suddenly find himself excommunicated, and those restrictions trickled down to the common classes as well. Just to further tighten controls, Pope Innocent III now forbade divorce under any circumstances-except in cases of church-sanctioned annulments, which were often used as tools of empire building or empire busting.
Marriage, once a secular institution monitored by families and civil courts, now became a stringently religious affair, monitored by celibate priests. Moreover, the church’s strict new prohibitions against divorce turned marriage into a life sentence-something it had never really been before, not even in ancient Hebrew society. And divorce remained illegal in Europe until the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII brought back the custom in grand style. But for about two centuries there-and for much longer in countries that remained Catholic after the Protestant Reformation-unhappy couples no longer had any legal escape from their marriages should things go wrong.
In the end, it must be said that these limitations made life far more difficult for women than for men. At least men were allowed to look for love or sex outside their marriages, but ladies had no such socially condoned outlet. Women of rank were especially locked into their nuptial vows, expected to make do with whatever and whoever had been foisted upon them. (Peasants could both select and abandon their spouses with a little more freedom, but in the upper classes-with so much wealth at stake-there was simply no room for any give.) Girls from important families could find themselves shipped off in midadolescence to countries where they might not even speak the language, left there forever to wither in the domain of some random husband. One such English teenager, describing the plans for her upcoming arranged marriage, wrote mournfully about making “daily preparations for my journey to Hell.”
To further enforce controls over wealth management and stabilization, courts all across Europe were now seriously upholding the legal notion of coverture-that is, the belief that a woman’s individual civil existence is erased the moment she marries. Under this system, a wife effectively becomes “covered” by her husband and no longer has any legal rights of her own, nor can she hold any personal property. Coverture was initially a French legal notion, but it spread handily across Europe and soon became entrenched deep in English Common Law. Even as late as the nineteenth century, the British judge Lord William Blackstone was still defending the essence of coverture in his courtroom, insisting that a married woman did not really exist as a legal entity. “The very being of the woman,” Blackstone wrote, “is suspended during marriage.” For that reason, Blackstone ruled, a husband cannot share assets with his wife even if he wanted to-not even if those assets were once technically the woman’s property. A man cannot grant anything to his wife, for doing so would presuppose “her separate existence” from him-and such a thing was clearly impossible.