Urged the proud steed, and couch'd the extended lance;
He, whose dread prowess with resistless force,
Bless'd, as the golden guerdon of his toils, Bow'd to the Beauty, and receiv'd her smiles:"
At a time when the legitimate eldest son of a great lord would inherit not only his father 's wealth but also his polygamy, the cuckolding of such lords was sport indeed: Tristan expected to inherit the kingdom of his uncle, King Mark, in Cornwall. While in Ireland he ignored the attentions of the beautiful Isolde until she was summoned by King Mark to be his wife. Panic-struck at the thought of losing his inheritance but determined to save it at least for his son, he suddenly took an enormous interest in Isolde. Or at least so Laura Betzig retells the old story: 54
Betzig's analysis of medieval history includes the idea that the begetting of wealthy heirs was the principal cause of Church-state controversies: A series of connected events occurred in the tenth century or thereabouts: The power of kings declined and the power of local feudal lords increased. As a consequence, noblemen gradually became more concerned with producing legitimate heirs to succeed to their titles, as the seigneurial system of primogeni-MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN
::: 241 :::
ture was established. They divorced barren wives and left all to the firstborn son. Meanwhile, resurgent Christianity conquered its rivals to become the dominant religion of northern Europe: The early Church was obsessively interested in matters of marriage, divorce, polygamy, adultery, and incest. Moreover, in the tenth century the Church began to recruit its monks and priests from among the aristocracy:"
The Church 's obsessions with sexual matters were very different from St: Paul' s: It had little to say about polygamy or the begetting of many bastards, although both were commonplace and against doctrine. Instead, it concentrated on three things: first, divorce, remarriage, and adoption; second, wet nursing, and sex during periods when the liturgy demanded abstinence; and third,
" incest" between people married to within seven canonical degrees: In all three cases the Church seems to have been trying to prevent lords from siring legitimate heirs: If a man obeyed the doctrines of the Church in the year 1100, he could not divorce a barren wife, he certainly could not remarry while she lived, and he could not adopt an heir: His wife could not give her baby daughter to a wet nurse and be ready to bear another in the hope of its being a son, and he could not make love to his wife "for three weeks at Easter, four weeks at Christmas, and one to seven weeks at Pentecost; plus Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays—days for penance or sermons; plus miscellaneous feast days:" He also could not bear a legitimate heir by any woman closer than a seventh cousin—which excluded most noble women within three hundred miles: It all adds up to a sustained attack by the Church on the siring of heirs, and
" it was not until the Church started to fill up with the younger brothers of men of state that the struggle over inheritance—over marriage—between them began." Individuals in the Church (disinherited younger sons) were manipulating sexual mores to increase the Church 's own wealth or even regain property and titles for themselves: Henry VIII ' s dissolution of the monasteries, following his break with Rome, which followed Rome ' s disapproval of his divorcing the sonless Catherine of Aragon, is a sort of parable for the whole history of Church-state relations."
::: 242 :::
The Red Queen
Indeed, the Church-state controversy was just one of many historical instances of wealth-concentration disputes. The practice of primogeniture was a good way to keep wealth—and its polygamy potential—intact through the generations: But there were other ways, too: First among them was marriage itself. Marrying an heiress was always the quickest way to wealth: Of course, strategic marriage and primogeniture work against each other: If women inherit no wealth, then there is nothing to be gained from marrying a rich man ' s daughter: Among the royal dynasties of Europe, though, in most of which women could inherit thrones (in default of male heirs), eligible marriages were often possible: Eleanor of Aquitaine brought Britain 's kings a large chunk of France. The War of the Spanish Succession was fought solely to prevent a French king from inheriting the throne of Spain as the result of a strategic marriage: Right down to the Edwardian practice of English aristocrats marrying the daughters of American robber barons, the alliances of great families have been a force to concentrate wealth.
Another way, practiced commonly among slave-owning dynasties in the American South, was to keep marriage within the family: Nancy Wilmsen Thornhill of the University of New Mexico has shown how in such families more often than not men married their first cousins: By tracing the genealogies of four southern families, she found that fully half of all marriages involved kin or sister exchange (two brothers marrying two sisters): By contrast, in northern families at the same time, only 6 percent of marriages involved kin: What makes this result especially intriguing is that Thornhill had predicted it before she found it: Wealth concentration works better for land, whose value depends on its scarcity, than for business fortunes, which are made and lost in many families in paralleclass="underline" "
Thornhill went on to argue that just as some people have an incentive to use marriage to concentrate wealth, so other people have an incentive to prevent them from doing exactly that. And kings, in particular, have both the incentive and the power to achieve their wishes: This explains an otherwise puzzling fact: that prohibitions on "incestuous " marriages between cousins are fierce and numerous in some societies and absent in others: In every case MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN
::: 243 ::•
it is the more highly stratified society that most regulates marriage.
Among the Trumai of Brazil, an egalitarian people, marriage between cousins is merely frowned upon: Among the Maasai of East Africa. who have considerable disparities of wealth, such marriage is punished with "a severe flogging: " Among the Inca people, anybody having the temerity to marry a female relative (widely defined) had his eyes gouged out and was cut into quarters: The emperor was, of course, an exception: His queen was his full sister, and Pachacuti began a tradition of marrying all his half sisters as welclass="underline" Thornhill concludes that these rules had nothing to do with incest but were all about rulers trying to prevent wealth concentration by families other than their own; they usually excepted themselves from such laws: 58
DARWINIAN HISTORY
This kind of science goes by the name of Darwinian history, and it has been greeted with predictable ridicule by real historians. For them, wealth concentration requires no further explanation: For Darwinians, it must once have been (or must still be) the means to a reproductive end: No other currency counts in natural selection.
When we study sage grouse or elephant seals in their natural habitat, we can be fairly sure that they are striving to maximize their long-term reproductive success. But it is much more difficult to make the same claim for human beings: People strive for something, certainly, but it is usually money or power or security or happiness. The fact that they do not translate these into babies is raised as evidence against the whole evolutionary approach to human affairs.59 But the claim of evolutionists is not that these measures of success are today the tickets to reproductive success but that they once were. Indeed, to a surprising extent they still are: Successful men remarry more frequently and more widely than unsuccessful ones, and even with contraception preventing this from being turned into reproductive success, rich people still have as many or more babies as poor people.`°