Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2009
In the study of popular culture, the significance of gifts and tokens in the making of marriage has not been given the attention it deserves. The surviving artefacts alone merit closer examination and the role of such objects in dramatic and pictorial representations has yet to be adequately explored. If their full social and symbolic importance is to be understood, however, a close examination is necessary of acts of giving in precisely defined historical contexts. The richly detailed evidence of ecclesiastical depositions surviving for the diocese of Canterbury permits just such an examination. This evidence provides examples from rural communities in woodland, downland, marshland and lowland pays in Kent to the south and east of the River Medway, and shows their connections with local towns. And among these, the case of Divers v. Williams provides unusually extensive information.
2. Causes of ‘jactitation of matrimony’, although less common, were often directly associated with the more familiar type of spousal suits which were contested; Ingram, Martin, Church Courts, Sex amd Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 191.Google Scholar Matrimonial litigation was at times further complicated by the interests and claims of other relevant parties; in this case, Jerman Seliborne. See Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library, Canterbury (hereafter C.C.A.L.), MS. X.11.3, ff. 18–20. The following account of the case of Divers v. Williams has been pieced together from the depositions, loose cause papers, and act books: C.C.A.L., MSS. X. 11. 5, ff. 223–5, 233v.–4, 248v.–9, 258 and v.; J/J 3, 37 and 38; Y.3.15, f. 271v., Y.3.2, f. 42.
3. It has been shown that the prime concern in most matrimonial causes lay in enforcing an alleged contract. It was inevitably the ‘clandestine’, unsolemnised marriages which were most vulnerable and disposed to contention; a phenomenon accounted for by the survival of traditional, secular practices, and ‘difficulties of proof and interpretation’. Such characteristic suits apparently experienced a long–term decline between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the trend more rapidly manifested in N. France: Helmholz, Richard H., Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 25–6, 30–4, 166–8Google Scholar; Houlbrooke, Ralph A., Church Courts and the People During the English Reformation, 1520–1570 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 55–6, 66Google Scholar; Houlbrooke, R., ‘The making of marriage in mid-Tudor England: evidence from the records of matrimonial contract litigation’, Journal of Family History 10 (1985), 339–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ingram, , Church Courts, pp. 189, 192–6, 206Google Scholar; Donahue, C. Jr, ‘The policy of Alexander the Third's consent theory of marriage’, in Kuttner, S. (ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law (Rome, 1976), pp. 260–1Google Scholar; Donahue, C. Jr., ‘The canon law on the formation of marriage and social practice in the later middle ages’, Journal of Family History 8 (1983), 144–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The early sixteenth century may, however, have been exceptional. Matrimonial suits tended to increase again after 1500 in the diocese of Canterbury. See Woodcock, Brian L., Medieval Ecclesiastical Courts in the Diocese of Canterbury (London, 1952), pp. 82–5, 109–10.Google Scholar
4. Donahue, , ‘Policy of Alexander III’, p. 261Google Scholar, considers the problem of historical interpretation where the records are incomplete, assuming a possible disparity between legal principles and social conditions. Helmholz, , Marriage Litigation, pp. 128–9Google Scholar, concluded however that court procedure was such that the medieval judge was probably no more enlightened than the modern historian.
5. It should be stressed that the survival of an exceptional document does not necessarily imply that the social circumstances themselves were unique. Indeed the argument of this paper will be to suggest the contrary. Furthermore, if depositions are regarded as incomplete summaries of social facts and conditions, it is equally possible to infer that the accounts in the fourth article of gifts exchanged, were likewise incomplete.
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160. Seen. 58.
161. C.C.A.L., MS. X.10.7, ff. 187 and v., (1567).
162. See n. 85.
163. C.C.A.L., MS. X.I 1.3, f. 5v., Alcocke v. Hordes, (1598)Google Scholar; Ibid., MS. Y.3.2, f. 66.
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