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Gender and Authority of Oral Witnesses in Europe (800–1300)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Elisabeth van Houts
Elisabeth van Houts
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Extract

Between 1068 and 1070 an extraordinary dispute was settled at Bonneville-sur-Touques in Normandy. Duke William, who had recently become king of England, and his wife Matilda, heard the story of a contested property at Bayeux which centred on the identity of a rented child. The story goes as follows. A man called Stephen had married a widow called Oringa by whom he had a small son (puerulus) who lived only a short while. When the boy died, Oringa substituted for him, without her husband's knowledge, the son of a woman called Ulburga at Martragny (Calvados, c. Creully), to whom she paid an annual sum of 100 solidi. Stephen made the boy his heir and left him his property. When first Oringa and then Stephen died, the boy's natural mother emerged and demanded rent from the couple's surprised relatives. The family refused to pay and Ulberga turned to Duke William and his wife Matilda. Having heard die case Duke William, in consultation with Archbishop John of Rouen, Roger of Beaumont and others, decided that an ordeal of the hot iron would be die most appropriate way to establish the truth. William and Matilda sent their chaplain Rainald to Bayeux to organise the ordeal, which took place in the monastery of Saint-Vigor in the presence of Rainald himself, two named archdeacons, Robert Insule and his wife Albereda, Euremarus of Bayeux and many otfier good men (meliores homines) of Bayeux. Ulburga emerged unscathed from the ordeal by fire and therefore her son was returned to her.

Type
Oral History, Memory and Written Tradition
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 9 , December 1999 , pp. 201 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1999

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References

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70 See above, p. 212.

71 Bedos-Rezak, B., Form and Order in Medieval France. Studies in Social and Quantitative Sigillography (Aldershot, 1993), IX, 61–82, at 65–67Google Scholar for the relative large number of noble and non-noble Norman women to have possessed seals.

72 I should like to acknowledge my gratitutude to Coady, C. A. J. for the inspiration provided by his book Testimony. A Philosophical Study (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar.