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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 1999-03 > 0920474760


From: <Michelle.Murphy%>
Subject: Catherine of Valois / Jeanne of Brittany / Medieval marriage
Date: Wed, 03 Mar 1999 16:26 +0100 (BST)


>Marriage certificates as we would understand them were not regularly issued in
>the Middle Ages, Michelle. It was not an era in which most people could have
>read one.

snip...

>Jeanne was b. 24 Jan. 1391 and died 20 Sept. 1433. Her marriage contract is
>dated in Sept 1396, though obviously she could not have lived as the duke's
>wife before 1403, when she turned 12, the Church's minimum age for conjugal
>life.

Is the contract you refer to the actual agreement or treaty between her father
and the Duke of Brittany, or is it a marriage certificate? Was a marriage
certificate common among royalty, in such alliance-founded marriages?

Are there any known incidences from the middle ages of anyone contravening the
minimum age law (not that I can imagine for a moment why any man would want to
have marital relations with a wife aged under 12 years old!)

> it could also betoken that sufficient means of oral proof--the
>witnesses--were available to convince Henry VI and his council that there
>had been a valid marriage, clandestine or otherwise. Cardinal Beaufort would
>have had canonical authority to make that determination on the spot.

So witnesses would simply have gone before the Council, and Cardinal Beaufort
could officially declare a marriage legal or valid? If he, as arbitrer, refused
to do so, would it generally be taken that no marriage existed, because the
testimony of the witnesses was unreliable?

Also, given that there are quite extensive records of Council activities during
Henry VI's reign, is it reasonable to assert that if an enquiry was made into
the validity of an alleged marriage involving the Queen's late mother, it would
not have been reported either as Council business or by chroniclers at the time?
If even the incident of the dancing ladies whose bosoms were uncovered was
recorded for posterity, I'm a little surprised that a scandalous inquiry into
Catherine's alleged marriage would not have been mentioned.

Also, would it have been in Cardinal Beaufort's interests to declare the
marriage legal? What personal involvement, if any, did Humphrey Duke of
Gloucester have in Owen's arrest? I believe that it was Gloucester's men who
made the arrest. Could it be suggested, then, that Beaufort would have
validated the marriage because it ran contrary to Gloucester's interests?

>It should also be possible to determine if Henry V at any time summoned the
>duke and duchess of Brittany to him, as for his wedding to Catherine, but I
>don't know if he did. It certainly would have been a politic move for him.

Is there no record of who was present at the marriage ceremony and the
festivities afterwards? I think we have information on who was present at the
festivities when Henry took Catherine back to England for the first time e.g.
King James of Scotland was present.

>Rouse speculates, from the "wasted" appearance of her funeral effigy in
>Westminster Abbey--generally acknowledged to have come from a death mask--that
>it was cancer. But we'll never know.

Yes, I did notice that she appears extraordinarily thin - although a neck of
that length (if accurate) would not be due to illness. I suppose that would
have given her a graceful appearance which might have contributed to reports
that she was a beauty.

Would consumption have had the same "wasting" effect on a sufferer's body?

>I don't know if anyone has
>tried to track down other cases of madness in Charles VI's family. His mother,
>Jeanne de Bourbon, had also experienced periods of madness and if memory
>serves, she died during one of them.

I'd be very interested to know if any of Charles VI's children, or their
immediate family, suffered from madness. I mean, it's definitely suggestive
that Joan of Bourbon suffered from madness, as did her son Charles VI. The
malady then apparently skipped a generation and then surfaced again in
Catherine's son Henry VI.

With madness appearing in three such close generations like that, it has to be
very possible that either Catherine herself suffered from some effects of the
malady, or that some of her siblings did. Charles VI's brother Louis Duke of
Orleans doesn't seem to have shown any signs of inherited madness, apart from
his bad taste in allegedly having an affair with his sister-in-law, Isabeau!

>or those
>that received the daughters of Llywelyn and David of Wales in 1284.

I take it that it's conclusive that none of David's daughters ever left the
convents and had issue? I know that his two sons Owain and Llywelyn were
imprisoned, and died in prison (one of them in early childhood) and that
Gwenllian, daughter of LLywelyn ap Gruffydd and Eleanor de Montfort, died in
Sempringham Convent in 1337.

thanks,

Michelle

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