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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 1999-03 > 0920487259


From: John Carmi Parsons <>
Subject: Re: Catherine of Valois / Jeanne of Brittany / Medieval marriage
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 13:54:19 -0500 (EST)


Comments interspersed below.

On Wed, 3 Mar 1999 Michelle.Murphy% wrote:

>>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?

The contract would have been the formal official record of the agreement
touching the marriage, sealed between the king of France and the duke of
Brittany. It would not be regarded as a marriage certificate per se because
again it was a secular document that essentially dealt with an alliance
between secular princes that was to be cemented by a marriage. Marriage
itself was, again, a sacrament and was regulated only by the Church.

Apart from notices in chronicles and other narratives sources, marriage
certificates as we would understand them were not used in the Middle Ages;
as I posted earlier, they were generally issued by the Church only when
some dispute had arisen after the fact about the validity of a particular
union. Royal and aristocratic marriages were commonly celebrated with
great ceremony and with crowds of witnesses; it was upon the testimony of
such witnesses, if later required, that proof of the marriage's validity
would rest.

> 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!)

Doubtless some people did see to it that their children married when
canonically underage; most often this happened to secure the wife's
inheritance for her husband. There were, however, very great risks here. In
one case known to me, Hugh Despenser the Younger in England, trying to attach
his family to as many aristocratic houses as possible, compelled the earl of
Arundel's young heir to marry Hugh's daughter when both were young children.
The earl was later easily able to have the marriage annulled by the Church,
and its issue bastardised, on the grounds that he had been forced to marry
when not of lawful age to give his consent. So a marriage solemnized under
such conditions might ultimately be undone and an inheritance, or political
influence, lost.

I discuss the problem of the age of aristocratic brides in the Middle Ages,
and the age at which they actually undertook conjugal relations, in my article,
"Mothers, Daughters, Marriage, Power: Some Plantagenet Evidence, 1150-1500,"
in *Medieval Queenship*, ed. John C. Parsons (New York, 1993).

>> 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.

It would depend entirely on the circumstances as the individuals concerned
interpreted them. The inquiry would not necessarily have had to take place
before the full council formally assembled, only a few members as the more
powerful lords cared to summon them--remember, this would not have been a
secular proceding, but an ecclesiastical one since the Church alone could
declare the validity of a marriage. If the inquiry did not take place in a
formal session of the council, there would not have been formal record of it.
It would, I think, be quite understandable that the king and lords would want
to assure themselves about such a delicate matter without necessarily having
all the details become public knowledge; Henry's subsequent beneficence to his
half-brothers would offer eloquent enough testimony to his acceptance of his
second family as legitimate.

> 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?

Cardinal Beaufort was the bitter political enemy of Duke Humphrey, who in 1437
was the heir-presumptive should Henry VI die without issue--or should
sufficient doubts be raised about Henry VI's legitimacy to justify removing
him from the throne. (His lack of resemblance, either physically or in
character, to his father would later, given medieval beliefs on human
generation, also raise questions about his paternity.) It does appear to have
been Humphrey who first "went after" Catherine and Owen, quite possibly in the
hope that if Catherine's relationship to Owen could be proved illicit (i.e.,
no wedding) then it might be argued that her moral laxity as a widow mirrored
her moral laxity as Henry V's wife--in other words, if she had borne OOW
children as a widow, she might also have deceived Henry V and presented him
with somebody else's son. Were Henry VI to be deposed on such grounds, bingo--
God Save King Humphrey. Hence Humphrey's interest in the legitimacy of her
children by Owen, and presumably the Cardinal's (and the king's) interest too.

This, I submit again, would have been a prime consideration in Catherine's
thinking as to whether or not she should marry Owen.

>>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.

There very probably is such information, though in what quantity I don't know
because I haven't looked for it.

>>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?

Quite possibly. Given artistic standards at the time and the artist's ability
or lack thereof, the length of the neck of Catherine's effigy can't be readily
explained. Just possibly the length was needed because the effigy was
displayed lying on top of the coffin, with the head usually on two pillows;
so the neck would have had to be carved in such way as to make the head look
natural in that position, and also as to make the face visible to observers.

>>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!

There does exist a book written early in this century with a title something
like *Pathologie mentale des rois de France*, which may deal with the
questions you raise. However I know from experience it is not easy to come by
and you'd have to be up on your French to get through it.

>>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.

To my knowledge none of the daughters ever made it out of their convents. It
was long suspected that Gwenllian was even kept ignorant of her high birth,
but a letter has been discovered in which she as an adult, identifying herself
very explicitly, seeks arrears in a pension that had been granted her by the
crown when she was a child. Her cousins, David's daughters, are an obscure
lot--I don't even think we know any of their names.

John Parsons

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