Contexts of Marriage in Medieval England: Evidence from the King's Court circa 1300

In medieval England, as in the rest of Christian Europe, marriages contracted privately and solely by the exchange of words of present consent — something like “I here take you as my legitimate wife [husband]” — were considered binding even without consummation from the late twelfth century. Such marriages would be enforced by the ecclesiastical courts, even if the enforcement required a divorce between a man and woman solemnly married in church. Such a divorce, of course, was never a divorce in the modern sense, but rather an annulment, a judicial declaration that since one of the parties to that church ceremony had already been married, the ecclesiastical ceremony had not produced a marriage at all. The original, privately contracted marriage stood in full force. The moral problems faced by the ecclesiastical courts in such matters were substantial; the problems presented for the king's court, particularly in matters relating to property rights, were no less so.