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Divorce
and women's rights
GROUNDS
FOR DIVORCE - PROPERTY SETTLEMENTS
PLEASE
NOTE: THIS PAGE CONTAINS ADULT THEMES
Grounds
for divorce
Medieval marriages could, and were, dissolved. Annulments took place before
the courts and were expensive. One of the most common reasons cited for
divorce was consanguinity; the close relations by blood or marriage of
the intended parties.
 Other
grounds for the dissolution of a marriage also included adultery, leprosy
and impotency. The failure by a husband to render his wife her marriage
debt was taken quite seriously, as it was believed that a woman needed
regular sexual intercourse for her emotional and physical well-being.
The humors which would build up inside her if she was denied what was
her due could lead to madness and hysteria. Interestingly, failure to
supply a male heir was not grounds for divorce, as it was clear that God
willed the father a daughter instead of a son, and to divorce for such
a reason was to imply that the husband was against God's plan.
Thomas of Chobham devised a method to determine if a husband was truly
unable to render his marriage debt and was absolutely impotent. He approved
a physical examination of the man's genitals by 'wise matrons', followed
by a bedroom trial:
'after food and drink, the man and the
woman are to be placed together in one bed and wise women are to be
summoned around the bed for many nights. And if the man's member is
found to be useless and as if dead, the couple are well to be separated.
There are documented court cases
in both 1292 at Canterbury and 1433 in York where wise women testified
against the husband in cases such as this.
Property settlements
The status and rights of medieval women during the dissolution of marriage
differed from period to period. Anglo-saxon women in England, should they
have been married for seven years before the marriage dissolved, had a
great deal of property settlement owing to them, but the laws were very
specific as to what was hers and what remained with her husband. The laws
of Hywel Dda are examined by Henrietta Leyser in her book Medieval
Women: A Social History of Women in England 450-1500 thus:
Pigs go to the man, sheep to the woman.
Eldest and youngest son to the father, middle son to the mother. Milking
vessels, except one pail, to the woman. All drinking vessels to the
man. The man gets the hens and one cat. The woman gets all the flax
and linseed and wool, all the opened vessels of butter and the opened
cheese and as much as she can carry of flour by the strength of her
own hands and her knees from the larder to the house. The bedclothes
which are over them to the woman and those which are under them to the
man, until he takes a wife. After he takes a wife, they belong to the
woman. If the wife who comes to the husband sleeps on them, she must
pay compensation to the first wife.
The status of women changed
around 1066 and new laws affected the way property was divided after a
marriage breakdown.
Copyright
© Rosalie Gilbert
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Gilbert unless stated.
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