Appendix 2 Marriage Law and the Economic Interests of the Medieval Church

Jack Goody’s thesis that the medieval Church’s control over marriage enhanced its economic power is only partly consistent with the evidence.¹ The Church’s policy of promoting exogamy and discouraging endogamy through the rules concerning consanguinity had the effect of breaking up closely held concentra­tions of real property; this was a major reason why the law on consanguineous marriage generated resistance among the propertied classes.

The almost total disappearance in medieval Europe of adoption as a strategy for supplying childless couples with a means to assure their family’s existence and to preserve the continuity of their property holdings seems to support Goody’s argument.³ His supposition that ecclesiastical opposition to concubin­age, either among the clergy or the laity was consistent and effective, however, finds little foundation in the evidence. There was no formal prohibition of lay concubinage until the sixteenth century and, although the canons certainly dis­couraged the practice, they did not flatly forbid it.⁴ Further, the disadvan­tages visited upon illegitimate children, with respect to both inheritance and other matters, originated primarily in secular, rather than ecclesiastical, law. If concubinage was, as Goody argues, inimical to the economic interests of the Church, then the Church was not particularly successful in defending this as­pect of its property interests.⁵

The Church’s defense of its economic interests did not, in fact, always reach

¹Goody, Development of the Family, pp. 154-56.

²Ibid. pp. 134-46.

³Ibid. pp. 68-84.

⁴5 Lateran Council (1514), Constitution Supernae dispositionis, in COD, p. 599; see above pp. 514-17, as against Goody, Development of the Family, pp. 75-81.

⁵Goody, Development of the Family, pp. 75-81, 134; but see above, pp. 543-44, as well as Brundage, “Concubinage and Marriage,” pp. 1-17.

Marriage Law and Economic Interests

a high level of effectiveness. The strenuous efforts that the eleventh-century reformers had to make in order to recover property that the Church had lost to lay owners testified eloquently to this. Goody’s conclusion that ecclesiastical marriage policies resulted in substantial numbers of families in any given gen­eration being left without legitimate male heirs may be correct, but the figure of forty percent that he proposes as an estimate of the proportional frequency of this result is difficult to test.^[2154]