Conclusion

The relatively easy access to legal institutions in towns like Ghent gave citizens welcome opportunities to defend their rights. By mapping out the aftermath of a private abduction settlement, this chapter shows that age and gender were aspects of legal culture, especially concerning the question of who had access to courts, who used the law and local customs, by what means and to what ends.

The dispute about our couple’s wedding gifts and inheritance reveals Ghent’s sophisticated legal culture, in which litigious actions within competing kin groups could drag on for years. Indeed, this case shows multiple alternating litigants who regularly referred back to earlier promises and actions made by the counterparty. This reveals a remarkable degree of consciousness about such matters’ legal validity and shows that young people were able to operate within the patriarchal structures of their time by using the law to their advantage. It is certain that wealthy citizens like Gertrude and Jan Van Formelis made full use of the opportunities that Ghent’s legal system offered to them. Both Gertrude and Jan stubbornly sued their parents and their in-laws to rid themselves of stipulations that they considered to be unfavourable. Although neither one was rebelling against the existing marriage pattern that favoured mighty parents who prioritised their political and economic goals when they chose spouses for their children, both manoeuvred within the system to oppose their parents’ will. The clandestine marriage of Jan and Gertrude may have been motivated by a desire to resist their parents’ will, or even by love.

The advantageous rights enjoyed by citizens in towns such as Ghent made them active participants in marriage negotiations, inheritance settlements and distributions of property within families. Our fifteenth-century Ghent heroine, Gertrude, appears to have been a relatively independent woman who negotiated tenaciously over marriage and property, sometimes for her own sake, sometimes on behalf of her husband. Clearly, she and her husband were well informed about local custom, which they actively applied in practice in order to make the best of a difficult situation. Studying the economic activities of married women in Ghent, Shennan Hutton has demonstrated that their legal capability in actual practice derived from the property they inherited from their families of origin, Ghent’s property custom and widespread acceptance of women’s public performance of property management, both with and without their husbands.⁵⁴ To that we may add that matrimonial policies and judicial actions in the afterlife of marriage arrangements also belonged to the woman’s domain, at least for the woman in this study. Others must verify if this was a widespread pattern, or if it was truly an exception in what is generally considered to be a father’s world.