Concubinage and Nonmarital Sex

Alexander III and his successors shared their predecessors’ ambiguity toward concubinage among the laity. Indeed Alexander’s marriage formation doctrine made it more difficult to distinguish clandestine marriage from simple con­cubinage.

Alexander III was determined to penalize men who deserted their wives in order to take up with a mistress. Such men, he declared, must be forced to take back their legitimate wives and treat them with marital affection. But diffi­culties sometimes arose when a man claimed that he had exchanged informal marital consent with his mistress prior to his public marriage to another spouse. Under those circumstances a court might hold that the publicly married wife was a concubine and the apparent mistress was a legitimate wife.^[1325]

Late twelfth-century popes were generally conservative in dealing with non- marital sex.^{[1326] [1327] The law in this area was reasonably clear, but measures for enforc­ing it were so poorly developed and ineffective that many people remained un­aware, for example, that simple fornication was an offense.[1328] Prostitution was likewise little affected by decretal legislation. Popes and other churchmen in this period did not attempt to repress prostitution (which they had apparently concluded was a hopeless task), but rather aimed to make it easier for women to leave the trade, either through marriage or entrance into religion.[1329] In conse­quence religious houses and even whole orders dedicated to the reform of pros­titutes thrived during these decades.[1330]}