On 1 July 1433 the schepenen or aldermen of Ghent (the main city in the county of Flanders) reached a verdict in a remarkable case.
They declared that Simon van Formelis was not liable in the complaint of his eldest son Jan, who had asked his father to pay 50 pounds groten (the local currency). Jan was in urgent need of cash because of the debts he had contracted for his wedding party, and therefore he asked his father to fulfil an earlier promise.
Shortly before, Jan had abducted Gertrude of Strépy, the daughter of Jan of Oostkerke (a nobleman from the duchy of Brabant), whom he had married without the consent of his father or the bride’s parents. Simon recognised that he had promised to pay an annuity as a marriage gift shortly after he was informed about the abduction, because he felt �with heartfelt grief’ (met herteleet) that he had to compensate for the dishonour his son had inflicted upon his father-in-law when Jan married his daughter. However, Simon put forward that he had never definitively promised to pay the annual sum because his son did not appear after Simon had repeatedly asked Jan to discuss the precise conditions of the payment. While the aldermen of Ghent agreed with Simon on this line of reasoning, they also did justice to Jan. He was allowed to ask his father for a generous wedding gift, although Simon was not obliged to pay him 50 pounds groten immediately because Jan had been reluctant to make a definite agreement about it.1 The makeshift decision solved the conflict, though in the end it would take father and son three months to discuss the marriage settlement. More than 18 years would pass before the aldermen pronounced a final verdict in the case. The documents from all this litigation form the evidence of this paper.This chapter will explore urban cultures of law through the example of conflicts concerning marriage. We will show how children (like Jan) could enlarge their scopes of action by refusing the role of being only an object of familial marriage strategies, but also how they used the legal system in order to achieve personal goals.
Historians rarely hear the voices of children when they are reconstructing the history of marriage. As the main method of settling conflicts between households, maintaining the family patrimony and extending the power of a lineage, marriage has long been approached by historians as a strategy of parents and extended families to overcome the uncertainties of life. The patrimonial concerns mattered especially to socio-economic elites, to which the families in our case belonged. In reality, therefore, weddings were more rational than they were emotional. Scholarship has tended to consider sons and especially daughters to be �victims’ of the family’s marriage plans. For example, Claude Lévi-Strauss in his famous �Elementary structures of kinship’ argued that girls were an �object of exchange’ in the negotiations between parents over marriage, though others have contested his claim because of its universal nature.2 In his essay �Matrimonial strategies’, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu also described the �structural victims’ (victimes structurales) of marriage policies: younger sons as chess pawns and daughters as toys without volition in the marriage market.3 Martha Howell called this �trade endogamy’: families married within the same trade in order to secure business relationships and stabilise property.4 Yet Howell and many others have nuanced the representation of medieval marriage practices studied by Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu and their followers; future spouses did have a say, they were richly endowed and sometimes they were �accomplices’ in the negotiations preceding marriage. In Ghent, for instance, it was customary to take the wishes of the future couple into account when the marriage settlement was discussed, though certainly the bride could not take a leading role. Families, particularly the father of the household, decided upon the partner, the marriage gift and the future inheritance.5 Parenthood, family relationships and matrimonial strategies were not solid structures, but could be negotiated.6 Following this logic, the marriage of Jan van Formelis and his charge against his father would be brave assaults on the well-established norms and expectations of matrimonial arrangements.Yet, was Jan’s resistance successful? Recalcitrant children could try to prevent marriage to someone chosen by their parents through a clandestine marriage to a partner of their choice. As we will see, urban elites promulgated bylaws that punished such practices severely. There is some evidence of young men who resisted against forced marriages by refusing to go through with their parents’ marital plans.7 The Ghent case of 1433 demonstrates that the arsenal deployed by unwilling grooms and brides to resist their parents’ will included not only refusal and clandestine marriage but also judicial strategies. As Daniel Smail has concluded, citizens were increasingly �consuming’ justice when they were angry rather than resorting to violence; in the later middle ages, citizens �notarised’ their enmities by legal process in court.8 A detailed study of Jan and Gertrude’s amorous adventures and juridical perils gives us access to such legal strategies used by �structural victims’ to negotiate the marriage conditions determined by their respective families. Using remarkable, little-known sources, the private contracts and dispute settlements of Jan and Gertrude, we will demonstrate that both brides and grooms took matters to court if they felt victimised by their families. Even though their lawsuits were not always successful, the main actors in our case did have the power to contest the marriage contracts arranged by their parents. The favourable legal position of women in the urban society of the Low Countries gave them opportunities to navigate social and legal structures, but at the same time the relative wealth and the prominent social position of the main actors determined their access to justice. The urban setting in itself is also an important factor, because the customs and bylaws of Ghent gave citizens the rights and judicial means to bring such cases to court. Thus, it will be argued that the legal culture of cities created an advantageous environment for citizens to solve marital and inheritance conflicts in a peaceful way.
More on the topic On 1 July 1433 the schepenen or aldermen of Ghent (the main city in the county of Flanders) reached a verdict in a remarkable case.:
- On 1 July 1433 the schepenen or aldermen of Ghent (the main city in the county of Flanders) reached a verdict in a remarkable case.
- Armstrong Jackson (ed.). Cultures of Law in Urban Northern Europe: Scotland and Its Neighbours, 1350-1650. Routledge,2020. — 304 p., 2020