This chapter explores how politics and private interest affected the anticorruption apparatus gradually put in place by French, English and Portuguese kings between 1250 and 1500. This apparatus was comprised of judicial prosecution and procedures for appointing and replacing officials, rules defining the duties and duration of office, improved record-keeping and accounting practices and mechanisms for administrative supervision. The chapter also argues that these royal regimes were structurally incapable of punishing and restraining corruption effectively and in a sustained manner, essentially because they could not control political society directly and because political constraints and their dependence on informal service often made a strict approach to corruption injudicious. Late medieval states, therefore, were confronted with the dilemma of having to fight corruption with inadequate means and without unduly disturbing the social and political equilibrium on which their authority depended.

Based on one of the few surviving records of marriage cases brought before ecclesiastical courts in fourteenth-century Portugal, this article offers a rare glimpse of marriage practice in a small village in a remote corner of Western Europe and the complex ties that bound its inhabitants and which secular and ecclesiastical authorities sought to regulate. Clear parallels can be drawn with the patterns of marriage litigation observed in England and Northern France, but evidence also suggests that royal legislation played an important part in the resolution of marital disputes and in the shaping of conjugal behaviour.

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This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Open Library of Humanities, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities.