Two Weddings and a Lawsuit: Marriage Litigation in Fourteenth-Century Portugal

Abstract

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.

Bad Cases and Worse Lawyers: Patterns of Legal Expertise in Medieval Portuguese Court Records, c. 1200–1400

“…22 Proctors had to be retained to represent the parties at the curia or before the judges delegate appointed to hear and determine the case (see, inter alia, Linehan, 1979 andSchwarz, 2016), and their salaries must be paid out promptly, lest they deliberately obstruct proceedings at their end in retaliation, which is precisely what happened in 1338 to the abbess of Santa Clara of Coimbra and her proctor at the audientia litterarum contradictarum in Avignon. 23 But it is ultimately thanks to the clerical bustle-the procuring of copies of court proceedings, the copying out of title deeds and witness depositions, the safekeeping of papal rescripts relevant to a case-that was sparked off by petitions made directly to the papal curia or by the decision to appeal to it against a sentence from a lower judge that a great deal of the extant records of legal practice from Portuguese ecclesiastical courts in the 13th and 14th centuries was preserved (see, for example, Branco, 2006 and2018;Vitória, 2016).…”