As I noted before, marriage as a sacrament required the free consent of both parties. It doesn't count as a sacrament if you're forced to do something against your will. Families and powerful neighbors might exercise powerful suasion, but medieval marriages all started from the assumption that both parties, the man and the woman, had agreed to it. (They did not have same-sex marriages.) Marriage thus was a constant impediment to any attempt to establish a thoroughly patriarchal society.
Still, families with political agendas would try to make sure that their children agreed to marry who they were supposed to. Betrothals of children to other children could cement an alliance. In such a case the girl was often sent to live with the family into which she was expected to marry, to learn the customs of the region (and the language in some cases), and to grow up with the boy who, it was hoped, would be her childhood best friend as well as future spouse.
People lower on the social scale had more freedom to pick out their own spouse than did members of the high aristocracy. But anyone who determinedly said No would be supported by the priests. The church generally thought that parents should guide their children in the correct path, but forcing someone's will was never acceptable.
As this suggests, in spite of all the official talk about how a woman was supposed to be subservient to her husband (a lot of it with biblical backing), couples recognized that the wife had a great deal of free exercise of will within a marriage. There are plenty of examples of wives "disobeying" their husbands, and even more of men being guided by sound wifely advice. Couples normally shared a bed, both for intimacy and to keep warm at night, and wives were often described as giving their husbands useful advice as they snuggled down.
In practice, husbands and wives needed each other. If a great lord was going to be away (say on Crusade), the normal practice was for his wife to run the castle in his absence. She would have been familiar with what was required to do because of having been involved in it since the beginning of their marriage. Much of running a castle was a woman's prerogative anyway, so she just expanded what she was doing.
For peasants, farming chores really worked better with two adults (as any modern farmer will tell you), and a woman had to know how to plow, cultivate, harvest, and take care of the animals as well as to cook and sew and raise the children. Among merchant and artisan families in towns, husband and wife typically worked as partners, and widows of guild masters could become masters themselves.
Married couples were assumed to love each other, even if they had not known each other very well before the wedding. The physical consummation of their union was quite literally portrayed as making love, intensifying their emotional ties to each other. Letters from Crusaders writing back home to their wives are full of terms of endearment and statements of how much they missed their wives. In practice, a certain number of wives accompanied their husbands on these expeditions, if there was someone else to keep the home place running in their absence.
Marriage was still oriented more toward the husband and his family than toward the wife, however. Husbands with concubines were treated relatively indulgently in the early Middle Ages (though by the twelfth century this was increasingly frowned upon), but a wife with lovers was shocking and horrible. A new couple would typically move to the man's house (or castle or country, depending on social status). If a husband died, and the wife remarried, she would typically leave her children behind to be raised by her late husband's family.
A lot of widowed people of both sexes, however, never remarried. A widower with young children might find it expedient to do so, and a young woman still of child-bearing age would be sought after. But a lot of people who became single, either through death of a spouse or through divorce, just decided to stay single. One could enter the church as a monk or nun or just carry on in the world.
A good recent book on medieval marriage is by Elisabeth van Houts, Married Life in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2019).
© C. Dale Brittain 2019
For more on married life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.
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