Oath Helpers

 People in the Middle Ages totally believed in the rule of law.  They were not always sure what the law was, and often they seemed to be making it up as they went along, but they believed at least as much as do modern people in doing things in a lawful manner.  Even though modern laws in the West grew directly out of medieval legal practice, there are plenty of differences.

One of the best examples of this is oath helpers.  Most discussions of guilt and innocence, of who did what to whom, turned as they did today on witness testimony and physical evidence.  But how to tell if someone was actually telling the truth?

As I have discussed previously, someone's truthfulness might be tested by ordeal, that is that they would swear to something and grasp a red-hot iron as proof of their veracity.  If the burn healed up as it should, they were indeed telling the truth.  Understandably, most people would prefer to be proven to be truthful by less extreme means.  Indeed, more people threatened to undertake trial by ordeal than actually went through with it.  (In some ways it was a bluff, saying "I'm so certain I'm innocent that I'll accept a horrible burn to prove it," forcing the other side to start to doubt their accusations.)

An alternate method was to gather oath helpers.  These fidejussores as they were known in medieval Latin would swear to the truthfulness of someone else's oath.  They were not witnesses, as they need not have any insights into what had happened, and they were not even character witnesses, as they were not expected to say (for example) that the accused was an affectionate husband and father who wouldn't hurt a fly.  Instead they swore oaths that someone else's oath was true.

So someone accused of (say) murder would swear on holy relics that they had never touched the victim.  Everyone would watch to see if he started frothing at the mouth and falling down.  If he didn't, he would provide oath helpers who would similarly swear.  Six or twelve men (or some different number, it wasn't absolute) would swear that this oath was true.  If any of them gasped and choked and fell down while trying to swear falsely, guilt would be pretty well established (pending of course further discussion, medieval judgments always required a big discussion).

But even if the accused managed to get all his oath helpers to swear to his own oath's veracity, he was not necessarily found "not guilty."  Part of any trial was "what everyone knew."  If the accused was, in everyone's mind, clearly the murderer (in this example), then they'd keep going.  They might require an ordeal, with further oaths from the fidejussores.  They might have a combat or dunk the accused in water.  Best of all, they might find that the knife stuck in the victim's throat was the accused's own distinctive knife.

When someone ultimately found guilty was to be punished,  all his oath helpers were also punished.  In the stories they were sometimes hung, although that was probably an extremely rare outcome.  But being an oath helper was a serious business, as the fidejussor knew that if the person whose oath he was helping actually was guilty, he himself would be punished, by the court or by God.

(In the "Court Scar" series I've written with my husband, we include several examples of legal judgments that carry the plot along, based on real medieval events.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval law, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Courtship

 Courtship, as the name implies, is something that is done at court.  We are talking here not about a law court but about a king's or great lord's court, where he (or she) would gather all their powerful men and women around them.  Now in fact a law court and an aristocratic court were essentially the same thing in the Middle Ages, as the great lords were the law-givers, but let's focus on courtship for now.

At its most basic courtship meant making a case to a powerful person that one's position should be supported.  There might be only a small difference between asking for a grant of property as a favor (in return, of course though probably unsaid explicitly, for loyalty) and asking for a favorable ruling in a legal case.  All great lords were surrounded by petitioners, and the lords' wives often in effect had their own courts, with petitioners of their own.  Someone who feared a duke might not look kindly on their petition would start with the duchess, in the hope that if he could persuade her, she might persuade her husband.

In a broader sense, "courtship" applies to men seeking the affection and favor of women.  Women were petitioned for their love in the same way that a petitioner might ask a count for the revenue from a toll bridge.  We in fact still use the term courtship in that way, asking for a woman's love, even though the idea of sweet-talking a great lord into making one gifts has fallen by the wayside.  As scholars have recently demonstrated, women, especially aristocratic women, had a great deal of authority in the Middle Ages, so such courting made sense.

At a great lord's court a number of young people might be assembled, some hoping to rise in the world through association with the powerful, some there as hostages for a parent's good behavior.  With few responsibilities day to day, these young men and women enjoyed hunting and hawking, playing games like chess, and especially having romantic entanglements.  As a student of mine once said, like college without the muss and fuss of going to class.

The women gave every sign of having had a blast.  They could act coy, or allow an embrace, or give way to jealousy, or have secret trysts, or gossip mercilessly.  Because the men were asking for anything from a sweet smile to a kiss to a whole lot more, they were in a subservient position, the humble petitioner, making gifts in the hopes of winning that smile (or something more).  Women at the court of Champagne in the twelfth century made up a whole lot of arbitrary rules for the men to follow (which has led some scholars who ought to know better to suggest that there were clear mandates for "courtly love" throughout the Middle Ages).

Financial transactions as a part of romance may seem odd to us today, but not to the wealthy who now routinely draw up pre-nuptial agreements.  Not just among the well to do young people at court, but among all of medieval society, marriage arrangements involved discussions about money.  There was the dowry to decide on, what the bride would bring to the marriage, and the dower, what would be settled on her if her husband died.  Potential inheritance and very cost of the wedding required discussion.  So a man of whatever status looking for a wife would engage in courtship that might begin with a gift of something like a ring or a puppy to engage the woman's affection but quickly became much more financially serious.

Such courting was not restricted to men looking for a wife.  The duchess being "courted" so that she would persuade her husband to grant someone a toll bridge would receive gifts and asked for her "love" as well as her agreement, such love not being actually romantic, though it used the same language, but rather something closer to a friendly business deal.

The single women found in many late medieval cities, running businesses or working in crafts and trades, would also be courted, by men looking not necessarily for a wife but for female companionship, of a variety of possible sorts.  The poverty in which many of these women lived could be alleviated by allowing men to court them -- as well as providing entertainment and friendship.  The January 2024 issue of the medieval studies journal Speculum has a good article about late medieval single women being courted in cities.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval women, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.