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Authentication of Marital Status: A Thirteenth-Century English Royal Annulment Process and Late Medieval Cases from the Papal Penitentiary*
University of College London
At all levels of later medieval society people went to the trouble of obtaining papal documents proving that possible past marriages were not genuine. One example is an enormous papal bull which archives the documents on the road to annulment of Henry III of England's putative first marriage, which all involved must surely have known to be invalid. A similar impulse led individuals to obtain documents from the Apostolic Penitentiary. None of the cases discussed were contested. They were not dissolutions of marriages that had ever definitively existed even de facto. The aim was to lay to rest rumours and to kill any possible suspicion that there had been a marriage, in order to make a present or future one more secure. The facts become explicable in the light of some more general observations on the marriage system between the Fourth Lateran Council and the Council of Trent. Since consent was enough to make a valid marriage, it could be hard to know for sure whether or not a marriage had taken place. Yet it mattered, for legitimacy and inheritance were affected, as well as respectability. To get a document from the papacy to say that one had not been married was an ad hoc solution, though the general problem was not systematically resoved in Catholic Europe until Trent made marriage in Church necessary for validity.