WEDDINGS AND FUNERALS IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE

"In the great hall there was much merry-making, each one contributing what he could to the entertainment: one jumps, another tumbles, another does magic; there is story-telling, singing, whistling, playing on the harp, the rote, the fiddle, the flute and pipe, singing and dancing. At the wedding that day everything was done which can give joy. Not a wicket or a gate was left closed; but the exits and entrances all stood ajar, so that no one, poor or rich, was turned away". —CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES in "Eric et Enide"

Marriage in the thirteenth century normally unites people of the same class. But social mobility is present here as in all times. Marriages joining prosperous burgher families with the petty nobility are not uncommon. Marriage is also an avenue for an artisan to make his fortune; an alliance with a rich widow may mean a house in town, a stock of clothing belonging to the late husband, furniture, silver, and real estate.

Arranged marriages are the rule, but the Church emphasizes consent. Its preachers heap scorn on marriages based exclusively on financial considerations. “One might as well publish the banns of Lord Such-and-Such with the purse of Madame So-and-So, and on the day of the wedding lead to the church not the fiancée but her money or her cows,” says the sharp-tongued Paris preacher Jacques de Vitry. By Church law, a bride must be at least twelve, a bridegroom fourteen. Consanguinity is taboo; bride and groom cannot be related in the fourth degree (until the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 it was the seventh). The expression of the free accord of the two parties is the most important feature of the marriage ritual.

Marriages are recognized between slaves, between freemen and serfs, between Catholics and heretics, or Catholics and excommunicants, but not between Christians and heathens, since the latter have not been baptized. Until the Fourth Lateran Council, marriage between an adulterer who became free to marry and his fellow-sinner was prohibited, as was marriage between an abductor and a victim he later set free; now both are permitted.

Divorce (annulment) is rare. It is only permitted on the grounds that the union has broken one of the Church’s three laws on marriage—age, consent, and consanguinity. The intricacies of consanguinity sometimes provide a loophole toward annulment for the rich and powerful, but even they cannot easily get away with fraudulent claims. King Philip Augustus ran afoul of the Church when he sought to get rid of his Danish wife, and finally had to take her back.

Marriages, at least those of the wealthy classes, have a legal as well as religious basis, with a contract drawn up by the notary specifying the bride’s dowry. The son and daughter of wealthy burghers may start life with a house, one or two small farm properties, some cash, and the rent from a house in town. The contract may also specify what property will be the bride’s after her husband’s death; if it does not, she automatically inherits one-third of his worldly goods.

After the contract is drawn up, the next step is the betrothal, a religious ceremony of a solemnity approaching that of marriage itself. In fact, the similarity of the vows exchanged to those of the marriage ceremony gives rise to an awkward difficulty that results in many suits in the ecclesiastical courts. The Church emphasizes the distinction between these “words of the future” spoken at the betrothal and the “words of the present” that will be said at the wedding, but sometimes couples consider themselves married when they are no more than betrothed, converting an engagement into a clandestine marriage, which one party may later find easy to dissolve.

The priest asks the prospective groom, “Do you promise that you will take this woman to wife, if the Holy Church consents?” He addresses the girl similarly. The couple exchange rings, and the banns are published on three successive Sundays. Weddings cannot take place during Advent and the twelve days of Christmas, or during Lent, or between Ascension Sunday and the week of Pentecost.

On the day of the wedding, the bride’s mother and sisters and some of her friends help her to dress. There is no special bridal costume. She simply wears her best clothes: her finest linen chemise; her best silk tunic, trimmed with fur, perhaps with a velvet surcoat over it, embroidered with gold thread; and a mantle edged with gold lace. On her head a small veil is held by a narrow gold band; on her feet are shoes of fine leather, worked with gold.

The groom is also dressed in his best. As they ride to church, a little troop of jongleurs precedes them, playing on flute, viol, harp, and bagpipe. Behind ride parents and relatives and the other wedding guests. All along the way crowds gather to watch. In the square in front of the church everyone dismounts, and the priest steps out under the portico, carrying an open book and also the wedding ring.

He interrogates the couple: Are they of age? Do they swear that they are not within the forbidden degree of consanguinity? Do their parents consent? Have the banns been published? Finally, do they themselves both freely consent? Taking each other’s right hand they repeat their vows.

The priest delivers a short homily. A typical example, by Henri of Provins, dwells on religious education of children, domestic peace, and mutual fidelity. Henri observes that at the moment of the Flood, the Lord by preference saved married creatures; that if the blessed Virgin, the Queen of Paradise, had not been married God would not have been born from her womb; and that conjugal life represents a model of felicity in this world.

The priest blesses the ring; the groom takes it and slips it in turn on each of three fingers of the bride’s left hand, saying, “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Finally he fits it onto her third finger, saying, “With this ring I thee wed.”

Alms are distributed by the bride and groom to the poor who have collected outside the portico, and the wedding party enters the church. At this point, some ten years before in Dijon, a moneylender met with disaster at his wedding when one of the sculptures on the portico—a stone figure of a usurer in a Last Judgment scene—fell and struck him a fatal blow on the head with its purse. His relatives and friends obtained permission to demolish the other sculptures on the portico.

By their exchange of promises, the young couple are married. After the nuptial mass, the groom receives the Kiss of Peace from the priest and transmits it to his bride. They leave the church, remount their horses, and the procession returns to the bride’s home, again led by the little troop of minstrels.

A wedding feast in a wealthy burgher’s household is gargantuan, with wine by the barrel, legs of beef, mutton, veal and venison, capons, ducklings, chicken, rabbits, wafers from the wafer maker, spices, confections, oranges, apples, cheese, dozens of eggs, perhaps a boar’s head or a swan in its plumage. An array of extra servants is hired for the day—porters, cooks, waiters, carvers, stewards, a sergeant to guard the door, a chaplet maker to prepare garlands.

Jongleurs accompany the successive courses with music, and as soon as the spiced wine, wafers, and fruit are served the entertainment begins. It starts off with handsprings, tumbles, and other acrobatics. Imitations of bird calls, sleight-of-hand tricks, and a juggling act are likely to be on the program. Interspersed are singers who accompany themselves on two musical inventions of the Middle Ages: the six-stringed, pear-shaped lute, which is plucked, or the five-stringed viol, the first bowed instrument. Both are tuned in fourths and fifths, the accompaniment following the tune either in unison or at intervals of an octave or a fifth, sometimes with a drone note (a repeated tone with unchanging pitch) in the bass.

The professional entertainment over, tables are dismantled and guests join hands to dance and sing carols, accompanied by lute and viol, or perhaps by a tabor-pipe and tabor—a small flute played with the left hand and a light tambourine-like drum played with the right; sometimes the tabor is fastened to the player’s shoulder and he uses his own head as a drumstick.

At suppertime the tables are set up again, for more food, more wine, more music. At Vespers the priest arrives, and the guests accompany the young couple to their house. The priest blesses the new hearth, the chamber, and the nuptial bed, and gives his blessing again to bride and groom. The bride’s mother has taken care to search the bed to make sure that no ill-wisher has secreted anything there that may impede conjugal relations, such as two halves of an acorn or granulated beans.

The celebration is usually over in the morning, but a really big wedding can go on for days. One such wedding, described in a romance called Flamenca, lasted “several weeks.” The streets were decorated with tapestries, spices burned in all the squares of the town; “five hundred sets of clothes, of purple decorated with gold leaf, a thousand lances, a thousand shields, a thousand swords, a thousand hauberks and a thousand chargers” were prepared as gifts for the wedding guests. The wedding cortege was “several leagues long.” “Two hundred jongleurs” fiddled while the guests danced, and story tellers recounted the tales of “Priam, Helen, Ulysses, Hector, Achilles, Dido and Aeneas, Lavinia, Polynices, Tydee and Eteocles, Alexander, Cadmus, Jason, Dedalus and Icarus, Narcissus, Pluto and Orpheus, Hero and Leander, David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, Julius Caesar, the Round Table, Charlemagne and Oliver of Verdun.” The festivities were “as delightful as Paradise.”

Like marriage, death has its ritual. For a well-to-do burgher the most important task in preparation for departure from this world is the disposition of his property. The Church strongly advises not only making a will in plenty of time, but giving in advance the endowments that will speed the donor through purgatory. The preacher Henri of Provins tells the story of a man dining at the house of a friend, who sends a servant to light his way home so that he will not stumble and fall in the mud. If the servant carries the lantern behind the guest’s back, says Henri, it will not prevent him from stumbling or falling. Thus it is with alms: If you keep them to distribute after your death, your lantern will be carried behind your back. Henri to the contrary notwithstanding, many burghers like to hang on to their wealth till the last possible moment.

That moment is extreme unction, after which the Church considers a man as good as dead. A sick man who recovers after receiving it must fast perpetually, go barefoot, and never again have intercourse with his wife. In some places he cannot even amend his will.

A dying man in particular fear of hell, because he is pious or guilty, may express his penitence by having himself laid on the ground on a hair cloth sprinkled with ashes. Louis IX, given up by the doctors, adopted this practice and discoursed so eloquently on the insubstantiality of this world’s wealth and power that he drew tears from his audience—and then recovered to go on a Crusade. Prince Henry of England, son of Henry II, after tying a rope around his neck and having himself dragged to his bed of ashes, where gravestones were placed at his head and feet, also recovered.

When a burgher dies, a public crier is hired to announce his death and the hour and place of burial. The doors of the house and of the death chamber are draped with black serge. Two monks from the abbey wash the body with perfumed water, anoint it with balsam and ointment, and encase it in a linen shroud; then they sew it in a  deerskin and deposit it in a wooden coffin. Draped in a black pall, the coffin is placed on a bier consisting of two poles with wooden crosspieces and taken to the church, attended by a cortege of clergy and black-clad mourners, the widow and family making loud and visible lament. The bier halts outside the chancel gates (if the dead man is a priest, the body is laid out within the chancel), and the Mourning Office is said—the “Dirge,” from Dirige, the first word of the first antiphon. When the mass is over, the priest removes his chasuble, censes the body and sprinkles it with holy water, says the Lord’s Prayer, in which all join; then he pronounces the Absolutions, a series of prayers and antiphons of forgiveness and deliverance from judgment.

As the cortege proceeds to the church burial grounds, monks from the abbey lead the way with crosses, sacred books and thuribles, and mourners follow with candles. The latter are numerous, for the poor can earn alms by carrying candles in a rich man’s funeral procession. When the place of burial is reached, the priest makes the sign of the cross over the grave, sprinkles it with holy water, and digs a shallow trench in the shape of the cross. The real grave-digging is then done to the accompaniment of psalms. The wooden coffin is lowered, the final collect for forgiveness said, the grave filled in, and a flat tombstone laid. (Those who cannot afford coffins rent one, and the remains are buried without the coffin.)

The procession returns to the church, singing the Seven Penitential Psalms. For a time the tomb will be lighted with candles and a funeral lamp. In a few years the bones may be lifted out of the grave and stacked, so that the space can be used again.

By Joseph and Frances Gies in "Life in a Medieval City", Harper-Collins, USA, 2010. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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