[36] Marriage was a most important and desirable milestone in the life of a medieval Castilian townswoman, but it was a weighty business. Contracting a valid marriage in the Middle Ages embraced a complex process rather than a single event. There was little uniformity in western Christendom as to how women and men ought to, or in fact did, wed, but three broad stages characterized the process, in Castile as elsewhere in Europe: consent of the couple to marry, and that of other people to marry them; betrothal or events surrounding the agreement to marry; and, finally, nuptial rites at the church. Georges Duby has proposed two 'models' of twelfth-century marriage based on two general conceptions of the institution, secular and ecclesiastical. ⁽¹⁾ In Castile municipal customs provide a perspective on secular matrimonial habits of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, while the Church's views can be found in canon law, theology, papal policy and rite. Duby's two models had different concerns, but at no time were they completely at odds with one another, nor were they entirely consistent within themselves, Thus customs differed from town to town just as canonists, theologians, popes and the composers of marriage liturgies held diverse views on marriage and its celebration. Moreover, the two viewpoints took notice of or were influenced by one another, so that municipal customs do not present a wholly secular conception of brides and matrimony but also incorporate principles which betray ecclesiastical concerns. These intertwining threads were both old and new. Some are indebted to old Hispanic doctrines and practices whose sources can he traced to the Hispana, the canon law book with the conciliar decrees of the fourth to seventh centuries, to Visigothic secular legislation, and to Hispanic liturgical rites of the tenth and eleventh centuries, especially those of the mid-eleventh-century codices of the Liber Ordinum. At other points more recent canonical, theological and [37] liturgical currents are discernible side by side with novel secular preoccupations. Quite naturally municipal legislators were more attentive to the contractual aspects of the union than to its canonical, spiritual or affective underpinnings when they set forth principles governing the manner in which a woman was to make the vital transition from girl to wife.

Intense ecclesiastical ferment about matrimonial procedures marked the period in which Castilian customs on the subject were developing. The Church was highly favourable to marriage and made its contraction relatively easy but its dissolution difficult. Although canonists and theologians approached the subject from different perspectives, they were in agreement that Christian marriage was a sacramental avenue of grace; that once contracted it was indissoluble except by death; and that all aspects of the process, save the property transactions involved, should be regulated by the Church. Claiming jurisdiction over marriage, the newly reformed Church of the twelfth century regarded secular interference with its definitions and regulations of the marriage bond as an intrusion on its authority to define and order the responsibilities of individual Christians. It sought, therefore, to eradicate secular customs which restricted the capability of men and women to choose their spouses independently of the preferences and self-interest of other persons. Debate on the validity of marriage thus centred first around the couple's explicit consent to marry one another, but the subject was of particular importance for women whose ability to choose their own husbands had always been more circumscribed than that of men. ⁽²⁾

The Church's increasing tendency to make consent the determining factor in establishing the validity and indissolubility of a marriage had direct bearing on its views of marriage rites. During the Late Empire and the centuries subsequent to the Germanic invasions the western Church had come to terms with secular practices which favoured two principal formalities in the contracting of marriage, the betrothal and the wedding. ⁽³⁾ The twelfth-century Church refined its conceptions of these events and their relative significance to the validity and indissolubility of marriage, but not without conflict. On the fundamental questions of how and when a couple wed, there were wide differences of opinion, especially as between canonists and theologians whose doctrines emerged in Gratian's Decretum (c. 1140) and Peter Lombard's Sententiae (after 1152), both of which had diverse repercussions in the towns of medieval Castile.

[38] Gratian, strongly influenced by earlier canonical precedents and secular custom, gave great weight to the betrothal which he viewed as an exchange of promises binding the man and woman irrevocably. The betrothal 'initiated' the marriage process and made inevitable its 'perfection' which was accomplished by consummation (copula carnalis) and, preferably although not indispensably, sacerdotal benediction. In contrast, Lombard elaborated the consensual aspects of marriage present in the writings of Augustine, Pope Nicolas I and Hugh of St Victor, and he propounded the view that the betrothal was simply a promise spoken in words in the future tense (per verba de futuro) to marry at a later date. An indissoluble marriage was contracted when words spoken in the present tense (per verba de praesenti) indicated the couple's intention henceforth to live together permanently in conjugal affection. Only this exchange of promises between a man and a woman, not the preliminary pledge to marry, constituted the indissoluble and sacramental union based on the consent of the man and woman who married. To Lombard consummation was of no relevance to the irrevocable words spoken in the present, and it did not transform into a valid marriage the promises to wed in future. Thus Lombard placed far less importance on the betrothal than did Gratian and none at all on sexual intercourse which many canonists, before and immediately after Gratian, stressed as a sign that the commitments of betrothal had become unalterably fixed, perfected and henceforth indissoluble. Despite these differences, canonists and theologians were in agreement that no specific ecclesiastical and ritual formalities for the betrothal and wedding were absolutely necessary for contracting marriage. Nevertheless individual leaders of opinion in the Church favoured certain rites, especially sacerdotal benediction, as part of the many different ecclesiastical ceremonies which accompanied and were construed as confirming the essential exchange of consent between the man and woman who married. ⁽⁴⁾

The theoretical controversy reached a temporary compromise in the last quarter of the twelfth century. Pope Alexander III stressed the necessity for consent only of the couple contracting the marriage and accepted Lombard's distinction between the promises made for the future and those expressing the binding commitments of husband and wife. By 1179 Pope Alexander, adding elements from Gratian's theory, came to the conclusion that the promise to marry in the future, when followed by intercourse, was as valid a marriage as one [39] contracted by Lombard's words spoken in the present tense. The papacy now accepted two ways of contracting marriage: betrothal followed by copula carnalis, and the exchange of binding promises to live together as man and wife. Like Gratian, the pope regarded betrothal, not as an engagement in the modern sense, but as an unconsummated marriage. Like Lombard, he viewed as revocable the verbal and other agreements made at betrothal, but now, in his opinion, they became unalterably binding when followed by intercourse. The late twelfth-century papacy emphasized the consensual aspects of both words and acts and saw neither way of contracting the valid and indissoluble union as requiring any specific liturgical or secular formalities. Cladestine marriages based only on the couple's exchange of consensual vows, even though contracted without a public celebration and lacking the participation of outsiders, family members or clergy, thus acquired full ecclesiastical recognition as valid and indissoluble unions during the last quarter of the twelfth century. Only at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 did the Church move to require an ecclesiastical wedding with explicit and public declarations of consent, to be preceded by banns in order to establish that no kin relationship or other impediments existed to invalidate the prospective marriage and to disseminate public knowledge of it. The council, however, did not invalidate clandestine marriages; it merely penalized the participants. Such marriages did not become invalid in canon law until the sixteenth century. ⁽⁵⁾ Thus, between the Decretum of Gratian and the Fourth Lateran Council, controversy and changes of direction characterized the position of the Church on the contracting of marriage. Since this era coincides with the period during which customary law on the subject was evolving and being recorded in León and Castile, it was bound to embody several contradictory currents, even without reference to its purely secular preoccupations.

In Iberia, unlike Italian and French regions, the manner in which the laity contracted marriage was not a major preoccupation of post-Gregorian churchmen. The surviving acts of the Castilian councils, much concerned with clerical discipline and jurisdictional disputes between bishops of reconstituted dioceses, betray a limited interest among the kings' ecclesiastical magnates in regulating marriage. The Council of León of 1114, held under the presidency of the metropolitan archbishop of Toledo, affirmed the indissolubility of lawful wedlock (legitimum conjugium), apparently in reference to the troubled [40] and part-time marriage of Queen Urraca and Alfonso I of Aragon, although its canon on marriage added that any persons marrying relatives should be separated or excommunicated. ⁽⁶⁾ Here the matter was dropped, so far as the conciliar records show. As for the papacy, its concerns in the central Peninsula were chiefly political and organizational rather than pastoral, while the hostility of the Castilian monarchy to papal intervention in ecclesiastical and secular affairs did little to encourage at Rome any plans to promote post-Gregorian conceptions of lay marriage at the parish or even diocesan level. These conditions did not bode well for radical changes in traditional ways of contracting marriage, nor for ecclesiastical control of the process during the twelfth century. Since canon law was more intensely studied than theology in Castilian schools and universities, it is logical to expect that the views of Gratian and the canonists, rather than those of Lombard and his followers, would have an appreciable impact on Castilian conceptions of marriage and the bride's role in the matters of consent, betrothal and wedding. ⁽⁷⁾ We shall begin, then, by examining the matter of consent as the basis of a valid marriage, next proceed to the characteristics of the Castilian betrothal and, finally, inspect customs which pertained to the concluding nuptials.

Hispanic canon law and Visigothic secular law had long affirmed that no unmarried woman or widow could be forced to marry against her will or that of her parents. ⁽⁸⁾ The customs of Toledo incorporated the earlier prohibitions in 1118, whence they passed into the fueros of many Andalusian towns. ⁽⁹⁾ All these texts stressed essentially the need to prevent coercion exercised by so-called 'powerful persons', indicating the usefulness of marriage in concluding an alliance, gaining wealth and influence, or achieving some other objective that would make a match desirable for parties other than the bride and her family. Although the Toledan tradition did not explicitly invalidate marriages contracted in contravention of the proscription, the Visigothic secular law of the Fuero Juzgo declared them null and void. There existed, then, a strong peninsular tradition against forcing women into marriages they opposed.

There is, of course, a vast difference between opposing coercion and requiring explicit consent, especially when the former was exercised from within rather than from outside the immediate family. The Visigothic tradition and municipal customs asserted repeatedly the necessity for family surveillance over a woman's choice of a husband. [41] This was not necessarily incompatible with Gratian's views since he accepted and advised paternal guidance as well as filial obedience in the marriages of children, especially daughters. His opinion was quite different from that of Lombard who, by the middle of the twelfth century, was asserting the radical and eventually prevailing view that a marriage contracted in defiance of parental wishes was indeed valid, and that only the consent of the man and woman being married was required to contract matrimony. Now all parental as well as wider family and secular coercion was rejected as unnecessary and indeed invalidating. Uncoerced consent, and that only of the woman and man who married, was necessary for lawful wedlock. It is against this line of reasoning that Hispanic traditions and customs must be evaluated. ⁽¹⁰⁾

In Spain as elsewhere the application of these revolutionary principles met with unmistakable resistance from secular custom. Leonese and Castilian fueros redacted before and after the Fourth Lateran Council regularly reaffirmed the requirement that a daughter's marriage be approved by parents and other relatives. Custom varied among towns and regions but, in general, a daughter's failure to obtain consent as specified at each town constituted rebellion: the daughter was punished for elopement by disinheritance or worse, and the unapproved husband outlawed as an abductor. Of the two ecclesiastical views, that of Gratian, who advised paternal guidance, represented a less serious threat to secular custom than did Lombard's and not all customs were out of step with Gratian's assumption that fathers did and should arrange their children's marriages, especially those of their daughters. This is evident in a late thirteenth-century sacramentary from Toledo which prefaced its marriage liturgy with seven canons from the Decretum, the first of which stipulated that a daughter was married by her father, although not without considering her views. ⁽¹¹⁾

Under Visigothic law and the Fuero Juzgo a girl's father was the person who ordinarily married his daughter to a man whose proposal he accepted. If the father were dead, this power to marry her (potestas de coniunctione), passed to the girl's mother, provided the latter remained a widow. When both parents were dead or the mother remarried, they were replaced by brothers of age, then an uncle, with the latter also succeeding to the post when the brothers were under age. Both brothers and uncle were required to consult unspecified relatives about the orphaned daughter's marriage. ⁽¹²⁾ While a son was [42] said to be married by his father or widowed mother, as a minor under twenty without parents he was merely advised to consult with relatives about his marriage and might even marry against their wishes. ⁽¹³⁾ These ancient consent laws constitute the basis of the arranged marriage in Spanish secular law. They may have assumed the assent of the bride and groom to a parent's choice of spouse, but they did not mention it. Above all, they required the involvement of persons other than the bride and groom, immediately placing the rules at odds with the innovative twelfth-century theological currents, although they were less radically opposed to Gratian's view that children, especially daughters, should respect a father's wishes in regard to a marriage partner. Certainly the authority of the brothers and uncle finds no place in canon law which, like twelfth-century theology, was moving in the direction of conceiving marriage as an agreement made between two persons, rather than an estate into which an individual man or woman was placed by someone else.

Many towns departed from Visigothic law in specifying the persons charged with approving a man's proposal to marry a municipal daughter. At twelfth-century Oviedo and later at Avilés in Asturias a request to marry a townswoman had to be addressed to her parents or associates (amigos), that is, to her current household. Here the town council assumed a role in the delivery of the endowment, as we shall see shortly, but the decision about the husband rested with the woman's parents or the persons with whom she lived. ⁽¹⁴⁾ At Cuenca and other towns in the Castilian Extremadura the participation of mothers together with fathers was a notable characteristic of the decision. The consent of both was necessary since, it has been argued, they acted as representatives of both sides of the bride's family, those two sets of relatives to whom a woman was related by blood and inheritance. ⁽¹⁵⁾ When both parents were alive, a girl's maternal kin could be expected to voice objections to a prospective groom through her mother and thus oblige her father to consider their interests. It is equally true that a mother and father who agreed on the bridegroom against the wishes of any of their relatives could make the decision. Thus custom attributed more clout to the bride's mother than under the more, patriarchal Visigothic system that prevailed in León, provided the father was still alive. The need for both parents' consent was an advantage to Castilian daughters since a girl could conceivably enlist her mother's support for or against a particular bridegroom. From the mother's point of view, it is plain that her [43] influence in deciding whom her daughter would marry, as in other matters affecting her own and her family's welfare, was immeasurably strengthened when she had continued to reside in her home town after marriage and had family allies to support her views.

The local importance of the mother, then, in addition to a girl's inheritance prospects, required that the interests of both families be considered before a municipal daughter wed. At Alcalá de Henares a heavy fine was levied against a widowed parent who had not consulted the deceased parent's relatives about a daughter's marriage. These unspecified in-laws could even go to a priest and demand that he not marry the couple. Sepúlveda acknowledged the need for the fine in such cases and noted the loss of 'friendship' between the two families of the girl. Here, however, criminal exile (enemistad) was an additional punishment for the offending widow or widower. The same penalties fell on an orphan's relatives at Coria and other Leonese towns, which, in adopting these Castilian customs, condemned a unilateral decision about her marriage by paternal or maternal kin. The daughter, it is said, might just as well have been killed. ⁽¹⁶⁾ Thus a girl's prospective marriage was thought to require the formal intervention of relatives other than her parents, especially when one or both of them were dead. The necessity for both sides of her family to have a voice in the matter, however, did not arise solely from their common interest in the woman as an heiress and a kinswoman. Municipal custom rarely demonstrated any concern, to say nothing of adopting special protections, for persons who were not local residents. Both families had to be consulted when both had firmly rooted and privileged households in the same town where the daughter lived. The weighty business of a municipal daughter's marriage obviously required the widest possible consultation among her local kinsmen, not solely on the grounds of blood and inheritance. The daughter's attractions for men, especially for those seeking the privileges of municipal residence, automatically engaged the concern primarily of her relatives who lived in the same town. During the Reconquest there were more rootless men than women on the loose, if not also on the run, and it was clearly necessary to protect townswomen and their local families against unscrupulous, incompetent or otherwise undesirable husbands who attempted to gain a foothold in established families and weasel their way into respectability by marriage to a daughter of the community.

Although the brothers of an orphaned townswoman took no official [44] role in municipal consent procedures, they were not unknown to block her marriage in their own interests. If they could prevent their sister from marrying and having children, they and their children would claim her share of family property. Regional customs from northern Castile allowed a woman to proclaim publicly in the vicinity of her town their greed and the injustice of refusing consent. She could then marry whom she pleased without the penalty of disinheritance. Similarly, Visigothic law and the Fuero Real permitted an orphaned sister to marry against her brothers' wishes, and without penalty, after they had turned down three separate proposals. These were sufficient to prove that the brothers had not refused the suitors in order to procure a better match for her, as they claimed, but to get their hands on her inheritance. ⁽¹⁷⁾ Otherwise a woman was obliged to obtain consent to marry from family members until she reached the advanced age of thirty, according to the Fuero Real, despite the view of Isidore of Seville, the seventh-century archbishop, who had held that women could be married anytime after menarche. ⁽¹⁸⁾ Given the matrimonial imperatives and the relative scarcity of women in a Reconquest town, there were strong pressures for women to marry in adolescence. No town ever set an age limit on consent, however, and thirty was hardly a turning point except as an age beyond the best childbearing years. If not wed by thirty and in the prescribed fashion, a daughter might easily have contrived to work out plans of her own, a possibility we shall examine later in some detail.

The municipal widow, like her Visigothic predecessor, was rarely bound by any consent requirements before she remarried. No towns restricted her freedom to choose a new husband, although a few advised her to consult with one or more of her relatives about her plans. ⁽¹⁹⁾ Unlike the daughter, however, she was not penalized for failure to obtain consent or advice. The widow of any age was considered an independent woman, and her freedom to remarry furnishes one example of her autonomy as a citizen with an established position as an adult. She was often a householder, if not also a, property owner, with responsibilities for children. If she had moved to the town with her husband, she was unlikely to have relatives there, or she might wish to move back to her previous home. Remarriage could also relieve her children of the need to support her. For various reasons, it was impractical to penalize a widow for failure to obtain consent to remarry, especially when the traditional punishment for disobedient daughters was disinheritance. Certainly [45] there was no attempt to dispossess a settled widow. She could become a valuable wife for another townsman, particularly for one who failed to qualify, as we shall see, for the more desirable virgin bride.

The timing, although not the fact, of the widow's remarriage remained something of a problem. Several towns, especially in León, exacted fines from the widow who remarried too quickly after her husband's death. This chastisement is rooted in Visigothic law which expressed concern about the paternity of children born to a recent widow and prescribed stiff penalties against those who remarried within the year. ⁽²⁰⁾ The municipal fine for a widow's hasty marriage has been linked with another amercement known as huesas or ossas, customarily required when a female tenant sought the consent of her lord to marry. The widows of the important Leonese town of Ledesma were fined huesas by the town for marrying within a year, but daughters and widows who were personal dependents of a lord here paid it to him when they sought or failed to obtain his consent to marry. ⁽²¹⁾ Elsewhere the huesas fine was primarily a rural tax and quite different from the fine for hasty remarriage although the former was commonly exacted, or at some settlements explicitly abolished, solely for a widow's marriage. It was a device which permitted a lord to control tenurial arrangements by deciding who could marry his female tenants. Since he had to give his consent, and could thus withhold it, he was able to prevent undesirable bridegrooms from marrying the women. This was especially necessary in the case of an established widow who owed him rent and labour services and whose new husband would also be obligated for them. The seignorial marriage tax, due primarily from peasant widows or excused on their behalf, seems to reflect their capability, greater than that of daughters, not only to marry whomever they pleased but also to desert tenures and their responsibilities to their landlords when they married. Abolition of all seignorial taxes on marriage, plainly stated at Palencia for instance, was usually a fundamental privilege of town residents, but municipal custom viewed with dismay the widow who ignored expected proprieties and restraint by marrying too soon and failing to observe the traditional year of mourning for her late husband. ⁽²²⁾

The necessity for a Castilian daughter to obtain from family members consent to marry rested largely on her function as an heiress of local capital, property in which close relatives from both sides of her family had an interest. Consistent with the need to protect the [46] propertied citizens of a town, consent to the municipal daughter's marriage was firmly rooted in her family and the property structure based on the municipal casa poblada, primarily that of her mother and father but extending to the households of other kinsmen who lived in the bride's town. In harmony with the tradition of opposing coercion by outsiders on the marriages of women, but in recognition of pressures that could be brought by members of her own family on the woman's consent to marry, Castilian townsmen of the thirteenth century condemned the practice of giving and taking bribes to obtain the highly desirable townswoman as a wife. ⁽²³⁾ While none of the prohibitions against such bribes, often in the form of slippers or hose, reveal the identity of the givers and takers, they demonstrate municipal resentment of venality in the consent process. Discrepancies in wealth were allowing rich bridegrooms to compete successfully and, it was thought, unjustly on the municipal marriage market, by suborning those members of a woman's family whom custom charged with marrying her. In short, coercion on the daughter from within her family, although never acknowledged explicitly as acceptable and contrary to the consensual union required by the Church, remained a real possibility. It is clear from the bribery charges that family control of daughters' marriages was not waning during the thirteenth century in spite of vigorous ecclesiastical assertions that a woman was free to choose her husband.

Once a daughter's family had accepted a man's petition to marry her, the couple became betrothed as esposa and esposo, or novia and novio. The chief business of the betrothal was to publicize the agreement to marry and confirm the economic foundations of the marriage. According to Visigothic law the betrothal took place before witnesses, usually parents and other relatives, and preferably within two years of the final nuptials. ⁽²⁴⁾ Before the twelfth century a separate ecclesiastical betrothal rite, traditionally requiring the participation of a priest, dignified the conclusion of the agreement, but later all ecclesiastical rites were postponed to the concluding nuptial celebration. ⁽²⁵⁾ According to the betrothal liturgy of the Liber Ordinum and diverse secular customs, the important visible signs of betrothal included an endowment charter or verbal commitment of property, especially by the groom, and the exchange of betrothal rings and a kiss. Of these, the first was by far the most important and meticulously considered matter. The hortatory Visigothic maxim that there should [47] be no marriage without endowment (Ne sine dote coniugium fiat) refers to a man's obligation to endow his betrothed, and it passed into ninth-century French canonical sources whence Gratian adopted it. The Decretum's requirement is included among the prefatory canons of the thirteenth-century sacramentary from Toledo and, although the Church eventually abandoned such endowment as necessary for a valid marriage, many canonists before and after Gratian favoured it to distinguish marriage from concubinage. ⁽²⁶⁾ The endowment (dos, pretium filiae, arrha) was popularly styled arras in peninsular usage, after the Latin name given to the pledges which a buyer of goods transferred to a seller in order to secure delivery, in this case delivery of the bride. ⁽²⁷⁾ The matrimonial arras, however, bound both bride and groom, and it is plural because it included a ring and sometimes other gifts from the groom in addition to the endowment proper.

The groom's endowment prescribed by Visigothic law and the Fuero Juzgo was given or promised by the groom or his father, either in a written charter or a witnessed verbal agreement. It was limited to a tenth of the groom's property or expected inheritance, although a noble could, if he chose, add slaves, horses and other gifts worth up to a thousand sueldos. He could even give more, provided the bride-to-be matched the additional gifts with those of equal value. The endowment or promise of endowment was received and conveyed to the woman by those charged with consenting to the marriage. ⁽²⁸⁾ It belonged to her, and she could dispose of it freely until she had children. They were to inherit three quarters of it, and the remainder was freely disposable by her. As a widow, she could live on its income until she died or remarried. If she died without children, it reverted to her husband or his relatives. Gifts other than the groom's endowment and the matching fund from the richly endowed bride were forbidden between husband and wife until a year of marriage had passed. ⁽²⁹⁾ Such are the main features of the Visigothic endowment which a woman received or was promised by her future husband at betrothal, together with a betrothal ring, la sortiia or anulus arrarum, a token of the groom's commitment. ⁽³⁰⁾ All these and other possibilities for giving and exchanging property at betrothal will appear in later medieval peninsular records, but only the groom's endowment of the woman remained a necessary condition of betrothal. It was frequently the only property formally considered at this time since the economic foundation of a marriage was usually the anticipated inheritances and earnings of both husband and wife. These prospects were [48] undoubtedly subjects of speculation, discussion and negotiation before a couple became formally betrothed, but they were not invariably stipulated in the endowment charter or, alternatively, the verbal promise of endowment required only of the groom at betrothal. He delivered or promised arras as a condition of the agreement, but no formal transfer of property was required of a woman when she became betrothed.

Extant medieval endowment charters (cartas de arras) and regional Castilian customs exemplify diverse characteristics of the arras presented to women who married noble and wealthy men. The charters, beginning in the ninth century, have survived primarily in the cartularies of Leonese monasteries which eventually acquired property mentioned in the documents. ⁽³¹⁾ They are notable, first, for their short sermons on the nature and purpose of marriage, stressing its creation of one flesh and the indissolubility of the bond. The marriages of the patriarchs are cited, as is Christ's presence at the marriage at Cana and his injunction that a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. Man was created in the image of God and woman for the glory of man, says one charter. Most of these texts are derived from Scripture, but they are also based on prayers in the old Hispanic marriage liturgy and on the biblical readings prescribed for weddings in a widely copied tenth-century book. ⁽³²⁾ The biblical and liturgical prologues, certainly composed by a monk or priest, signify the traditional and sacramental importance of the endowment in Leonese marriage customs. Although highly diverse in detail, there is no appreciable change in their homiletic content from the ninth to the end of the twelfth century, and they display no identifiably novel elements to indicate changing conceptions of marriage, modifications of the consensual forms of the contract, or significantly different phrases suggesting innovative theological currents. On the contrary, the sermons remained conservatively biblical and liturgical, reflecting continuity of concept and practice during the twelfth century.

These charters endow women with highly miscellaneous goods. They list land, houses, villages, livestock, slaves, saddled mules or horses, clothing, hides, tithes and other valuable items. Real property is the kind most commonly named, and its source is frequently the man's inheritance, occasionally the arras he received from his own mother. The charters often mention the consent of the woman's parents to the marriage, a notable feature of Visigothic formulas for endowment, and it is either stated or assumed that arras are necessary [49] for the validity of the marriage which became indissoluble by the act of endowing the woman as wife and future mother. While the arras are given directly to the woman, the charters often stipulate that they should descend to children of the marriage. If there were no children, the property might be assigned to an abbey with usufruct reserved for the widowed husband or wife. ⁽³³⁾ Charters said to be composed per foro de Leon or as lex docet, meaning the Visigothic law, seem to refer to the woman's full ownership of the endowment until she had children, rather than to limitations on the size of the gift, although tenths of particular goods are found in some of the earliest. ⁽³⁴⁾ By the eleventh century arras of up to half a man's movable and real property were promised to women by their future husbands. ⁽³⁵⁾ Endowment given 'according to Castilian custom' is occasionally mentioned in such charters, and this has been interpreted as meaning half of a man's property or expected inheritance, as opposed to the Visigothic tenth of León. ⁽³⁶⁾ This regional opposition remains in doubt, but it is clear that wealthy men everywhere were conveying increasingly large proportions of their property to their brides in the form of arras, both in León and Castile. We shall see that these habits had diverse repercussions in the towns, but a further look at the customary arras of a Castilian noblewoman will place the differences in sharper perspective.

According to customs compiled in the thirteenth century, the Castilian noble endowed his bride with a third of his wealth or expected inheritance. The noblewoman's arras were intended to support her in chaste widowhood, and she could not sell what her husband gave her except to his heirs. The latter were not required to pay more than five hundred sueldos for the endowment, and it is therefore unlikely that the woman would dispose of it unless forced by circumstances to do so. ⁽³⁷⁾ In addition to the arras proper, the Castilian noble could give his bride a fully owned and alienable cash present of as much as a thousand maravedis (mrs.), perhaps derived from the noble's gift of a thousand sueldos in the Fuero Juzgo. In the middle of the thirteenth century this was said to have replaced an earlier customary wedding gift in kind. It had included a handsome tent made of fine leather, decorated with gold fittings and sufficiently large to accommodate the entrance and exit of an armed knight. This movable residence is a curious gift for a bride but evidently suitable for the couple's rank and perhaps necessary for itinerant domesticity when visiting their scattered properties or attending the king. In [50] addition to the tent, the noble gave his bride a mule equipped for riding, a silver dish and a Muslim slave girl. Although none of these were part of the juridical endowment, the arras which the bride was given or promised at betrothal, they were traditional gifts bestowed on a woman when she married a noble who delivered them just before the wedding. ⁽³⁸⁾ Provision for municipal daughters frequently assumed quite different characteristics.

Some of the old traditions characterized the endowment of Leonese and Castilian townswomen. At Zamora, for example, arras became the property of a wife. They supported her in widowhood, descended to her children, and reverted to the widower's use if she died before him. ⁽³⁹⁾ At Toledo a man was traditionally expected to set aside a tenth of his wealth as arras, the Visigothic limitation later prescribed by the Fuero Real which also reserved three-quarters of the endowment for the couple's children. According to Alfonso's municipal code the parents of a betrothed woman younger than twenty kept the arras temporarily to prevent her from squandering them, but elsewhere arras, which often included personal gifts, were given directly to the bride. ⁽⁴⁰⁾

A wife's full ownership and their children's inheritance of arras characterized the endowment of townswomen at Oviedo and Avilés where we hear of a charter pledging arras, approved by the town council and given by the groom to the family of his betrothed. He had to present it within nine days of receiving consent to marry the daughter and coming to terms with her family about the arras, 'according to the custom of the town'. Pending delivery of the charter, the groom named a surety who agreed to guarantee his obligation to pay the agreed sum. ⁽⁴¹⁾ At Cáceres and Usagre arras were again subject to negotiation between the groom and the woman's family, with payment guaranteed by sureties. ⁽⁴²⁾ Nearby at Plasencia a carta de arras is mentioned, while other towns required the groom to name sureties to secure his payment of arras and the other wedding gifts promised by a man at betrothal. ⁽⁴³⁾ At numerous towns, however, the endowment given or promised to a betrothed woman was fixed and non-negotiable arras ordinarily paid in cash or gifts of comparable worth, whose combined value was not to exceed a maximum sum. This custom first appeared in the middle of the twelfth century at Molina de Aragón which forbade women to accept more than the fixed arras. The custom of prescribing non-negotiable arras then spread to other towns, especially in the Castilian Extremadura. Thus [51]arras set by fuero, as opposed to a bargain struck between the groom and a woman's family, or to a fixed percentage of the man's property, became one of the most common characteristics of the Castilian townswoman's endowment.

While the towns of Uclés and Valfermoso de las Monjas established a maximum twenty mrs. for the arras of any woman, Molina and Alfambra set the virgin's arras at twenty and the widow's at ten mrs. ⁽⁴⁴⁾ Cuenca, Guadalajara, Soria and numerous other towns, however, also distinguished between women from the town proper and those from villages in the surrounding alfoz. ⁽⁴⁵⁾ The arras of ten mrs. for a widow from town were the same as those presented to a daughter who lived in a village, while a village widow received five mrs., a quarter of the arras of 20 mrs. given by the man betrothed to a girl from town. These classes of brides indicate their desirability as wives, based on the greater attraction of girls presumed to be virgins but also on the higher status of women who lived inside the town proper and whose families were the leading citizens of the community. ⁽⁴⁶⁾

The fixed Castilian arras were also a way to make marriage a viable possibility for the bachelors whom towns hoped to attract and domesticate. Thirteenth-century Brihuega allowed a newly arrived citizen to certify the wealth he or she had brought to the town and give up to half of it as a wedding gift to establish full faith and credit as a responsible spouse. This custom is similar to one reputedly from Logroño in northern Castile. ⁽⁴⁷⁾ Most Castilian towns, however, required only the groom's limited arras, both for the sons of residents and for newcomers. Marriage had to remain within the reach of men in varying family and economic circumstances, especially young men of promise who had as yet neither made their fortunes nor come into an inheritance. Despite the usual necessity to pay arras to secure a wife and give her a suitable endowment, it was desirable to make the cost of marriage as affordable and equitable as possible.

Similar in purpose was the possibility of deferring payment. It was common to towns with fixed arras and appears in the Fuero Real with its prescribed tenth of expected inheritance or later acquired wealth. A man who lacked available funds to pay the sum immediately at betrothal could give pledges instead, and his wife could redeem them after the wedding as long as he lived.⁽⁴⁸⁾ Whether partially deferred or paid in full at betrothal, fixed arras, like the later prohibitions against bribes offered a woman's relatives to obtain their consent to marry her, asserted the need to prevent unfair competition for municipal [52] brides solely on the basis of wealth, while making marriage a reasonable and predictable expense for a man. The fixed arras were especially suitable to the needs of the bachelor who, as a newcomer in town, had no local relatives and lacked the prospects of a dependable inheritance against which to assess a percentage as endowment, but it did not give the rich newcomer an advantage over local men. If the price structure of the Castilian municipal arras sometimes prevented a man from competing for the most desirable daughters of a town, he might still find a country girl or a widow better suited to his pocketbook.

Once betrothed, the groom also assumed other obligations in anticipation of marriage to a municipal bride. It was his duty to pay for the nuptial celebration, especially the wedding feast. At Uclés and Valfermoso a third of the fixed arras, twenty mrs. for all townswomen, was set aside for this purpose. The custom of including wedding expenses as part of arras probably originated from the groom's initial responsibility to pay for food and drink to mark the betrothal. At mid-twelfth-century Molina, for example, the cost of a pig, sheep, wine and grain for this feast was an additional outlay when a man gave arras, while eighty years later at Madrid his expenditures were explicitly reserved for the wedding day, not betrothal. ⁽⁴⁹⁾ Although there are many such signs that the wedding day, rather than the betrothal, was increasingly observed as the more festive occasion, municipal custom nevertheless continued to include diverse obligations of a bridegroom in arras, since both endowment proper and wedding expenses were immediate commitments assumed by a man at betrothal. Moreover, combining the necessary endowment with wedding costs assured the accessibility of municipal brides at calculable levels of expense, while setting appropriate ceilings on funds for the celebration. The amount of money available to splurge on the wedding of a distinguished daughter from the centre of town was thus appropriately larger than what could be spent when the bride was a widow or a woman from the countryside. A relatively lavish celebration was suitable for a daughter from one of the town's most important families, while less extravagance befitted the marriages of widows and country women. Thus during the second half of the twelfth century the old dos or arras of Visigothic law and Leonese custom evolved in Castilian towns, chiefly by departing from their traditional purpose to provide support for a widow, later for her children. Arras paid or promised to a woman when she became [53] betrothed were still necessary and, exceptionally, the town of Soria acknowledged that the pledged but unpaid arras could be claimed by the couple's children, although not by the widow. ⁽⁵⁰⁾ Here and in other Castilian towns a widow could claim only what her husband had already delivered before he died, and their children's rights were usually ignored since arras had changed and now fulfilled different and more immediate obligations to a woman.

In the Leonese Extremadura, however, at Cáceres and Usagre both endowment and wedding costs remained unlimited, although the Castilian ceilings were known to the redactors of those Leonese towns' customs. Here a groom might be expected to endow his betrothed and celebrate their marriage on a scale which suited her family's demands. For the wedding he provided, at the least, the several bushels of grain, barrels of wine, sheep, and sides of pork and beef like those expected at nearby Portuguese towns with similar regional customs but where bridegrooms were fined for exceeding those limits. ⁽⁵¹⁾ Salamanca, another Leonese town which set no ceiling on endowment, nevertheless fined the citizen who accepted more than thirty mrs. for his betrothed daughter's or kinswoman's wedding celebration. He was also fined for taking more than twenty mrs. worth of new clothing for her. ⁽⁵²⁾ New clothes for the bride were a customary expense of the wedding at most towns. Like food and drink, they were paid for by the groom who frequently gave or promised them at betrothal. A municipal bride could thus expect them as part of or in addition to the endowment funds of her arras. ⁽⁵³⁾ At Soria, where arras were fixed at the customary rates for the region, the groom's sartorial largesse was also restricted, not to a maximum sum but to two new outfits for his betrothed. Both groom and bride were subject to fines for giving and receiving more than these. ⁽⁵⁴⁾

During the thirteenth century inflation and extravagance drove up the cost of municipal weddings. In 1235 Madrid changed its regulations about the funds given and promised by a groom at betrothal. We have no record of the town's earlier customs, but now the groom was to spend no more than fifty mrs. when he married a virgin from town, twenty-five at marriage to a widow, the same for a village girl, and fifteen for a village widow. His expenditures were for clothing, shoes, bread, wine and hose, all food and gifts for the wedding celebration. Now, however, the bride also contributed. The townswomen, whether virgin or widow, could give her bridegroom twenty-five mrs. worth of clothing, while the village woman, virgin or [54] widow, donated fifteen. ⁽⁵⁵⁾ The bride's smaller contributions are solely gifts to the groom but also clearly expenses of the wedding, which he alone had assumed traditionally at other towns. The payments for different categories of brides at Madrid, fourfold like the earlier Castilian arras, are not called arras here, but they are clearly related to the limitations on arras of other Castilian towns with their rate schedules of appropriate expenditures on the bride's endowment, adornment and wedding celebration.

All these restrictions on endowment and wedding expenses benefitted grooms directly and primarily, the bachelors whom towns so anxiously sought to pin down in domestic permanence. The evolution of the customs during the early thirteenth century, especially at Salamanca, Soria and Madrid, also demonstrates a desire to limit display by the rich at their weddings. This concern is paramount in diverse sumptuary legislation enacted by royal charter and the Cortes, especially in the later thirteenth century. It restricted the size of wedding processions, the numbers of guests from each side, the amount of food and drink to be served, gifts exchanged between hosts and guests, extravagance in dress and other nuptial luxuries, not excluding the bribes given by grooms to the families of the townswomen they wanted to marry. ⁽⁵⁶⁾ There is no reason to suppose that municipal brides or their families were especially enthusiastic about curtailing a bridegroom's lavish wedding expenditures. On the contrary, we may reasonably imagine that a townswoman would heartily object, not only to the new restrictions which affected all concerned, but also to the older customary ceilings on arras, which diminished both her chances to obtain a large endowment and the pomp of her wedding for which arrangements were begun at the time of betrothal.

Once betrothed, the bride assembled her trousseau. It consisted primarily of household equipment and personal possessions given by her parents and was commonly known as ajuar (Lat. supellectile) or another Romance variant of the Arabic word šuwár, marriage gift. Sometimes it was called alhajas or alfayas, from the Arabic hâa, necessities. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ The bride's trousseau was counted as part of a daughter's share of family inheritance and deductible when her parents' goods were divided, like the groom's expenditures for the wedding. ⁽⁵⁸⁾ All these gifts, together with the inheritance prospects of the bride and groom, were inevitably subjects of discussion and decision before a woman became firmly betrothed.

While a wealthy and aristocratic woman could expect to receive [55] land, clothing and silver plate for her trousseau, ordinary women would be given much less valuable items and usually only movable goods like cooking utensils, quilts and linens. ⁽⁵⁹⁾ The trousseau and other property of a wealthy municipal bride are described in an elaborate inventory drawn up at Toledo in 1285.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Unlike the earlier Leonese arias charters, this document is a betrothal contract which lists all the assets of the bride and groom. It is said to fulfil the requirements of Leonese and canon law for endowment and therefore includes the groom's endowment of the bride. It also shows how the economic basis of the marriage was established by joining the property or expected inheritances of both. The groom is Ruy Ponce, son of a deceased constable (alguacil) and magistrate (alcalde) of the city. His bride is Doña Mayor Álvarez, a lady from an important aristocratic Toledan family, whose lineage is traced in the charter to her great-grandfather. Ruy Ponce endows Doña Mayor with a tenth of his goods which he enumerates. It includes real property, animals, arms, debts owed by others, and clothing for the wedding, probably bought especially for the occasion. His total wealth is calculated at 17,000 mizcales. The lady's property is worth better than 40,000 mizcales. Two-thirds of this is real property, livestock, debts, and the house she inhabits. The remainder consists of her trousseau. It includes silk and taffeta clothing, fur-lined cloaks, richly embroidered dresses and jackets, gold, silver and pearl jewelry, and thirty-six tocas or coifs, some plain, others embroidered with gold. She also owns pots, jugs, cauldrons, dishes, plate, linens, bedding, and other household items, including slaves. Although the inventory lists the woman's total assets, it is the household equipment, especially kitchen utensils and other furnishings, which constituted the ajuar of municipal custom. This bride, perhaps an orphan, is nearly three times as wealthy as the bridegroom, a felicitous catch indeed for the alcalde's son.

Although few contracts of this type survive from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, other Toledan documents show that a municipal bride, however poor, customarily contributed the basic necessities of a trousseau. Wills and other charters record gifts to townswomen of five, ten or fifteen mizcales, small sums conveyed 'in marriage' or 'to aid marriage'. These were pious bequests and donations designated to help poor female relatives, servants, widows and even anonymous individuals assemble the trousseau a woman was expected to provide at marriage. ⁽⁶¹⁾

All these wedding preparations, however, might come to naught, [56] with the betrothal terminating unexpectedly for either accidental or scandalous reasons. Under Visigothic law, both secular and ecclesiastical, the status of the sponsa was virtually the same as that of the wife, and unilateral termination of a betrothal, like a marriage, was rarely legal. Canon law and ecclesiastical tradition emphasized that only adultery by a wife or betrothed woman justified a man in leaving her. ⁽⁶²⁾ The Fuero Juzgo allowed him to do so and punished the woman with confiscation and enslavement to her betrothed, in provisions which the Fuero Real and then the town of Soria later endorsed. ⁽⁶³⁾ Otherwise unilateral termination of betrothal under Visigothic law brought the same harsh penalties as for deserting a fully wedded spouse, with lashings and banishment, or confiscation and enslavement, for the party which ended the agreement to marry. ⁽⁶⁴⁾ It was expected that betrothal would lead inevitably to matrimony, barring fraud, dissolution by mutual consent, or some unusual circumstance which permitted relatives of one side or the other to cancel the agreement to marry. They could nullify the agreement, for example, if the woman was older than the man to whom she was betrothed, excepting when a widow and an adult man had decided to wed. Marriage to an older wife was termed contrary to natural law since it violated man's authority over woman, and the older wife was not unlikely to produce deformed children. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ While such marriages might have raised eyebrows in later times, neither a woman's age nor her infidelity were major concerns when later medieval townsmen contemplated the possibility that betrothal might not lead to marriage. Rather, it was necessary primarily to protect betrothed women against the chance that the men they expected to marry would walk out before the wedding.

Changing one's mind about going through with the marriage was a most distressing matter, especially when the groom backed out. In many communities the man or woman who 'repented', 'refused' or 'repudiated' the betrothal could be fined as much as 100 mrs. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ This was collectible through the sureties, pointing to the man who named sureties for arras as the more usual breaker of the agreement. A conceivably valid excuse, recognized at Soria, was the possibility that the Church might invalidate the marriage for some reason, but otherwise municipal custom took no notice of legitimate grounds for ending a betrothal. ⁽⁶⁷⁾ Far more serious than a simple change of heart was the case of the man who repudiated his betrothed after he had 'lain with', 'come togetherwith', 'deflowered', 'corrupted' or 'had' [57] her. Earthier language is not unknown. At Zorita de los Canes repudiation after copula carnalis, to use the canonists' term, quadrupled the town's relatively low fine for simple repudiation, while at Teruel it soared to 200 mrs. Here, as at Cuenca and all the other towns, which considered this disastrous sequence of events, the man was also banished as an outlaw. ⁽⁶⁸⁾ It seems plain that sexual intercourse itself was not condemned, unexpected or even unusual between betrothed couples, but only the groom's repudiation of his bride after it happened. When the betrothed man died before the wedding, for example, his bride was often permitted to keep the clothing and other presents he had given her only when they had slept together. At Zamora and Soria the bereaved woman could keep the gifts whether or not intercourse had taken place, and Plasencia expected the deceased man's arras charter to be honoured to the letter. ⁽⁶⁹⁾ At Cuenca and other towns, however, the woman had to return all the presents, just as he reclaimed them if she died before the wedding, unless the betrothal had been consummated. Only then could she keep his gifts. ⁽⁷⁰⁾ These considerations demonstrate that betrothal remained just as obligatory as under Visigothic law, unalterably pledging the couple to wed. Intercourse strengthened the commitment, but it would be wrong to conclude that it actually turned the betrothal into a valid marriage, as Pope Alexander III maintained. Rather, the concept is much closer to that of Gratian who held that intercourse simply perfected the already binding vows of betrothal. The woman whose betrothed died before the wedding did not become a widow in the full legal sense since she was not so regarded until after the final nuptial celebration. Nevertheless, once betrothed, a woman could ordinarily expect that the man who promised and gave arras would marry her. Custom tenaciously demanded these binding financial outlays by the groom and defined their contents in the broadest terms in order to protect women. Most especially it was necessary to prevent a woman from being wooed and seduced with simple promises or pretty new dresses and then find herself deserted by some irresponsible cad.

A woman who had intercourse with her betrothed, expecting their wedding to follow in due course, but who was then abandoned might easily prefer to cover up the facts rather than press charges against him. Denial seems to have been the choice of one Doña Elvira, daughter of Ferrando Gomez of Villa Armento in Old Castile, whose case is recorded in a thirteenth-century precedent (fazaña). ⁽⁷¹⁾ She had [58] been betrothed to a caballero who gave her clothing, a saddled mule and other appropriate gifts. For some unexplained reason the betrothal terminated, and the man asked Elvira to return his presents. She contested the need to do so, and the judge in the case ruled that she could keep them if her betrothed had 'kissed and embraced' her. If not, she had to return them. Not wishing to admit these intimacies, Elvira returned everything. The kiss and embrace of the Castilian fazaña were acts with juridical consequences, the latter implying the 'lying together' of the consummated betrothal and the former the betrothal kiss which had traditionally sealed the agreement to marry.

The betrothal kiss has an obscure history in peninsular custom. The Romance Fuero Juzgo decrees that any gifts from a betrothed woman to her bridegroom should be returned to her heirs if she died before the wedding, whether or not the kiss had been exchanged. If, on the other hand, he died, she was required to return any gifts and endowment, but only half if the couple had kissed. These provisions are not found in the Visigothic Code, but were apparently taken from the early sixth-century Lex Romana Visigothorum which here incorporated a law of Constantine recorded in the Theodosian Code. It refers to the kiss which intervened (osculum interveniens) between betrothal and death before the wedding, and it constituted partial consummation of the marriage, like the betrothal kiss to which Tertullian was favourable as a sign that the promised marriage would follow betrothal. The Fuero Real embellished the old provisions in the second half of the thirteenth century, again in reference to the death of either sponsa or sponsus. If the groom died before the kiss and consummation, the woman had to return everything to his heirs, that is, both gifts and arras. If he had kissed her, she could keep half the gifts but had to return the arras. If they had had intercourse, she kept both gifts and arras. If, however, the bride died before the wedding, the man had to return all her gifts whether or not he had kissed her, unless they had had intercourse, in which case he returned nothing. ⁽⁷²⁾ These legal consequences seem painfully subtle but, as in older municipal custom, consummation completed the commitments made at betrothal and was regarded as an unsurprising event during betrothal. The kiss, however, also had juridical effects as a partially binding act in the agreement to marry.

The reappearance of the betrothal kiss in thirteenth-century peninsular records after some seven hundred years is assuredly a [59] consequence of its preservation as a secular custom. Although we hear nothing about it in the municipal fueros, it nevertheless survived in the betrothal liturgy of the eleventh-century Hispanic Church. According to the betrothal rite (Ordo arrarum) of the Liber Ordinum, the couple exchanged the kiss of peace at the conclusion of the ceremony. Here it is the 'true witness' of their mutual love and affection (obscula pacis, quod est uerum testamentum). Reformed liturgies composed at Toledo in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries abolished the kiss from their matrimonial rites, although they included a general exchange of the peace in the nuptial mass. ⁽⁷³⁾ Prudently or prudishly dropped so as to emphasize the spiritual union of the couple, the betrothal kiss nevertheless persisted in secular custom and still with the force of the liturgical rite's reference to it as a seal on the troths plighted by the giving and receiving of arras, the 'true' witness of the rite conceivably opposed deliberately to actual consummation.

The old betrothal rite included the presentation, blessing and exchange of the arras charter and two rings, the latter placed on different fingers of the couple's right hands, just prior to the concluding kiss. We noticed that the Visigothic Code refers to one ring given to the bride at betrothal. Isidore had explicitly favoured not more than one betrothal ring placed on the bride's left fourth-finger which, he knew from Macrobius, possessed a vein leading straight to the heart. To Isidore the ring symbolized one love shared. The ninth-century Mozarabic Bishop Eulogius nevertheless wrote of two betrothal rings, like those exchanged and blessed with arras in the betrothal rite of the Liber Ordinum. ⁽⁷⁴⁾ Although one ring appears occasionally in some later ecclesiastical service books, including the trans-Pyrenean rite used at Braga in the early twelfth century, two rings were the preferred custom and, unlike the betrothal kiss, remained in the nuptial ritual at Toledo during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, persisting for centuries thereafter as a distinctive custom of Hispanic weddings. ⁽⁷⁵⁾ Both in the old and later ecclesiastical ceremonies, the priest blessed the rings and arras as the most important and binding requirements of betrothal. Neither in the liturgical rubrics nor in the fueros is it clear that the groom was expected to supply rings in addition to or as part of arras. A late twelfth-century endowment charter from Toledo, however, shows that the groom had promised his bride a tenth of his goods as arras, together with wedding regalia and a betrothal ring (anillo de arras). He also received a ring from the bride as a sign that his proposal had been [60] accepted by her mother, a widow. ⁽⁷⁶⁾ Thus, while a groom might include the cost of a ring among or in addition to the expenses of arras, a municipal bride would also be expected to furnish a ring for her betrothed to wear, one that would later be blessed at the wedding, together with the ring he had given her when they became betrothed.

The rings, the kiss and, above all, the groom's gifts or promises of arras to his bride were the most important features of medieval betrothals. Traditionally the betrothal was a binding agreement to marry, and it was not unusually consummated before the final nuptial celebration. The novel theological concepts of breakable promises to wed with subsequently binding promises exchanged in the present tense long remained foreign to twelfth- and thirteenth-century municipal custom. Alfonso X's Fuero Real nevertheless introduced the canonical terms palabras de futuro and palabras de presente to distinguish betrothal from matrimonial vows. Now, in harmony with canon law, the latter superseded betrothal vows already made to another partner, unless the initial promises had been carnally consummated. ⁽⁷⁷⁾ It is not hard to imagine that this policy, when enforced by an ecclesiastical or royal court, would inevitably cause tongues to wag about the betrothed townswoman who had accepted, as was customary, clothing and other gifts from a man who then jilted her to marry someone else. This was a distressing prospect in communities where men paid a premium price for virgin brides. Municipal custom, however, consistently favoured the traditional betrothal, with its necessary and compelling gifts to a woman, as the binding event in the marriage process. As a result, the municipal bride was very nearly a married woman when she arrived at the church for her wedding, whether or not the betrothal had been consummated. The wedding ceremony, as we shall now see, dramatized her final transformation into a wife.

Municipal weddings were festive community occasions. At Salamanca a couple was married either in the cathedral or the bride's parish church whose clerics the couple had to compensate in coin when those from the cathedral officiated. ⁽⁷⁸⁾ The secular festivities afterwards sometimes continued for several days, with private and community-wide events. The fondness for ostentatious display at weddings, doubtless in imitation of aristocratic habits, made them occasions for processions, feasting, jousting and community revelry. Many thirteenth-century towns found it advisable to limit certain aspects of a wedding's celebration, not only to curb unwanted extravagance but also to ensure propriety and public order.

[61] The bride and her attendants rode ceremoniously on horseback to the church and, after the service, through the streets of the town with her new husband. The prestigious horse was the ordinary possession of the male gentry of a town, although not necessarily of women in this class. Even the bride of a Castilian noble was given only a saddled mule as a customary wedding gift. At Salamanca a bride was not allowed to have more than one attendant in her wedding party. This woman was her wedding sponsor (madrina) who, together with another relative, was also permitted to ride with the bride at Alba de Tormes. If other women joined the procession, they or their husbands were fined. ⁽⁷⁹⁾ The chivalric retinue was a most distinctive honour, an occasion for showing off wedding finery, and evidently an opportunity for townswomen, especially wives, to lord it over the spectators. A widowed bride was altogether denied the procession at Coria, Cáceres and Usagre, both to the church and through the streets afterwards. Moreover, she could not be married on Sunday, nor 'make a talamo'. The last prohibition is a reference to the domestic wedding rite which, according to the Liber Ordinum, took place in the bridal chamber on the day before the final ecclesiastical ceremonies. The domestic rite commenced on Saturday morning at the third hour when the priest scattered salt to purify the bed-chamber and blessed the union. ⁽⁸⁰⁾ Later in the day, according to the old matrimonial customs, there was an office of vespers at the church and, in the morning, lauds followed by the nuptial rites. ⁽⁸¹⁾ Sunday was thus the traditional wedding day and, in keeping with the need for tact and restraint when a widow remarried, several towns fined her for holding her wedding on Sunday and for celebrating the domestic wedding ceremony of the previous day. Although this ancient rite, like the betrothal kiss, was routinely dropped from surviving twelfth- and thirteenth-century service books, in order to rivet full attention on the spiritual union emphasized by the strictly ecclesiastical ceremonies, the custom of purifying and sanctifying the bridal chamber, at least that of a virgin bride, was evidently slow to disappear from the wedding's schedule of events.

Marriage rituals of the twelfth and thirteenth century remained heavily indebted in many other respects to the old Hispanic liturgy of the Liber Ordinum. Despite official abandonment of the old liturgy decreed under papal pressure at the councils of Burgos and Braga in 1080, the revised service books retained not a few of the old liturgical representations of matrimony and married women, preserving customs which were handed down for centuries to later medieval and [62] even modern times. ⁽⁸²⁾ Moreover, replacement of the old books and liturgical customs was undoubtedly a slow process, especially at the parish level. Deeply rooted Hispanic wedding customs thus survived the official change of rite, not only in secular custom but, like the tradition of two rings, in later sacramentaries, manuals and pontificals of the Spanish Church. Tenacity of liturgical practice is especially evident in twelfth- and thirteenth-century wedding liturgies from Toledo, the metropolitan see, while even the archiepiscopal see of Braga, with its rite imported from southern France, did not totally abandon all the traditional ecclesiastical prayers and customs which had characterized earlier peninsular weddings. We could expect variations from diocese to diocese, and even from town to town within dioceses, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but the marriage rituals composed later, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries before the extensive reforms and uniform practices decreed by the Council of Trent, prove the remarkable persistence of many ancient Hispanic wedding customs, some dating from the time of Isidore. They emphasized the sanctity and indissolubility of the marriage bond while, at the same time, they presented an explanatory and visual spectacle of a woman's transformation from bride to wife.

The new matrimonial liturgy of Toledo, preserved in three sacramentaries and a manual from the second half of the twelfth to the end of the thirteenth century, furnish a brief guide to ecclesiastical wedding customs. The liturgy incorporated many of the prayers and practices found in the betrothal and nuptial rites of the Liber Ordinum. The wedding began with the formalities of the old betrothal rite in which the priest blessed the secular and liturgical symbols of the couple's consent to marry, the groom's arras charter and two rings. Now a well-known Gallo-Roman prayer for the blessing of one ring replaced the old Hispanic benediction in which the priest invoked the marriage endowments of Abraham to Sarah, Isaac to Rebecca, and Jacob to Rachel and enjoined the couple to be fruitful and remain faithful. Omitted at this point was the concluding and binding kiss of the old betrothal ritual. The major changes, however, were the postponement of the rite to the wedding day and its location. It took place outside the church, an adaptation of the trans-Pyrenean marriage at the church door (in facie ecclesie) adopted at Braga.⁽⁸³⁾ At Toledo, unlike Braga, the main elements of the old betrothal liturgy, with its important echoes of secular betrothal customs, were retained, [63] and there was no interrogation of the couple to ascertain impediments to the marriage and no exchange of promises de praesenti, constituting the marriage rite at the church door. Instead, the new Toledan ritual at the door kept the main features of the old betrothal liturgy, according to which the couple must enter the church where the concluding nuptial rites took place. These are also heavily indebted to the Liber Ordinum, although they were celebrated now within rather than after the nuptial mass, following Roman usage. ⁽⁸⁴⁾

The progression of ritual events, with their accompanying old and new prayers, presented a visual spectacle which dramatized the position of women in the marriage relationship. First, before the peace, the bride and only the bride was remitted to the priest by her parents or other relatives, just as in the Liber Ordinum. They gave her away as prescribed in a fourth-century canon which, however, stipulated that both bride and groom were delivered to the priest. This text is among the canons of the Decretum cited in one of the Toledan sacramentaries, but only the bride was delivered in the nuptial rite itself. Her remittance, retained also at Braga, constituted the important liturgical manifestation of her family's consent to a woman's marriage. ⁽⁸⁵⁾ Having received the woman, the priest at Toledo then veiled the couple in traditional fashion. The veil signified the sacredness of the union and ecclesiastical benediction of the marriage. At Rome from the fourth century the priest had veiled the heads of bride and groom prior to the verbal benediction, but in Castile he covered only the woman's head and the man's shoulders. The prayers in the Liber Ordinum associate the veil with Rebecca, veiled when Isaac first saw her, an allusion made by Isidore who explained the Hispanic custom as representing the Pauline injunction that man is the head of woman (vir est caput mulieris). Although at Braga both were veiled lying flat on the floor with the man's arm over the woman, the traditional Hispanic velatio, in which only the bride's head was veiled, remained as deeply rooted a custom as the two betrothal rings, persisting in Castilian marriage rites into modern times. ⁽⁸⁶⁾ During veiling the priest placed a white and purple cord over the shoulders of the couple. Isidore called this the yoke of matrimony; and it symbolized the indissoluble union, its colours standing for chastity and the blood of procreation. His explanation and reference to the subordination of wives (subiectas et humiles) are cited in two of the Toledan service books. ⁽⁸⁷⁾

Once the mass was concluded, the priest remitted the bride to the [64] groom just before the final benediction. In two of the Toledan sacramentaries the priest joined the hands of the couple. The joining of hands is a trans-Pyrenean rite, a sign of mutual consent, which displaced here the Liber Ordinum's sacerdotal traditio of the bride to the groom. ⁽⁸⁸⁾ The old usage was nevertheless retained at Braga, coming after parental delivery of the bride to the priest. Moreover, the Toledan manual from the late thirteenth century revived the older custom, and the priest, instead of joining the couple's hands, again committed the bride to the groom in the traditional manner. Now, however he added a cautionary warning to the benediction: 'I give you a wife, not a servant.' The formula, a citation from Jerome, recurs in a late fifteenth-century manual from Seville, together with many of the older actions and prayers preserved in the thirteenth-century Toledan matrimonial rites. ⁽⁸⁹⁾

With dismissal the priest traditionally enjoined the couple to observe the 'night of Tobias', one night of chastity after the nuptial rite, although Braga changed the Liber Ordinum's demand to three nights. The single night derives from the old fourth-century text stipulating parental delivery, and the requirement, although missing from the new rites at Toledo, is included among the canons from Gratian's Decretum which preface the thirteenth-century sacramentary. ⁽⁹⁰⁾ To review them all, the citations stipulate (1) that a father should consult his daughter before marrying her; (2) that she be endowed; (3) that intercourse without consent did not constitute a marriage; (4) that no one was to marry during high feasts and fasts of the Church; (5) that priests should not marry people in secret but only publicly; (6) that endowment and sacerdotal benediction validated a marriage; and (7) that the man and woman were married by their parents or other relatives and should refrain from intercourse for one night following the nuptial rite. This sacramentary was thus officially and explicitly grounded on the canon law of the Decretum as excerpted and edited by Toledan clerics, and its ritual acts and prayers, many of which followed traditions of the old Hispanic betrothal and nuptial rites must have fulfilled, in the opinion of its compilers, canonically acceptable standards for the celebration of matrimony.

Finally, we should notice supplements in the Liber Ordinum for which there were no counterparts in the later service books. The eleventh-century liturgy contains special prayers and benedictions for the second marriages of men and women, but without rubrics to [65] indicate changes in the actions or order of the ceremony. Formulas for the benedictions were evidently taken from the eighth-century Italian Bobbio Missal into which the Hispanic liturgists carefully and repeatedly interpolated clauses on the benediction and grace being conferred on the remarrying individual, man or woman. It is said that a woman, like Ruth, remarries for love, not lust. ⁽⁹¹⁾ While early Hispanic canon law had condemned the remarriages of widows who had been the wives of clerics and of clerics with other widows, repudiated women or prostitutes, this disapproval cannot have extended to marriages of the ordinary laity, certainly not in the minds of later churchmen. ⁽⁹²⁾ The eleventh-century prayers for second nuptials express no condemnation but, on the contrary, approval of remarriage. They are, however, simpler and shorter than those for first marriages. This is in keeping with secular demands for restraint at a widow's marriage, with the difference that municipal customs were explicitly judgmental, not of the widow who remarried, but only of one whose conduct was less than circumspect in the celebration of her marriage. Omission of the special prayers for a second marriage in the later Toledan service books need not imply that sacerdotal benediction, once given, was necessarily withheld on later occasions. This refusal, however, became customary in early modern Castile. ⁽⁹³⁾ The liturgical customs of matrimony, highly traditional and durable, portrayed the transfer of the bride from the bosom of her family to the priest and then to a sanctifying position under the veil whence she emerged a muger velada or de bendicion, the most ordinary terms for a married woman in the towns. The priest's caveat, remitting a wife not a servant to the bridegroom, was an explicit caution against the conclusions the bridegroom or other observers would draw about a wife's position as depicted visually in the events of the wedding ceremony. She emerged from the church a fully married woman sacredly committed into her husband's care. The necessity for her obedience and her secondary position in the marriage relationship had been publicly attested and ecclesiastically confirmed by the rites of the nuptial liturgy.

Notably secular celebrations followed a municipal wedding ceremony. They included the procession of the couple through town, sport, feasting, and other revelries about which, disappointingly, little notice survives. The public events were widely attended by a town's inhabitants, especially since Sunday was the traditional wedding day. The feast might include as many as forty or sixty guests, [66] which were maximum numbers set by the sumptuary legislation. Canon law had traditionally and soberly forbidden priests to attend the celebrations where dancing was considered an especially dangerous spectacle, or activity, for clergy. ⁽⁹⁴⁾ At Salamanca those who performed the ceremony may have come to the feast since the couple was expected to pay them not only in coin but also with meat, bread and wine, fare usually served the wedding guests at the groom's expense. ⁽⁹⁵⁾ This town granted a two-week military furlough to the citizen preparing for the wedding of his child or relative, although it limited to some extent the activities that could be planned. Here jousting was solemnly prohibited, as was also true at Alba de Tormes, but the fines for participating were quite small, and men conceivably ignored the bans, especially since Alba's blacksmiths were exonerated from responsibility for defective horseshoes lost or broken at wedding jousts. ⁽⁹⁶⁾ The prohibitions were probably due to injuries and deaths at these events, but many Castilian towns frequently abolished penalties for such accidents at a wedding tournament. Frequently it had to be held outside the walls and was the usual destination of the procession after the ceremony. Teruel, however, permitted the games in the town's central square (plaza major) when approved by the town judge and announced by the crier, as on other important fiestas. ⁽⁹⁷⁾ Tournaments were, of course, spectator sports for townswomen, and many undoubtedly enjoyed the pageantry and society more than the feats of martial and athletic skill. Jousting gave men an opportunity to show off and perhaps catch the eye of some damsel or members of her family, but processions, banquets and fine clothes certainly held more evident attractions for townswomen. All were features of the celebration which royal and Cortes legislation restricted to curtail lavish display by the rich, but plainly without discouraging the taste for showy weddings. They could nevertheless get out of hand. Soria found it necessary to restrict them to two days, as was enacted by the Cortes for all towns. Sorian citizens who wanted to entertain the couple were supposed to give private parties at least several days after the wedding, and guests were expected to stay inside. As on other holidays, revellers were fined for disturbing the peace, especially men and women who wandered about town singing at night. ⁽⁹⁸⁾

All the merriment could evidently become a source of public disorder, but it was also a joyful deliverance from the serious and lengthy business of matrimony. Doubtless the festivities on many occasions relieved mercifully and cathartically the careful planning [67] and, especially for the bride's family, burdensome anxieties about a betrothal's destined but not inevitable outcome. Marriages for the daughters and sons of townsmen were most desirable, but children had to marry appropriately and responsibly. Deliberation and care were essential in arranging marriages for municipal daughters with their ample attractions, both as wives and sexual partners, for the wealthy opportunists and fortune hunters, not to mention scoundrels, drawn to a Reconquest town. The valuable but youthful and vulnerable daughter's ability to choose her own husband had to be restricted carefully in the interests of her immediate family and other important local relatives. Marriage to a townswoman ought not to cause inordinate difficulties or expense for a responsible man, but there had to be adequate safeguards for the bride's kinsmen who presumably, although not invariably, looked out for a girl's interests as well as their own. Ideally matrimony pursued the course we have followed here, from petition through the legally binding betrothal to ecclesiastical formalities with a strong traditional cast. Inevitably all marriages were not contracted along these lines, especially when a daughter had a mind of her own. We shall confront this possibility in due course, but first let us consider the bride become wife. Contrary to the notably passive role officially assigned the daughter in the marriage process, custom not infrequently recognized the municipal wife as an able and invaluable contributor to the marriage partnership. Her rank and dignity were already proclaimed in the need for a mother's consent to her daughter's marriage and by the bride's procession through town high on a horse beside the man who, in many cases, considered himself fortunate to have won her.

1. Medieval marriage: Two models from twelfth-century France (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 1-22. For Spain, see Carlé, 'Apuntes sobre el matrimonio en la edad media española', CHE 63-4 (1980), 115-77.

2. A. Esmein, Le Mariage en droit canonique, 2nd edn. by R. Généstal (2 vols., Paris, 1929-35), vol. 1, pp 9-34; G. Le Bras, 'La Doctrine du Mariage chez les théologiens et les canonistes depuis l'an mil', DTC, vol. 9, pt 2 (Paris, 1927), cols. 2123-223. For consent, ibid., pp. 2137-57; Esmein, Le Mariage, vol. 1, pp. 67-100, 101-3, 119-48; J. Dauvillier, Le Mariage dans le droit classique de l'Eglise depuis le Décret de Gratien (1140) Jusqu'à la mort de Clement V (1314) (Paris, 1933), pp. 5-54; J T. Noonan, Jr, 'Marital Affection in the Canonists', Studia Gratiana 12 (1967), 479-509; idem, 'Power to Choose', Viator 4 (1973), 419-34; Le Bras, 'Le Mariage dans la théologie et le droit de l'Eglise', Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale II (1968), 191-202, J. A. Brundage, 'Concubinage and marriage in medieval canon law', Journal of Medieval History 1 (1975), 1-17.

3. L. Godefroy, 'Le Mariage du temps des pères', DTC, vol. 9, pt 2 (Paris, 1927), cols. 2077-123, H. Le Clercq, 'Mariage', DACL vol. 10, pt 2 (Paris, 1920), cols. 1843-982; R Bidagor, 'Sobre la naturaleza del matrimonio en S. Isidoro de Sevilla', Miscellanea isidoniana, Homenaje a S. Isidoro de Sevilla en el XIII centenario de su muerte, 636-4 april - 1936 (Rome, 1936), pp. 253-70.

4. Esmein, Le Mariage, vol. 1, pp. 119-36; Le Bras, 'La Doctrine du Mariage', cols. 2149-54. K. Ritzer, Le Mariage dans les églises chrétiennes du I^er au X^e siècle (Paris, 1970), pp. 222-32, trans. of Formen, Riten and religiöses Brauchtum der Eheschliessung in den christlichen Kirchen des ersten Jahrtausend (Munster, 1962).

5. Dauvillier, Le Mariage, pp 51-4, 473-9.

6. Conc. of Leon, c. 5, TC, vol. 3, p. 233.

7. Maldonado, 'Las relaciones entre el derecho canónico y el derecho secular en los concilios españoles del siglo XI', AHDE 14 (1942-3), pp. 227-381; Serrano, El obispado de Burgos (3 vols., Madrid, 1945), vol. 1, pp. 394-424; vol. 2, pp. 190-221, D. Mansilla Reoyo, Iglesia castellano-leonesa y curia romana en los tiempos del rey Don Fernando (Madrid, 1945), pp. 6-8, 254-71, V. Beltrán de Heredia, 'La formación intelectual del clero en España durante los siglos XII, XIII y XIV', Revista Española de Teología 6 (1946), 313-57.

8. III Toledo 10, VC, p. 128, LV and FJuzgo 3.3.11, save by the king's order.

9. FToledo (1118), MC, p. 366; FToledo 30 (c. 1166); FCórdoba-Cartagena, p. 33; FCarmona 17; FLorca, p. 8; cf. Cortes of Valladolid (1351), pet. 23, ed. Sáez, Colección diplomática de Sepúlveda (Segovia, 1956), vol. 1 [unicum], pp. 92-3.

10. Esmein, Le Mariage, vol. 1, pp. 171-5; Le Bras, 'La Doctrine', cols. 2135, 2151; Dauvillier, Le Mariage, p. 192.

11. Sacramentario 3, ed. I. García Alonso, 'La administración de sacramentos en Toledo después del cambio de rito (s. XII-XIII)', Salamanticensis 5 (1958) 36, 48-50.

12. LV 3.1.6, 7; FJuzgo 3.1.7, 8. Gibert, 'El consentimiento familiar en el matrimonio según el derecho medieval español', AHDE 18 (1947), 706-25; D'Ors, El código, pp. 132-50; King, Law and society, pp. 228-30, E. Meynial, 'Le Mariage après les invasions', Nouvelle RHD, 21 (1896), 514-31.

13. LV 3.1.1, 7; FJuzgo 3.1.1, 8.

14. FAvilés 25; FOviedo, p. 126 R. Prieto Bances, 'Los "amigos" en el fuero de Oviedo', AHDE 23 (1953), 203-46.

15. E.g., FCuenca 13.9; FIznatoraf 321; FAlarcón 300; FAlcaraz 4.96; FBaeta 320; FZorita 315; FBéjar 404. FBrihuega, p. 168; FFuentes 116. Gibert, 'El consentimiento', pp. 746-61; idem, Los fueros de Sepúlveda, pp. 485-8. FDaroca (MC, p. 537) exceptionally demands parental consent for a son's marriage as well.

16. FAlcalá 89. FSepúlveda 55. FCoria 62, FCáceres 69, FUsagre 68.

17. LF 183; FAntiguo 17; FViejo 5.5.2. FReal 3.1.2. LV 3.1.8; FJuzgo 3.1.9. Merêa, '0 Dote visigótico', Estudos de Direito visigótico (Coimbra, 1948), pp. 43-8; and D'Ors, El código, pp. 133-4.

18. FReal 3.1.6. Isidore, De ecclesiasticis officiis 2 20.8, PL, vol. 83, cols. 727-836. LV 3.4.2, referring to the unrestricted marriage of a woman 'que in suo consistat arbitrio', is conspicuously absent from FJuzgo 3.4.2; she is a woman of age (i.e., 20), both of whose parents are dead (Merêa, '0 Dote visigótico', pp. 40-8; D'Ors, El código, pp. 146-7).

19. FCoria 61; FCáceres 68; FUsagre 67. FAlcalá 74. Cf. FAlba 19.

20. FZamora 34, where she is barred from court and given a high fine. FSalamanca 213; FLedesma 139, where the fine is low, but she loses any legacy left by her husband FCoria 75; FCáceres 82, FUsagre 67, where she is dispossessed if pregnant, partly in favour of her in-laws. A low fine in FVillavicencio (1221), MC, p. 181, and FSepúlveda 59a but here for lower-class women only LV and FJuzgo 3.2.1. FReal 3.1.13. Cf. Partidas 7.6.3. and 4.12.3. For pressures to abolish this fine following the plagues of the fourteenth century, see Cortes of Valladolid (1351), pet. 27, Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y Castilla (5 vols., Madrid, 1861-1903), vol. 2, p. 16; Sáez, Colección diplomática de Sepúlveda, p. 95.

21. FLedesma 210-13; cf. cap. 139, above, n. 20. J. Puyol, Origenes del reino de León y de sus instituciones políticas (Madrid, 1926), pp. 229-32.

22. FLPalencia 30 (1181), HD, p. 194, FPalencia 29, ed. C. Caamaño, 'El fuero romanceado de Palencia', AHDE 11 (1934), 503-22 E.g., FLlanes 59, ed. Bonilla y San Martin, 'El fuero de Llanes', Revista de Ciencias Jurídicas y Sociales I (1918), 97-198 (sep. pr., Madrid, 1918); Garcia Gallo, 'El fuero de Llanes', AHDE 40 (1970), 241-68. FPozuelo de Campos 23 (1157?), HD, pp.66-7. FSan Julián (1161), ed. Sáez, 'Fueros de San Julián y Villamuriel (Palencia)', AHDE 15 (1944), 559. FSanta Cristina (1062), MC, p. 223, and (1226), Alfonso IX, vol. 2, p. 583, FSanta Maria de la Vega 2 (1217), HD, p. 111, where the abolished custom any exaction from widows had been paid in olives; in contrast, FLongares-Albelda 5 (1264, ed. Martinez Diez, 'Fueros de la Rioja', AHDE 49 (1979), pp. 449-50) requires any woman marrying a man from outside the village to give a small wine skin. Cf. FLeón 14 (1017?) ed. Vázquez de Parga, 'El fuero de León (notas y avance de edición crítica)', AHDE 15 (1944), pp. 464-98 (sep. pr., Madrid, 1944); Garcia Gallo, 'El fuero de Leon, su historia, textos y redacciones', AHDE 39 (1969), 5-171.

23. FSoria 291; royal charters to Guadalajara (1242?), MM, p. 261; Uceda (1250), ibid., p 522; Alcaraz (1251), E. S. Procter, Curia and cortes in León and Castile, 1072-1295, Cambridge Iberian and Latin American Studies (Cambridge, 1980), p. 272; Cuenca (1256), ed. Ureña, Fuero de Cuenca, p. 862. Procter identifies this legislation as originating in the Cortes of Seville, 1250 (Curia and cortes, pp. 124-5). Later, Cortes of Valladolid (1258), pet. 44 (Cortes, vol. 1, p. 63); Cortes of Jerez (1268), pet. 40 (ibid., p. 79).

24. LV and FJuzgo 3.1.3, 4. For betrothal, see Bidagor, 'Sobre la naturaleza del matrimonio', pp. 253-70; Godefroy, 'Le Mariage', cols. 2077-123; Le Clercq, 'Mariage', cols. 1843-982; and, for diverse arguments as to its effect, Ritzer, Le Mariage, pp. 413-18.

25. Le Liber Ordinum en usage dans l'Eglise wisigothique et mozarabe d'Espagne du cinquième au onzième siècle [1052?], ed. M. Férotin, Monumenta Ecclesiae Liturgica, vol. 5 (Paris, 1904), cols. 433-43. Isidore, De eccles. off. 2.20.5-12; cf. idem, Etymologiae 9.7.3, 4, 9, ed. W. M. Lindsay, Isidori hispalensis episcopi etymologianvm sive originvm (Oxford, 1911), and Bidagor, 'Sobre la naturaleza del matrimonio', pp. 270-85. Garcia Alonso, 'La administratión', pp. 43-4; and the thirteenth-century description of the betrothal and marriage of the Cid's daughters in Primera crónica general de Espana que mandó componer Alfonso el Sabio y se continuaba bajo Sancho IV en 1289, ed. R. Menéndez Pidal (2 vols., Madrid, 1955), c. 928, vol. 2, pp. 601-2; but cf. Ritzer, Le Mariage, pp. 390-2.

26. LV 3.1.9. FJuzgo 3.1.9 omits the maxim but contains the other provisions setting out the details for giving and receiving endowment. Sacramentario 3, ed. Garcia Alonso, 'La administración', p. 36. Esmein, Le Mariage, vol. 1, pp. 209-11; Ritzer, Le Mariage, pp. 340-54.

27. Isidore, De eccles. off. 2.20.5-7, 10; Etymol. 9.7.6, A. Otero, 'Las arras del derecho español medieval', AHDE 15 (1955), 189-210. For the Hispanic arras sponsalica, see Merêa, 'Arras: Achegas para a solucão dum problem filológico-jurídico', Boletim de Filologia 4 (1936), 285-93; '0 Dote visigótico', pp. 23-48; idem, '0 Dote nos documentos dos seculos IX-XII (Asturias, Leão, Galiza e Portugal)', Estados de Direito hisânico, vol. 2, pp. 139-45; Otero, '"Liber Iudiciorum 3, 1, 5" (En tema de dote y "donatio propter nuptias")', AHDE 29 (1959), 545-56; M. Garcia Garrido, 'El régimen jurídico del patrimonio uxorio en el derecho vulgar romano-visigótico', AHDE 29 (1959), 420-37.

28. LV 3.1.5, 6; FJuzgo 3.1.6, 7.

29. LV 4.5.2, 3.1.5; FJuzgo 4.5.2, 3.1.6.

30. LV and FJuzgo 3.1.3

31. Forty-three such charters, ed. Merêa, '0 Dote nos documentos', pp. 78-138. Cf. 'Formulae visigothicae', ed. K. Zeumer, Formulae merowingici et karolini aevi, MGH, Legum, sectio v: Formulae (Hanover, 1886), nos. 14-20, pp. 581-5; and Isidore's tabulae dotales (e g., De eccles. off. 2.20.10) For early records, see Martínez Díez, 'Las instituciones del reino astur a través de los diplomas (718-910)', AHDE 35 (1965), 104-7.

32. Cartas, ed. Merêa, '0 Dote nos documentos', e.g., nos. 6 (Celanova, 1029), 20 (Eslonza, 1104), 26A (Zamora, 1144), 34 (Sahagún, 1165). 'Legendum de nubentibus', Liber comicus, ed.J. Perez de Urbel and A. Gonzalez y Ruiz Zorilla, Monumenta Hispaniae Sacra, ser. lit., vols. 2 and 3 (2 vols., Madrid, 1950-5), vol. 2, pp. 537-40.

33. Cartas, ed. Merêa, '0 Dote nos documentos', e.g, nos 26 (León, 1134), 5 (Sahagún, 1011), 6 (Celanova, 1029), 19 (Sahagún, 1096), 27 (Oviedo, 1146).

34. Ibid, nos 16 (Sahagún, 1092), 12 (Burgos, 1074, the celebrated arras charter given by the Cid to Jimena), 25 (Sahagún, 1129), 34 (Sahagún, 1165), 37 (Sahagún, 1184).

35. Ibid., nos. 18 (Sahagún, 1096), 23 (Oviedo, 1117), 36 (Portugal, 1176), and cf. no. 17 (Sahagún, 1092), also, carta de arras (Oviedo, 1179), ed. P. Floriano Llorente, Colección diplomática del monasterio de San Vicente de Oviedo (Oviedo, 1968), pp. 511-12.

36. Thus Merêa ('0 Dote nos documentos', pp. 63-7), but the distinction remains obscure, see Alonso, 'La dote en los documentos toledanos de los siglos XII-XV', AHDE 48 (1978), 379-419, and Carlé, 'Apuntes', pp 156-66.

37. PON 101; POL 66; FViejo 5.1.1.

38. PON 100; POL 65; FAntiguo 24, FViejo 5.1.2. PON 100 and FViejo 5.1.3 make the proceeds from sale of these gifts equally divisible between husband and wife; for marriage property, see below, Ch. 3.

39. FZamora 39.

40. GM, nos. 134 (1177), 1010 (1185), 310 (1202), and perhaps 957 (1261). FReal 3.2.1-4.

41. FAvilés 25; FOviedo, p 216.

42. FCáceres 70; FUsagre 69.

43. FPlasencia 635. FUclés 28. FValfermoso, CD, p. 120.

44. FMolina 85, 127 FAlfambra 39. FUclés 28. FValfermoso, CD, p. 120.

45. FGuadalajara 34 (1219). FCuenca 9.1-3; FIznatoraf 172-3 (but with the same twenty mrs. for virgins and widows of the town), FAlarcón 162-4, FAlcaraz 3.60-2; FBaeza 170-2; FZorita 172-4; FBéjar 201-13; FTeruel 415; FPlasencia 634. FSoria 288. Martinez Gijón, 'El regimen económico del matrimonio y el proceso de redacción de los textos de la familia del fuero de Cuenca', AHDE 29 (1959), 50-69.

46. E.g., FGuadalajara 51. FLedesma 262, 236. FCoria 51. FPlasencia 67, 69. For a town's domination of its alfoz, see Carlé, 'La ciudad', pp. 69-103. A Woman's status followed that of her household unless she was a servant, as FCoria 44.

47. FBrihuega, p. 147. LF 289 (movables).

48. FCuenca 9.3; FIznatoraf 173; FAlarcón 164; FAlcaraz 3.62; FBaeza 172; FZorita 174; FBéjar 213; FTeruel 415; FPlasencia 634. FUclés 28 FValfermoso, CD, p. 120 FSoria 288 exceptionally mentions land Cf. FReal 3.2.2. FTeruel 415 uses the terms arras and esposalicio interchangeably, distinguishing both from the apreciadura (cap. 416. desponsationem); FL Teruel 305 aureos afonsinos, appreciaturum, pignus.

49. FMolina, p. 127. FUclés 28. FValfermoso, CD, p. 120 FCuenca 9.1-3, et fora alia. FMadrid 115, ed. A. Millares Carlo, G. Sanchez and R. Lapesa, El fuero de Madrid, 2nd edn. rev. (Madrid, 1963). Martinez Gijón, 'El regimen', pp. 53, 60-1.

50. FSoria 288. Cf. FPlasencia 635. For the distinctively different Aragonese and Navarrese arras, retaining its function as widow's support and heritable by children, but rigidly dependent in size and nature on a woman's social status as noble, townswoman or peasant, see, e.g., FViguera 384-94, FJaca 11-13, Los fueros de Aragon según el manuscrito 458 de la Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, ed. Tilander, Acta, Regia Societas Humanarum Litterarum Lundensis, vol. 25 (Lund, 1937), cap 221-7, Fuero General de Navarra, Amejoramiento del Rey Don Phelipe, Amejoramiento de Carlos III, ed. P. Illarreguí and S. Lapuerta (n.p., 1869, repr. Pamplona, 1964), 4.2.1-5.

51. FCáceres 70; FUsagre 69. See the Portuguese customs of Castel-Rodrigo, Castello-Melhor and Alfaites (1188-1230), ed. A. Herculano, PMH, vol. 1, pt. 1. Leges et consuetudines (2 vols., Lisbon, 1856; repr. Nendeln, 1967), vol. 2, pp 791-848; Maldonado, El fuero de Coria, pp. cclxxviii-cclxxx, Martínez Díez, 'Los fueros de la familia Coria Cima-Coa', Revista Portuguesa de História 13 (1971), 343-73.

52. FSalamanca 211.

53. FZamora 32. FSalamanca 211. FCáceres 70; FUsagre 69. FSoria 290, 294. FAlcalá 75. FCuenca 9.6, 7; FIznatoraf 173; FAlarcón 165, FAlcaraz 3.65-67; FBaeza 174; FZorita 177, 178; FBéjar 2,6, 217; FTeruel 417, FPlasencia 635. FMadrid 115. But cf. Alonso, 'La dote', pp. 381-2.

54. FSoria 290, as also Cortes of Jerez (1268), pet. 40 (Cortes, vol. I, p. 79), here valued at 200 mrs.

55. FMadrid 115.

56. The restrictions are first evident in charters of Fernando III to Guadalajara (1242?), MM, p. 261; Uceda (1250), ibid., p. 522, Segovia (1250), ed. D. Colmenares, Historia de la insigne ciudad de Segovia, 2nd edn. rev. (2 vols., Segovia, 1969), vol. I, pp. 380-2, Cuenca (1250), ed Ureña, Fuero de Cuenca, p. 860; Alcaraz (1251), ed. Procter, Curia and cortes, pp 272-3. Cortes of Valladolid (1258), pet. 45 (Cortes, vol. 1, p. 63); Cortes of Jerez (1268), pet. 40 (ibid., p. 79). Procter, Curia and cortes, pp. 124-5, 209, 216-17.

57. FCuenca 9.6 and FLTeruel 308 (supellectile); one or both of the Arabic terms in FIznatoraf '73; FAlarcón 165, FAlcaraz 3.66 (and FAlcázar); FZorita 177; FTeruel 417. FAlcalá 76. Cf FCuenca, Cod. Val. 1.9.2 (rropa), and FBéjar 216 ('todo lo suio'). López Ortiz, 'Algunos capitulos del formulario notarial de Abensalmun de Granada', AHDE 4 (1927), pp. 329, 350, 355; J. Corominas, Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd edn. rev. (Madrid, 1973; repr. 1976), pp. 35, 41.

58. FAlcalá 75, 76, see above, Ch I, fl. 36.

59. LF 125 (ropa); cf. FViejo 5.3.6.

60. Carta matrimonial (1285), GM, no. 1175. Cf. nos. 1010 (1185), 342 (1205), 1080 (1240), 1119 (1288). Alonso reprints no. 1175 ('La dote', pp. 423-7) and others (pp. 421-56), noting the growth of the bride's contribution at Toledo, especially in the first third of the thirteenth century. Cf. Lalinde Abadia, 'Los pactos matrimoniales catalanes', AHDE 33 (1963), 133-266, Herlihy, 'The medieval marriage market', Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1976), 3-27, repr. in The social history of Italy and Western Europe, Collected studies (London, 1978); D. 0. Hughes, 'From bride-price to dowry in Mediterranean Europe', Journal of Famity History 3 (1978), 262-96; and above, Ch. I, n. 37.

61. GM, nos. 1016 (1185); 1028 (1233); 1029 (1253); 1030 (1266); 1033 (1280); 1034 (1281).

62. Conc. of Elvira, c. 54, VC, p. 11. Isidore, De eccles. off. 2.20.11, 12. LV and FJuzgo, 3.6.2, 3. Penitencial silense (tenth century), c. 9, ed. S. González Rivas, La penitencia en la primitiva iglesia española, Estudio histórico, dogmático y canónico de la penitentia en la Iglesia española desde sus origenes hasta los primeros tiempos de la invasión musulmana (Salamanca, 1949), p 178; M. C. Diaz y Diaz, 'Para un estudio de los penitenciales hispanos', Mélanges offerts a Edmond-René Labande à l'occasion de son depart à la retraite et du XX anniversaire du C.E.S.C.M. (Poitiers, 1974), pp. 217-22.

63. LV and FJuzgo 3 4.2. FReal 4.7.2, 3. FSoria 540.

64. LV and FJuzgo 3.6.1-3.

65. LV and FJuzgo 3.1.4.

66. FCuenca 9.4, FIznatoraf 173; FAlarcón 165; FAlcaraz 3.64; FBaeza 173; FZorita 175 (25 mrs.); FBéjar 214, 215; FTeruel 416; FPlasencia 635. FSoria 289. FCáceres 70; FUsagre 69. Garcia Gonzalez, 'El incumplimiento de las promesas de matrimonio en la historia del derecho español', AHDE 23 (1953), 625-31.

67. FSoria 289.

68. FCuenca 9.5; FIznatoraf 173; FAlarcón 165, FAlcaraz 3.63; FBaeza 174; FZorita 176 (100 mrs.), FBéjar 215; FTeruel 416 (200 mrs.); FPlasencia 635.

69. FZamora 32. FSoria 294, 297. FPlasencia 635.

70. FCuenca 9.6, 7; FIznatoraf 173; FAlarcón 165; FAlcaraz 3.65-7; FBaeza 174; FZorita 177, 178; FBéjar 216, 217; FTeruel 417.

71. LF 241, POL 64, FAntiguo 22; FViejo 5.1.4. Cf. FViguera 53.

72. FJuzgo 3.1.5, Le Clercq, 'Mariage', col. 1850. FReal 3.2.5. Cf. the similar Leyes de Toro 52 (1505, Los códigos, vol. 6, p. 564) with the kiss intervening between the betrothal 'de futuro' and the wedding 'de presente', following the theological distinctions in Partidas 4.1.4 (begun 1256) Garcia Garrido, 'El regimen', pp. 399, 422.

73. Liber Ordinum, ms A, col 435. Garcia Alonso, 'La administración', pp. 36-40. It is also absent in earlier rites from Braga and the province of Tarragona. Molin and Mutembe (Le Ritual, p. 187) think the kiss is a charter, as in ninth-century Frankish usage, but see Le Clercq, 'Mariage', cols. 1894-5; and É. Chénon, 'Recherches sur quelques rites nuptiaux', Nouvelle RHD 36 (1912), 587-97.

74. LV and FJuzgo 3.1.3, De eccles. off. 2.20.8; but cf. Ritzer, Le Mariage, pp. 300-2. Eulogius, Memoriale sanctorum 2.10.3, PL 115, col. 778. Liber Ordinum, cols. 434-5. Sacramentarios 2 and 3, ed. García Alonso, 'La administración', p 37, although Isidore's preference is also cited, now as a wedding ring, in Sacramentario 3, cf. Chénon, 'Recherches', pp 584-7, 605-23. For the right hands, see R. Metz, La Consecration des vierges dans l'Église romaine, Le Ritual du Mariage (Paris, 1953), pp. 404-5.

75. Missal de Mateus, Manuscrito 1000 da Biblioteca Pública e Arquivo Distral de Braga, ed. J Bragança (Lisbon, [1975]), p. 575; P. David, Études historiques sur la Galice et le Portugal du VI^e au XII^e siècle (Coimbra, 1947), pp. 503-61. 'Urkunden-Material' (fifteenth- to nineteenth-century rites from Seville, Valencia, Salamanca, Toledo and Madrid), ed. J. Freisen, Das Eheschliessungsrecht in Spanien, Grossbritannien, Irland und Skandinavien (Dänemark mit Schleswig-Holstein, Schweden, Norwegen und Finnland), vol. I: Das Eheschliessungsrecht Spaniens in westgotischer, mozarabischer und neuer Zeit (Paderborn, 1918), pp. 95-159.

76. Carta de dote (1185), GM, no. 1010.

77. FReal 3.1.10. Cf. Partidas 4.1.4, following Bk IV of the Decretals (promulgated 1234). Partidas 4.1 (begun 1256) reflects mixed customary and new canonical traditions; E. Fernández Regatello, 'El derecho matrimonial en las Partidas y en las Decretales', Acta Congressus Iuridici Internationalis VII, Saeculo a Decretalibus Gregorii IX et XIV a Codice Justiniano promulgatis, Romae 12-17 Novembris 1934, Pontificum Institutum utriusque loris, vol. 3 (Rome, 1936), pp. 314-84; Maldonado, 'Sobre la relación entre el derecho de las Decretales y el de las Partidas en materia matrimonial', AHDE 15 (1944), 589-643. Cf. the fourteenth-century model arras and other matrimonial charters in Formularium instrumentorum, ed. Sanchez, 'Colección de formulas jurídicas castellanos de la edad media', AHDE 3 (1926), 490-1, 502-3; 4 (1927), 387, 401-5.

78. FSalamanca 301, 302.

79. FSalamanca 339. FAlba 44. For the padrinos, cf. FPlasencia 591.

80. FCoria 63; FCáceres 71; FUsagre 70, 71. Liber Ordinum, col. 433 ('Ordo ad thalamum benedicendum'). Ritzer, Le Mariage, pp. 299-300, 407-8; Molin and Mutembe, Le Ritual, pp. 27-8, 255-70.

81. Liber Ordinum, col. 434 ('Ordo nubentium'), incomplete and supplemented by the three offices ('Ad vesperum, ad matutinum, ad missam') of the tenth-century Antifonario visigótico mozarabe de la catedral de León, ed. L. Brou and J. Vives, Monumenta Hispaniae Sacra, ser. lit., vol. 5, pt 1 (Barcelona and Madrid, 1969), pp. 454-5 ('Officium de nubentium').

82. David, Études historiques, pp. 341-439; Serrano, El obispado, vol. I, pp. 287-321.

83. Liber Ordinum, cols. 434-6 ('Ordo arrarum'); Sacramentarios 1-3 and Manual, ed. Garcia Alonso, 'La administración', p. 37. For details of the ceremony, some in dispute, see Férotin, Le Liber Ordinum, col. 435; A. Olívar, El sacramentario de Vich, Monumenta Hispaniae Sacra, ser. lit., vol. 4 (Barcelona, 1953), pp. xcv-cxvii; Garcia Alonso, 'La administración', pp. 44-7, Ritzer, Le Mariage, pp. 294-7, 300-2; Molin and Mutembe, Le Ritual, pp. 144-9.

84. Missal, p. 575, Liber Ordinum, cols 436-40 ('Ordo ad benedicendum eos qui noviter nubunt').

85. Liber Ordinum, col. 436 ('parentes'), Sacramentario 3 ('pater aut mater puelle aut aliquis de propinquis'), ed Garcia Alonso, 'La administración', p. 39, Missal, p. 578 ('parentes'). Statuta ecclesiae antiqua (fourth century), c. 101, in Ritzer, Le Mariage, p. 278 ('Sponsus et sponsa . . . parentibus vel para paranymphis offerantur . . .'), with both cited in the prefatory canon of Sacramentanio 3, both were remitted at Vich By 1494 parental traditio of the bride had disappeared at Seville (Manual, ed. Freisen, Das Eheschliessungsiecht, pp. 95-105).

86. Liber Ordinum, col. 436, Sacramentanio 3, ed. García Alonso, 'La administración', p. 39; Missal, p. 578; all of Freisen's rites Le Clercq, 'Voile', DACL, vol. 15, pt 2, cols. 3186-93; Ritzer, Le Mariage, pp. 110-23, 222-5, 232-7.

87. Liber Ordinum, col. 436; Sacramentario 3 and Manual, ed. García Alonso, 'La administración', p. 39; Isidore, De eccles. off. 2.20.6-8; cf. Etymol. 9.7.9, 10. For 'subjection', see Metz, 'Le Statut de la femme en droit canonique médiéval', La Femme, Recueils de la Société Jean Bodin pour l'histoire comparative des Institutions, vol. 12 (2 vols., Brussels, 1962), vol. 2, pp. 61-9, 86-91; but cf. J. Bréjon de Lavergnée, 'Saint Paul, le Mariage et l'incapacité de la femme mariée', Études de droit canonique dédiées à Gabriel Le Bras (2 vols., Paris, 1965), vol. 2, pp. 1059-70.

88. Sacramentarios 2 and 3, ed. Garcia Alonso, 'La administración', p. 40. Chénon, 'Recherches', pp. 597-604, Molin and Mutembe, Le Ritual, pp. 77-9.

89. Manual, ed. García Alonso, 'La admimstración', p. 40, Manual (Seville, 1494), ed. Freisen, Das Eheschliessungsrecht, p. 105, although not in his later texts (e.g, Valencia, 1514). Jerome, Hexameron 5.7, PL, vol. 14, col. 214, I am indebted to Prof. J. A. McNamara for identifying the source.

90. Liber Ordinum, cols. 438, 439; Missal, p. 580 (as also at Vich); Statuta ecclesiae antiqua, cap. 101, in Sacramentario 3, ed. García Alonso, 'La administración', p. 36.

91. Liber Ordinum, cols. 440-3 ('Prefatio solius persone que primum nubsit cum ea persona que iam nubsit'; 'Item ordo de secundis nubtiis'). Cf. the benedictions in cols 441-2 to those from the 'Bobbio Missal', ed. Ritzer, Le Mariage, pp. 431-2.

92. I Toledo 3, 18, VC, pp. 20, 24, II Braga 26, 30, 34, ibid., pp. 94-5, 98, IV Toledo 19, 44, ibid., pp. 199, 207. Prohibited remarriage of the Visigothic queen was a special case owing to her vulnerable political position (J. Orlandis, 'La reina en la monarquía visigoda', AHDE 27-8 (1957-8), 109-35).

93. Refused at Seville (1494) and Valencia (1514) but not at Salamanca (1532), in the rites ed. Freisen, Das Eheschleissungsrecht, pp. 95-105, 106-22, 128-39. For the view that refusal was not usual medieval practice see Le Bras, 'A. Rosambert, "La Veuve en droit canonique jusqu'au XIV^e siècle"', Revue des sciences religieuses 6 (1926), 281-8.

94. Conc. of Coyanza, c. 5, Portuguese ms, ed. García Gallo, 'El concilio de Coyanza, contribución al estudio del derecho canónico español en la alta edad media', AHDE 20 (1950), p. 296; Oviedo ms, ibid., pp. 601-2.

95. FSalamanca 188.

96. FSalamanca 301, 302, 339. FAlba 44, 118.

97. FTeruel 462, but not FLTeruel 349; cf., e.g., FPlasencia 13; FAlarcón 211, 217; FBéjar 287, 296. FSoria 499; FReal 4.17.7.

98. FSoria 292, as Cortes of Jerez (1268), pet. 40 (Cortes, vol. 1, p. 79); FSoria 293.