[68] The Church Fathers, theologians and canonists ranked women by their virtue as defined in terms of sexual abstinence and evaluated them as the sower in Matthew estimated the fertility of soils. Virgins were the most prized and respected. Next came widows, by definition chaste. The lowest marks went to married woman. ⁽¹⁾ This sequence, characterizing women in both religious and secular vocations, did not invariably match the priorities of medieval laymen. The descending assessment, if applied to ordinary Castilian townswomen, would not have received acclaim from, among others, the founders and leading citizens of towns, who regarded marriage as a social imperative, population growth as an urgent need, and the acquisition of a wife as a means, though not without obstacles, for advancement. We should not dismiss the ecclesiastical ideology as lacking influence on medieval conceptions of the female sex, but experience did not reinforce the theory that a wife, perhaps one's own above all, was inferior to a virgin or widow. Very different assumptions about feminine virtue or value are apparent, for example, in the scale of pecuniary fines meted out for fondling and molesting women at Alcalá de Henares and Sepúlveda, with a maximum of four mrs. at both towns when the victim was a married woman but descending for a widow and virgin to three and two at Alcalá, two and one at Sepúlveda. ⁽²⁾ Distinctions among the categories did not lack importance, but their order here is just the reverse of the ecclesiastical sequence.

Married women and mothers necessarily occupied positions of distinction in a Reconquest community, and medieval Castilian men held strong feelings about a married woman's dignity. Settlement in a town nevertheless offered husbands unique opportunities for leadership in the military and public arena, thereby strengthening traditional perceptions of men as the primary sex. A town's [69] fundamentally conjugal households remained mustering, fiscal and political units whose community obligations and formal dealings with officials and neighbours were undertaken by a married woman's husband, even when she owned their house. This does not mean that domesticity and child-rearing totally submerged a wife's personality or even independence. The medieval household made extensive demands on a woman's energy and talents, earning her respect and special consideration as an eminent member of her community. Many of the details of her domestic life remain unfortunately obscure, but a wife's importance will become plain if we consider married women primarily from the perspective of conjugal economics, certain practical aspects of the marriage relationship, and the more public side of a couple's obligations towards one another.

Medieval Castilian marriages were essentially partnerships whose assets consisted of three parts: the property of the wife, that of her husband, and that belonging to both and divisible between the couple in varying proportions during their marriage and after its dissolution. The third part was their acquisitions (lucrum, ganancia, gananciales) which included earnings, income and investments balanced against debts, fines and other liabilities. This three-part conception of conjugal properties -- the individually owned assets of each plus their jointly owned acquisitions -- is known as a 'society of acquisitions'. It was the characteristic Castilian matrimonial regime through the thirteenth century when a dowry (dos) of the Roman type, meaning wealth set aside for a woman by her family, augmented by her husband and administered separately for the benefit of a widow, began to supplement a woman's support from her personal property and share of acquisitions. Towns regulated diversely the claims of each spouse on the latter. Their respective shares ranged from an arbitrary half to division based on the size of initial and subsequent contributions by each. All three parts of marriage property -- hers, his and theirs -- could consist of land and movable goods, qualities which sometimes affected the claims of each partner on the acquisitions and, less common, the property of the other spouse. This last possibility usually arose only after one of them had died, and it therefore concerned a widow more immediately than a wife. ⁽³⁾

The society of acquisitions went into effect on the wedding day and operated, as stated in the Cuenca fueros, both in life and death. ⁽⁴⁾ Thus, while its full effects might not be felt until one of the spouses died, [70] acquisitions were an on-going feature of matrimonial property arrangements. This partnership was remarkably flexible. Since it usually assumed that the couple's wealth would increase over the years, it was eminently suitable in colonial settlements where colonizers hoped and expected to improve their lot, especially by residence in a town. The arrangement was also useful in communities where the modest fortunes of inhabitants were often measured by fluctuating assets in herds, flocks and agricultural produce, as opposed to extensive real-estate holdings. Above all, the society of acquisitions allowed for initial discrepancies in wealth and protected the individual partners and their respective heirs. Its underlying standards of generosity and fairness complemented those of partible inheritance and were in principle gender blind. The sex of spouses rarely affected the magnitude of their claims on jointly owned property. The society of acquisitions thus permitted municipal wives, as well as their husbands, to profit from wise stewardship of the couple's assets and opportunities to increase them. Many of these generalities are subject to important exceptions from a woman's point of view, but it is plain that wives, like husbands, could look forward to benefits from a well-managed partnership to which both contributed resources and talents which were not infrequently complementary rather than equal.

A wife's initial assets included her arras, her trousseau, and whatever she possessed before marriage. The last two were often advances on inheritance from parents, just as arras and her husband's property were not infrequently family gifts. Such advances, preferably movable goods, could include land, but even this often came out of their parents' acquisitions, that is, the latter's jointly owned assets. ⁽⁵⁾ Whatever their source, the advances were counted as part of the new husband's and wife's shares of sibling inheritance, and like any 'ancestral property' (abolengo) which each received later as a legacy, were subject to reversion (troncalidad) to one side or the other and diverse restrictions on the manner in which such property, especially land, could be sold. It was therefore necessary to keep careful track of each spouse's capital contributions to the society of acquisitions, but their assets were jointly administered, by the husband officially, for their mutual benefit during the marriage and constituted a community of properties which supported the conjugal household.

Contributions from each side would usually be settled in a general [71] if not specific way before betrothal, At Uclés parents or siblings had until a year after the wedding to deliver wedding gifts, and they could change their minds about the extent of their support for the newlyweds. ⁽⁶⁾ This possibility, as well as the limited goods parents usually gave their children at marriage, did not make for a highly secure beginning, at least in terms of independence. Young couples could thus start married life with limited funds, and they might continue to live for a time with parents or siblings of one side or the other. ⁽⁷⁾ The new couple and their society of acquisitions, however, were a separate book-keeping unit, and they commenced acquiring property even before they bought, built or inherited a house and set up housekeeping on their own. When a young couple sought independence, the place to go was a new town in the process of being colonized.

Wedding presents, aside from family gifts, were the first of the couple's newly acquired possessions. At Plasencia their wedding sponsors (padrinos) collected them on behalf of the new ménage. Gathering presents may thus have been a task assigned the bride's madrina who rode in her wedding procession. At Uclés promises of gifts from persons other than close relatives did not have to be fulfilled, and the requests of wedding sponsors to honour them may have seemed less imposing on neighbours' good intentions than requests made by seemingly greedy newlyweds or their parents. ⁽⁸⁾ At many towns such gifts, like all later donations from persons other than relatives, were shared by the couple. ⁽⁹⁾

This was not true of all gifts everywhere. Thirteenth-century customs of the Castilian aristocracy, the Fuero Real and the fuero of Soria followed Visigothic law by making presents from the king, a lord or even a friend the property only of the designated recipient. Here gifts belonged jointly to the couple only when the donor specified that the property was for both. ⁽¹⁰⁾ Joint royal donations, however, appear characteristically in the charters of Alfonso VIII of Castile when he rewarded a vassal, butler, armourer or one of his daughters' nurses. He routinely named spouses as co-beneficiaries of the royal largesse much more frequently than did contemporary kings in León. Attributing royal, seignorial and other gifts solely to one of the spouses, must have been more beneficial separately to husbands than wives, but this did not prevent a man's daughters from inheriting even castles in later generations of his family. ⁽¹¹⁾ Any such substantial donation would be a most unusual acquisition in the lives [72] of an ordinary municipal couple, but the manifestly increasing emphasis on private property and initiative during the thirteenth century meant a weakening of the concept of marriage partners as a single property-sharing unit. This development, not invariably prejudicial to wives, occurred with the revival of Visigothic as well as Roman law.

The Fuero Juzgo presents a rudimentary society of acquisitions which recognized a couple's discrepancies in wealth and acknowledged certain prerogatives for male initiative. Profits accruing to the couple during marriage were divided in proportion to the contributions of each spouse but by halves when the difference was so slight as to be inconsequential. Personal gifts were separately owned, but so was military booty which was explicitly reserved to a husband even if he obtained it with the assistance of slaves belonging to his wife. Here the Fuero Juzgo cited scripture as authority, explaining that a husband was caput mulieris. His masculine precedence gave him authority over his wife's slaves, but there was also the practical consideration that he was responsible if they caused damages when helping him win the spoils. ⁽¹²⁾ While later descriptions of the society of acquisitions survive less abundantly from Leonese than Castilian towns, it seems evident that major characteristics of the Leonese tradition, in so far as it followed the Fuero Juzgo, were both the possibility of sometimes attributing acquisitions to each spouse on the basis of their individual contributions, in property and effort, and the preference given to male initiative, specifically in acquiring wealth through military activities. Neither of these principles invariably governed the later medieval society of acquisitions during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

It was the custom, both among the aristocracy and in the towns, to make all matrimonial income and profits, excluding inheritances and sometimes gifts, divisible by half. These included earnings and purchases of land, animals and any other goods. Each spouse owned half of all these additions, regardless of which one earned them. Thus, with the doubling of a matrimonial flock of sheep that began with contributions of sixty head from the wife and forty from her husband, the increment would be divided fifty-fifty rather than in shares of sixty and forty. If the wife owned a vineyard but no sheep, she would still claim fifty head, but her husband acquired half the proceeds from the sale of her wine. Even if one of them owned all their property and earned every bit of the family's income, this was still divided in half. ⁽¹³⁾

[73] Equal shares did not always apply to investments in land belonging separately to wives and husbands, whether within the town, in the alfoz or somewhere else. At Alcalá de Henares, for example, a quarter of the value of improved property was acquired by the spouse who did not own it but contributed labour or funds to its improvement. ⁽¹⁴⁾ At Brihuega and many other towns the assisting spouse could choose between a quarter of the property and half the value of the improvements alone. At Coria, it is said, a wife who helped her husband clear land, plant a vineyard, build a mill, or otherwise add to the value of property belonging to her husband, could choose between a quarter interest in the full value of this property and half that of its new vineyard or building. ⁽¹⁵⁾ At towns which observed this option, applicable both to husbands and wives, the choice was made after one of them had died, thus resting with the assistant who survived but did not own the property, or the assistant's heirs. Later, with growing emphasis on private property rights, Soria and the Fuero Real made the choice available solely to the actual owner of the property, rather than the assisting spouse, but these later customs still retained the traditional principles of sharing the benefits of investment and labour between spouses. ⁽¹⁶⁾

The society of acquisitions as practised at Cuenca and many other towns was highly egalitarian. ⁽¹⁷⁾ These communities, with their emphatic principles of separate maternal and paternal lineage inheritance, drew no distinction between acquisitions proper and improvements made to property. Here there was no opportunity for the assisting spouse to acquire part of the other's land. Instead all improvements were divided in half like other acquisitions. Increments to the value of matrimonial assets in the form of new buildings or irrigated gardens would be shared equally, irrespective of ownership or the labour and investment made by either spouse. Thus a wife automatically acquired half the value of a new mill or livestock corral whether or not she owned the land on which it was constructed and, an advantage over the other Castilian customs, regardless of the actual labour or capital she may have invested in any such development. At Coria she must have contributed to the addition in order to claim a share of a new house, an enlarged dwelling or any other enhancement to her husband's property. At Cuenca she claimed half the value of any improvement even when her husband financed the construction, did all the work and owned the land on which it was situated. Since men presumably did more heavy [74] agricultural and construction work than women, a husband could have a better chance at Coria to acquire an interest in his wife's property than vice versa. At Soria a husband might be able to improve only property he owned and thus reap all the profits, assuming his wife made no financial contribution to the enterprise. This male advantage disappeared at Cuenca where the couple shared all the benefits on the same footing, even though the wife owned no property, invested no money, and stayed at home to run the house and raise the children. Here she could spend her days sitting in the sun and still profit in full measure from the society of acquisitions, but this was not an activity which any of these customs envisioned for a wife.

The similarities between all these provisions and their assumptions about the role of a wife are more important than their differences. They presuppose that she joined actively and participated fully in improving the couple's economic fortunes whether or not she owned property herself, as she often did. Useful and productive contributions by a wife in work or money, although not necessarily efforts identical to her husband's, are expected and compensated. The material rewards of the marriage partnership complemented partible inheritance, but they also resemble arrangements for colonizing property as found all across the peninsula during the Reconquest, especially the practice of 'shared planting' (medium plantum) which provided for apportioning profits between a landlord and the colonizer who put fields into production or otherwise added to the value of unused land. This standard method for clearing and developing uninhabited waste brought benefits to both partners who shared the income and sometimes divided the improved property when the work was completed. ⁽¹⁸⁾ Details of these partnerships varied from place to place, but the matrimonial society of acquisitions had much in common with them. Highly appropriate in colonial communities, it provided for sharing prosperity resulting from joint endeavours to reap the value of assets owned solely by one spouse. Numerous charters from thirteenth-century Toledo refer to the society of acquisitions, but also to wives who indeed worked side by side with their husbands to plant and cultivate land. On one occasion a wife who had share-cropped with her husband, helping to make a vineyard and pick the grapes, asked for her half separately when the proprietor settled with the pair. ⁽¹⁹⁾ The society of acquisitions recognized that a wife was a full partner in supporting the couple and brightening their economic future, although she was not invariably [75] required to make a direct investment of time, labour or money in the specific projects which added to the wealth she and her husband were accumulating.

It would add to a wife's advantage if booty were deemed jointly owned property. The Fuero Real and the fuero of Soria contradicting the Fuero Juzgo, admitted that it could be so considered, provided a wife helped pay for her husband's military equipment. With a minimum investment in boots or a bridle, a wife would claim half her husband's share of the profits from exploits by the town militia. Earlier Castilian customs at Cuenca and other towns, with their emphatically egalitarian views about matrimonial acquisitions, excluded women and children from an active part in dividing up the spoils brought home by municipal soldiers, but the goods became not solely the property of the married men who captured them. ⁽²⁰⁾ Husbands would have to share them, like other income, with their wives. Booty in the form of livestock, slaves or ransomable captives, military goods, and any spoils from the sack of a Muslim settlement were an important source of wealth to townsmen. Its inclusion in matrimonial acquisitions was not only highly beneficial to townswomen but also permitted them on occasion to acquire helmets, shields and weapons, the ownership of which was the basis of extensive municipal privileges. Although daughters did not usually inherit military gear, the society of acquisitions at a number of Castilian towns allowed a wife to claim a share of booty which, if it included arms, she could then transmit to her sons or even a second husband, together with the possibility of acquiring privileges based upon their possession and use.

So far we have considered the society of acquisitions in terms of growth. Most couples undoubtedly looked forward to prosperous times and staked their hopes and efforts in a partnership they expected to be mutually and consistently profitable. But what of losses and setbacks? The society of acquisitions in good times, could become a society of obligations in bad. Indebtedness, fines and the need or desire to liquidate property could make inroads on matrimonial wealth. It was one thing to recognize that a wife who did or did not own property had claims on a couple's increasing assets but to require her to dispose of them or admit that she was capable of doing so were different matters.

A medieval Castilian husband was the chief administrator of conjugal property, whether or not his authority was explicitly [76] justified, as it sometimes was, on the grounds of Scripture or some traditional text which asserted his special authority (potestas, poder) over his wife's and the couple's affairs. Isidore had characteristically ascribed a woman's relative weakness (imbecellitas sexus) and her need for masculine guidance to a supposed etymological connection between the words for man (vir) and force (vis), an explanation for a husband's precedence that was repeated in the Visigothic Code. ⁽²¹⁾ A wife's 'subjection' implied and sometimes explicitly called for asymmetry indecision making within the conjugal household, at least in regard to formal dealings between a married couple and outsiders. Since custom maintained the principle, and at times the fiction, that a husband had sole authority to administer, especially to liquidate, the property the couple or his wife owned, it was not infrequently desirable to circumscribe his arbitrary actions by instituting substantial protections for his wife.

Important checks on husbands were built into the medieval inheritance structure. According to the late thirteenth-century aristocratic customs, for example, a husband possessed authority (poder) to sell or mortgage any of his wife's property, even when she failed to authorize it. The property affected included whatever she owned before marriage, inherited, or claimed as her share of acquisitions. There was a considerable reservation. If she did not herself concur in the act of alienation, it could later be invalidated, either by the wife when she became a widow or, after her death, by her heirs. Obviously a buyer would be well advised not to cut a deal with a married man behind his wife's back when it affected her interests. ⁽²²⁾ While the towns of Sepúlveda and San Sebastian required a wife's explicit consent when her husband sold her property, Ledesma permitted a living wife or, later, her children to reclaim what her husband had sold in her absence, although not her share of property they had bought. ⁽²³⁾ Thus joint acquisitions, which constituted the most readily liquid assets of a married couple, were not invariably covered by the same protections as those extended to family property which had to be disposed of, not only with the consent of the wife who owned it, but also in accordance with specific provisions for selling it only to members of her family or offering it in advance to her relatives. Every surviving medieval cartulary, with documents typically showing wives acting with their husbands to sell, mortgage, exchange or otherwise dispose of property (not excluding the routine inclusion of queens in all the donations and public acts of medieval Castilian monarchs) proves that joint action [77] by both spouses was usual procedure in alienating any valuable goods, especially land that either of them owned. Incorporating an ordinary wife's consent to her husband's disposal of property in which she or her heirs might stake a claim was a necessary protection for the buyer or beneficiary. Barring a woman's concurrence, preferably in a written charter of alienation with her name appearing in the text as donor, her husband's sale of her property, and sometimes her acquisitions, would be hard to justify against the rights of a woman's heirs. The long-term claims of children and other kin protected a wife against an arbitrary, greedy, or merely incompetent husband. Nowhere do we find, before the fourteenth century, the opportunity for a man to obtain from his wife a procuratorial document authorizing him to act alone on her behalf or, as later developed, a document which went so far as to stipulate that he gave her his consent so that she might consent to his disposal of her property. ⁽²⁴⁾ These later medieval elaborations of a husband's authority over his wife and her goods derived from passages in Roman law, but they were foreign to municipal custom which simply required that a wife participate fully in any commitments her husband made to deplete her assets. This did not invariably apply to property she claimed as acquisitions.

A married townswoman would usually be on hand when she and her husband sold property, especially when it belonged only to her. Presumably she agreed to sell it with the expectation of obtaining a benefit. Usually there was little to prevent her husband from spending the money as he chose, although it was anticipated that the funds were necessary to meet the needs of the household rather than to satisfy his whims. When the Fuero Real and the fuero of Soria gave ownership of a new purchase, bought with the proceeds from the sale of property belonging to one of the spouses, to the husband or wife who had owned the original piece, municipal law gave wives an additional protection against husbands who ignored the cooperative spirit in which they were everywhere expected to manage a couple's affairs. ⁽²⁵⁾ This is not to say that husbands invariably conducted themselves responsibly. Indeed, a wife's explicit consent to dispose of her assets was the primary obstacle standing between her security and her husband's designs to get his hands on what she owned.

One tactic husbands might employ to avoid the need for consent was to have their wives give them their property. The Fuero Juzgo permitted and regulated gifts between spouses after the first year of [78] marriage, but these were primarily presents from husband to wife to increase her endowment and support her in widowhood. ⁽²⁶⁾ Most customs, in contrast, strongly resisted transfers of money and property between spouses, forbidding or carefully setting limitations on interconjugal gifts, testation and death-bed donations. Towards the end of the thirteenth century royal law permitted liberal gifts between spouses, but until then custom discouraged them. The explanation for the traditionally hostile attitude, as stated at Soria, was the danger that a husband would dispossess his wife by persuading her to transfer her property to him in secret, meaning without the knowledge of her kin. ⁽²⁷⁾ If she did, he could dispose of it as his own. Despite egalitarian societies of acquisitions and widespread assertions of a wife's claims to property, husbands gained considerable advantage as a result of their administrative prerogatives to liquidate a couple's wealth. However, any theoretical authority he might claim and attempt to exercise would, in practice, be limited by his wife's careful attention to his undertakings, her fortitude, and her influence in their town. Her ability to circumscribe his independence would be immeasurably strengthened by the support and intervention of relatives acting in their own as well as her interest. The leading citizens of the couple's town also took a dim view of the husband who attempted to defraud or otherwise undermine his wife's security. A husband, officially in charge of a couple's dealings with outsiders, would do well not to underestimate community pressures and opinion and be fair with his wife.

Among a wife's obligations as a partner in the society of acquisitions was her responsibility to share the family debt, although her husband was usually the one who actually contracted obligations. Local credit consisted primarily of circular and short-term debts which created close bonds among the households of a town. Credit in goods, services and, when necessary, cash, undoubtedly fueled the economies of many towns, especially those in the central peninsula where large numbers of merchants, pilgrims and nobles neither lived year round nor visited frequently. Agriculturalists, pastoralists and tradesmen borrowed from one another to plant a crop, buy livestock, or purchase goods in the shops, the weekly market or the annual fair. They might unexpectedly need funds to marry a child, ransom a relative held in captivity, or pay a court fine. The revolving indebtedness of a municipal couple would usually fluctuate with the family's seasonal income, like the wages of shepherds and labourers. [79] Payments for goods, services and borrowed cash would be deferred until harvest, sheep-shearing, the arrival of a company of local merchants who traded in Christian or Muslim regions, or the return of the militia from summer campaign.

The indebtedness of a married couple was widely conceived, like acquisitions, as a matter of concern to both a husband and his wife. Their debts, therefore, whether payable or receivable, were usually shared equally between them, and half of what they owed was often charged to the heirs when one of them died. ⁽²⁸⁾ Since husbands handled most of a couple's formal dealings with persons outside the family, it was sometimes advisable to distinguish the conjugal debt from other obligations for which a wife did not share liability with her husband who contracted them. At Zamora she did not have to pay his gambling debts. Castilian regional customs freed her from this obligation but also from the need to contribute toward loans and loan guarantees her husband made to friends, debts he owed to Jews, and any other personal borrowing which involved expenditures solely for his gratification. ⁽²⁹⁾ At Cuenca borrowing between Christian and Jewish husbands required their wives' corroboration in writing if widows were to be held accountable for the debt. ⁽³⁰⁾ Written confirmation by the women was surely necessary because such transactions consisted of cash loans at high interest and were not infrequently intended for the personal use of the husbands who obtained them, rather than the unrecorded neighbourly credit which town residents ordinarily extended to one another for temporary household needs. Most of a family's debts, however, were financial responsibilities which a wife expected to share with her husband.

The obligations and liabilities of debtors and creditors, who were usually local residents, were carefully regulated in town communities, with the objective of assuring repayment to lenders without unnecessarily damaging matrimonial assets or the valuable property which borrowers put in pledge to their creditors. Local credit did not depend upon written documents but required only that the debtor give items of value, usually household objects or livestock, as pledges to his creditor, or that a man and his wife own sufficient property which the creditor could seize if repayment was not forthcoming voluntarily. When a citizen needed to borrow money but owned no house or visibly stable means of repaying the loan, the lender would be wise to have him name a surety who did. His surety was a local citizen, sometimes a relative or employer, who guaranteed the [80] obligation, paid the creditor if the debtor defaulted, and then assumed responsibility for collecting on the debt. A defendant also needed to name a surety to certify that he would appear in court when another man lodged a complaint against him. A town resident who could not find a fellow citizen to back up his legal and financial commitments was indeed in poor standing in the community and not to be trusted. At twelfth-century Molina de Aragón the alcaldes would banish him in disgrace and order him never to return to his wife and children from whom the complainant or creditor then secured a settlement under the town assembly's supervision. ⁽³¹⁾

While debts comprised credit to finance future undertakings of municipal citizens, they were also widely construed as meaning almost any obligation towards someone outside the debtor's household. They thus included sums the municipal court awarded as restitution for damages to property, trespass, singing insulting songs and hundreds of other relatively minor offences, both civil and criminal, inflicted on one town resident by another. ⁽³²⁾ To obtain redress or collect a contested debt, the plaintiff or creditor had to secure a judgment against the defendant or head of the house where he or she lived. This was the husband in the case of a married couple, but procedures for debt collection immediately inconvenienced the wife of a man who disputed an obligation, refused to pay, and failed to name a surety who would guarantee his appearance before the alcaldes. To obtain a judgment from these magistrates, who heard such cases on Fridays at most towns, it was first necessary to hale the defendant into court. The plaintiff went to the couple's house, usually with another citizen, and began removing property. At Cuenca he took away a straw from the roof on the first day, while at Alba de Tormes he began by dislodging a stake marking the boundary. ⁽³³⁾ These symbolic pledges served notice that the plaintiff was entitled to a hearing before the alcaldes and was therefore allowed lawful entry without fear of infringing the householder's usually inviolable title to his house as his castle. If this first claim on the defendant's property did not induce him to appear in court, or produce sworn guarantees from another citizen that he would appear, the plaintiff returned on subsequent days and began removing portable articles of real value: clothing, furniture, animals, meat, grain, feather beds, arms and all manner of items which he held in pledge pending a settlement. ⁽³⁴⁾ In many Castilian towns the very last object the plaintiff could take from the house, barring the sick bed of an inhabitant and just before he [81] commenced to dismantle the building, was the family's bread starter, the leaven (massa) the wife kept for making the dough for the family's loaves. ⁽³⁵⁾ Since it had to be carried off in a clean white cloth, one imagines that she expected to have the leaven returned to her. Meanwhile, the peace, privacy and dignity of the house were slowly destroyed by this gradual but legal removal of the couple's household goods. The choice of items was usually made at the discretion of the plaintiff who cannot have cared particularly whether he took property of the man or his wife, provided he obtained enough to satisfy the debt or the damages he claimed in the suit he was attempting to initiate. The defendant's wife doubtless made a mental note of what she expected to get back when the matter was finally settled, although at Alfambra she had to be given a list of the articles the plaintiff held, once the intruder ceased his lawful depredations. Here the list was a protection for the wife of a man who had left town without paying his debts. ⁽³⁶⁾ In contrast, Ledesma prohibited creditors from pledging a married woman when her husband was away, and if anyone seized their goods, she could complain to the alcaldes who recovered the pledges. ⁽³⁷⁾ These two different solutions to the problem of the absent administrator juxtapose two different traditions about a wife's proper role as a defendant before the municipal court. Castilian and Leonese customs present essentially contradictory but chronologically successive views about a married woman's responsibility for family finances when her husband was unavoidably or, at times, deliberately out of town.

According to the fuero of Leon and twelfth-century adaptations of its customs at other towns, a wife could not be arraigned, seized or bound to any legal obligation when her husband was away. ⁽³⁸⁾ This temporary immunity was conceived as a protection for married women against coercion by royal bailiffs and other mighty persons, and it persisted at many Leonese towns down into the thirteenth century. All legal actions against a wife and her husband were deferred pending his return to deal with the matter personally. At Villavicencio the need for postponement was explained on the grounds that a wife obeyed no one except her husband who, it was feared, might lose property on her account when he was not in town. This could happen when she was fined for doing something wrong as well as when others sought to take advantage of her. ⁽³⁹⁾ At Sanabria a wife remained secure in her immunity, although it was only proper that her known wrongdoings be reported to her husband when he [82] returned to look into the matter himself. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ At Coria and other towns in Extremadura a wife did not have to answer any charges unless her husband was present, but a man from one of the villages in these townships could send his wife or steward to represent him when summoned to court. ⁽⁴¹⁾ Nearby at Plasencia a woman whose husband was a captive could sue other citizens to recover debts receivable, but no one could interfere in any way with a man's wife and children when he was away for any reason. ⁽⁴²⁾ A Leonese husband in particular was expected to keep a firm hand on all the dealings of his household with other citizens, especially those affecting his control of the family treasury. A wife's transgressions but, far more, her vulnerability to exploitation by other citizens was of utmost concern in postponing any suits against a wife or her absent husband until he returned to treat with their adversaries.

We hear nothing about a married woman's immunity to law suits at Alba de Tormes, a Leonese town which, on the contrary, required a wife to take responsibility for the family's debts when her husband was out of town. The custom here was similar to those practised at Castilian towns and differs from the older tradition usually observed in León. At Alba the debtor's wife had to swear in court that her husband was absent for a legitimate reason. She was given grace periods, ranging from 'nine days', designating the week between sittings of the court, to a year for bringing him to a hearing of the plaintiff's suit. The length of the postponements depended upon whether he was close by at the local pine grove, on a short trip to Ávila or Ledesma, or on a longer journey beyond the Duero or Tagus rivers. He could be in Portugal, León, Burgos or Toledo. Perhaps his wife asserted that he had gone to Santiago, Rome, Jerusalem or some other pilgrimage point. Tending livestock outside the township or service in the militia were also valid reasons she could give for delaying the suit. The debtor's wife was expected to know his whereabouts, and when he did not return within the time allotted for a legitimate destination, she represented him in the case and paid any judgment the court rendered. ⁽⁴³⁾

Castilian customs, like those at Alba de Tormes, were far more solicitous of creditors than of absent husbands and, as a result, the Castilian wife had broad responsibilities for family debts. In Old Castile the wife of Roman de Vario lost a suit to a man who claimed that her husband still owed several mrs. for livestock he had bought. Roman was away when the debt came due, but his wife, who had not [83] known about it, was ordered to pay it within six months if her husband had not returned by then.⁽⁴⁴⁾ Customs from this region allowed a wife to await her husband's return from a known destination before she had to repay funds he had borrowed, but local alcaldes attempted to locate him, and they supervised the taking of property from the couple whenever he could not be found. Lacking sufficient goods to satisfy the obligation, the wife of an absent debtor would be jailed, the penalty of last resort at many communities. ⁽⁴⁵⁾

Customs at Cuenca and other towns were similar, and the wife of an absent debtor had to come to court and swear that he was not in the alfoz, presumably tending sheep or cutting wood in the mountains, but had gone away for some legitimate purpose. He might be serving the king, on duty with the militia, or on a pilgrimage. Hunting, ranging livestock, or a trading expedition were also valid reasons she could give for postponing a hearing on the debt and payment to the creditor. If her husband did not return with known companions or those she presumably named, his wife and children had to pay or allow the creditor to take pledges towards whatever was owed. She was also granted a delay of thirty days if she claimed he was too sick to come to court. ⁽⁴⁶⁾ This delay was the same as that permitted a woman from Old Castile who pleaded that dropsy prevented her from immediately answering the claims of a creditor. At Teruel the ability to get to church was a sign that an individual could get around and thus answer charges other citizens brought against him. ⁽⁴⁷⁾ At most of the towns which required a wife to take over her absent husband's obligations, his captivity in a Muslim prison permitted her no delay in paying his creditors. Plasencia, however, allowed her a year's grace, while at Alfambra collection was postponed indefinitely until the captive returned, provided it was certain he was still alive. ⁽⁴⁸⁾

Quite possibly a debtor's wife would not know his whereabouts. When he defaulted and disappeared, responsibility for paying what he owed fell on his surety. At Cuenca the surety who could not locate the man would collect double the debt from his wife and children. ⁽⁴⁹⁾ If the man had no surety or could not be found, she could postpone payment by swearing in court that she did not know where he was. She would also have to affirm that she was not sending him food to some hideout in the alfoz and was thus not a conspirator in his disappearance. She had to return to court on three successive Fridays and again swear that she had not yet been able to locate him. Provided she did not bring him along to one of these mandatory court [84] appearances, she was then convicted in his place and obliged to pay the debt, just as she had to pay it if he failed to return as expected when she claimed he was away for a valid reason. Whatever arrangements a wife made as a surrogate defendant bound her husband when he eventually returned, thus protecting creditors against the chance that he might dispute her actions or the court's decision when he got back. ⁽⁵⁰⁾ All these duties fell on a wife because she was the person in possession of the debtor's goods, but the responsibilities fell on a man's children, resident mistress (barragana) or whoever had property belonging to him. ⁽⁵¹⁾

A Castilian wife might have to endure worse punishment than repayment, from which a wife in Leonese towns was protected. Debtors were imprisoned when they did not have the funds or sufficient goods to satisfy their creditors, and the wife of a debtor who had disappeared was jailed when her postponements expired and she was unable to pay the debt. At Cuenca and other towns a debtor's wife, children and sometimes a parent could also volunteer to take a convicted debtor's place in prison, thus permitting a responsible man to raise the money to pay his creditor. His substitutes could usually expect release within thirty days, after which the debt doubled. At these towns imprisoned debtors or their deputies were detained not in the public jail but by their creditors, although Sepúlveda was jailing debtors with other criminals in the town prison at the end of the thirteenth century. ⁽⁵²⁾ The customary detention of debtors by other citizens dictated special consideration for female prisoners, whether an unmarried woman with bad debts of her own or a wife who replaced her husband necessarily or voluntarily. Although Plasencia permitted women, and children under twelve, to be confined in foot irons or stocks, at Cuenca and other towns these prisoners were supposed to be restrained only by a chain, and they were spared the manacles, handcuffs, foot irons and stocks designed to prevent the movement as well as flight of male prisoners. ⁽⁵³⁾

Presumably a wife who was jailed when her husband had disappeared and left her saddled with the family debts attempted to persuade another citizen or even her jailor to bail her out. A responsible Castilian husband who had to go away for a long time would not sneak out of town without settling his affairs but make arrangements to protect his wife against the possibility of losing property or being jailed on his account. When a man of Alcalá de Henares planned to go away on a pilgrimage or for any lengthy stay, [85] he notified the judge, divided conjugal property with his wife and, 'putting out the light', left with the assurance that she could not be sued for any of his debts during his absence. ⁽⁵⁴⁾ At Cuenca, Soria and the other Castilian towns which imprisoned the wives of penniless and absent debtors any couple who decided to separate voluntarily could divide their goods and break up the society of acquisitions. We are not told why custom countenanced this dissolution of conjugal property arrangements, but it must have been a necessary and desirable precaution when couples went their separate ways for a long period or even permanently. Their decision, said to be mutual, would serve the same purpose as the division arranged by a husband departing from Alcalá and would shield a woman from calamity when a wastrel vanished leaving his wife to cope with the debts he left behind. ⁽⁵⁵⁾

Selling her assets and absconding without paying debts were not the only ways a husband could jeopardize his wife's security. She particularly needed protection against the consequences of his more serious wrongdoings. The high pecuniary penalties exacted for homicide and a host of other violent and outrageous crimes were surely among the heaviest burdens ever to fall on a municipal household. Since the perpetrators of the costliest crimes were usually men, their wives, even when not accomplices and therefore exculpated, sometimes had to face the hardship of paying the fiscal demands of town officials and the damages awarded to injured citizens or their relatives. For homicide these could run to several hundred mrs. In small seignorial settlements the whole community might be required to share the lord's fine when a man was killed. This and other onerous collective payments were abolished for the residents of privileged towns, but public fines and compensatory damages remained obligations of municipal criminals and their families. ⁽⁵⁶⁾ These economic consequences of breaking the law were often compounded by the loss of a breadwinner turned felon who, when convicted of some grave offence, was usually exiled as an outlaw. Alternatively, he could be executed, an increasingly frequent penalty for the most serious crimes in the course of the thirteenth century.

The towns' permanent state of military preparedness, the commitment of municipal elites to the practices and values of soldiering, and male competition for distinctions won on the battlefield disposed townsmen to employ brute force as a substitute for extended argument and litigation to settle quarrels. Personal injuries and [86] insults to reputation and self-respect could easily erupt into bitter confrontations between citizens, especially male citizens. Although custom permitted revenge and the lawful murder of the most heinous offenders by their enemies, a man was rarely justified in taking the law into his own hands when he had suffered a grievous wrong. It was illegal to do so before he had voiced his injury to town authorities and then publicly denounced the offender at an orderly arraignment, both procedures followed by trial and conviction in the town court. Such restraints were required to maintain law and order in the close quarters of a medieval town, but they were obviously necessary as a result of the violent behaviour to which medieval townsmen were prone. The repetition of imposing fines for carrying forbidden or concealed weapons in the towns, and the highly detailed descriptions of the disfiguring and dismembering injuries that required compensation, point to anger exploding into violence when one townsman offended another. At most towns a fearful citizen could require a suspected enemy to swear an 'oath of safety' promising not to harm him. The financial price of breaking the oath was enormous and usually resulted in a sentence of exile, tearing down the oath-breaker's house or other penalties which added to the financial cost exacted for injuring or killing the man to whom the oath had been sworn. At Teruel women were explicitly forbidden to give such oaths on behalf of persons other than themselves, although a man could bind all of his local kinsmen by the security. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ Women were not necessarily immune to the high potential for violence in the towns, but they were certainly not the main offenders when blows began to fall, and it was patently desirable to protect innocent women from the consequences of excessive provocations on the part of the men they married.

At León and communities which adopted its customs in the twelfth century, the wife of a convicted killer or a man who had fled to escape prosecution for homicide was guaranteed 'her half' and the family dwelling before municipal officials confiscated the remainder as his penalty. Only after her property and their house had been set aside did the authorities step in to seize the man's attachable goods. ⁽⁵⁸⁾ This privilege was a more substantial protection than a wife's temporary immunity from prosecution when her husband was out of town, for it secured her a permanent place in the town from which her husband had fled or from which he could expect to be exiled if convicted, provided the victim's relatives did not catch and kill him. The same privilege was extended to the wives of fugitives at twelfth-century [87] Toledo, Escalona, and later at towns in thirteenth-century Andalusia, explicitly to prevent a wife and their children from suffering the consequences of her husband's flight to avoid prosecution. There was always the possibility that he would return, make amends, and settle down to become a responsible citizen once again. ⁽⁵⁹⁾ Whether he did or not, the immunity of 'her half' was the least of the couple's property kept intact for the benefit of a Leonese wife, although at Salamanca and Ledesma the forfeited goods of an executed murderer were divided in thirds among his widow, his relatives and town authorities. ⁽⁶⁰⁾ In León the heirs of a married criminal were usually the only ones to suffer economic consequences, while the parents of unmarried felons and lesser criminals were obligated to pay for them. ⁽⁶¹⁾

At Alba de Tormes the protected 'half' of the criminal's wife referred to her share of the couple's acquisitions, rather than their attachable wealth and the couple's dwelling. This must also have been true of 'her half' at Coria and other towns in the Leonese Extremadura. ⁽⁶²⁾ The same immunity was observed in the north at Villafranca del Bierzo and Sanabria, towns with thirteenth-century customs based on the customs of León. A wife's property and the half she claimed as acquisitions could not be touched to pay what a fugitive or convicted murderer owed. At Sanabria Alfonso X ruled that confiscation and the death penalty given an apprehended killer amounted to double indemnity. Now the man's heirs rather than the authorities should have his property. If he escaped, his wife was still protected, but she would not necessarily claim their house since her share here was determined by what she owned herself in addition to acquisitions. ⁽⁶³⁾ Nevertheless, Leonese towns went out of their way to disrupt as little as possible the life of a townswoman married to a criminal.

A wife was a valuable municipal resident in her own right, despite the fact that her husband had proved himself a cowardly or vicious felon. Custom never admitted her direct culpability in her husband's crime, but her complicity could be subject to interpretation. At Alcalá de Henares the wife of a man charged with homicide was allowed to return to live there if she desired, although she had supported and protected him after he had fled to avoid trial. ⁽⁶⁴⁾ This decision must have resulted from a local precedent on behalf of an anonymous woman whose motives for changing her plans the record lamentably obliterated, but it seems evident that the town welcomed her back.

Contrary to Leonese customs, Castilian towns did not guarantee [88] the immunity of a wife's property from seizure to satisfy the legitimate claims of justice and aggrieved citizens when her husband had committed an expensive crime. At Uclés, Brihuega, Soria and other towns fixed fines and damages fell on the household as a unit, and a wife's property could be attached to pay her husband's penalties. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ As a result, harsh consequences fell on a woman named Juliana, married to a miller who had killed a man in Old Castile. The precedent laid down by the judge established that claims against the couple's property should first affect their movable acquisitions and then any land they had bought. The criminal's property was logically the next vulnerable goods, but he may not have owned any since the last and only other property forfeited was land Juliana possessed before she married him. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ Equally severe was the custom at Cuenca and other Castilian towns. A wife's inherited land, as well as her movable property, could be confiscated to pay fines and damages when her husband became a fugitive. Her unlimited responsibility was explained in several versions of these customs as a reform measure enacted in opposition to practices elsewhere, evidently the kingdom of León. There are places, notes the fuero of Cuenca, where it is customary for the wife of a malefactor to extract her half of their property before the rest was seized. Here the judge impounded everything they owned when the accused husband fled to avoid trial for homicide, selling someone into slavery, or any equally serious offence with severe economic penalties. If property was left over once financial restitution had been made, the balance was returned to his wife. ⁽⁶⁷⁾

This self-styled reform was evidently necessary to secure the payment of fines and damages, and perhaps to prevent a wife from siphoning off conjugal property to the fugitive in hiding. A wife's broad liability, however, was explicitly justified, and 'no cause for wonder', it is said, on the grounds that she was accustomed to share the wealth her husband brought home and should therefore bear misfortune when that, too, arrived. Other passages in the Cuenca fueros adopt the same moral tone, but now in reverse, to justify parents' appropriation of the wages and even booty earned by their unmarried children. Since fathers and mothers had to pay fines (although not debts) on behalf of children, especially sons who got into trouble with the law, 'parents' power' (potestas parentum) encompassed their taking the income as well. ⁽⁶⁸⁾ The economic interdependence of a married couple was couched in similar terms. It [89] resulted not only in a wife's liability when her husband fled to avoid prosecution, but also underlies the rather sentimental ruling that a single pecuniary penalty should be given the husband and wife who fought side by side in a street brawl. ⁽⁶⁹⁾ Wives and husbands shared good times and bad, as the fueros say, but this was a harsh lesson to preach to a woman whose husband had fled from his obligations and left her to shoulder the unusually bitter consequences.

The so-called reform at Cuenca did not endure beyond the thirteenth century, probably owing, in part, to the implication of a wife's inheritance in the payment of her husband's fines, property in which her relatives had an interest. At Sepúlveda and late thirteenth-century Plasencia it could no longer be seized to pay his penalties, for in 1285 Sancho IV amended the fuero of Cuenca, avowedly by request, to abolish both a wife's economic liability for her criminal husband and the necessity for parents to pay their children's fines. ⁽⁷⁰⁾ These changes mark a weakening of the traditional economic interdependence of household members in Castile and a narrowing of economic obligations when one of them took an initiative that threatened the underpinnings of the establishment. Ideally the matrimonial society of acquisitions was a partnership of limited obligations but unlimited gains for both spouses, together with their children and other heirs. The totally unlimited partnership envisioned at Cuenca met with stiff resistance from Leonese customs which repeatedly found it necessary and desirable to protect a townswoman's economic security, especially when her husband jeopardized it by failing to uphold his responsibilities as a law-abiding citizen.

Married women also broke the law, and a husband's liability for his wife's pecuniary penalties was explicitly mentioned at Soria.⁽⁷¹⁾ Moreover, married women entered the fray with their husbands when citizens clashed in the streets of a town. Husbands nevertheless consistently committed and understandably ran away from the most violent and costliest crimes, thus making an issue of their wives' property. A wife's onerous legal and economic obligations toward other town residents plainly increased in tandem with her husband's failures to uphold his community responsibilities, possibilities entertained at greater length in Castilian than Leonese towns. Provided a townsman remained a reliable citizen who paid his debts and obeyed the law, his wife had nothing to fear. It was obviously in her interest that he live as a dependable and upright member of the [90] community, but it would be difficult to assess the true effectiveness of marriage as a force for keeping husbands reliable.

Experience dictated protections for married women whose husbands were less than model citizens, but custom remained supportive of a responsible husband's efforts to keep a firm hand on the affairs of his household including, and at times especially, the activities of his wife. Since a married man's public responsibilities included paying household taxes and the fines and damages incurred by members of his immediate family and other dependents, he had to supervise carefully any major commitments that affected the house as an economic unit. Many towns, for example, prohibited wives, as well as children, from standing as sureties for other citizens. At Cuenca this was justified on the grounds that a husband exercised authority (potestas, poder) over his wife. If a wife at Alcalá de Henares or in Old Castile made such a promise unknown to her husband, he could cancel it, and physically rebuke the intended beneficiary of his wife's generosity with a blow. ⁽⁷²⁾ At Molina de Aragón a married woman was not supposed to sell or put anything in pledge without her husband's permission. ⁽⁷³⁾ A number of other towns adopted fixed limits on the amount of money a wife could legally spend, borrow or lend unless he had approved it. At Villavicencio, with its traditionally Leonese exemption from prosecution for a wife whose husband was away, she could not be fined or pledged for more than five sueldos, thus effectively voiding any large disbursements made without her husband's approval. Pursuing this line, Coria and nearby towns, which also expected a husband to be present when someone sued his wife, permitted married women to borrow and lend, one to another, without their husbands' intervention in litigation arising from their transactions, but the funds involved could not surpass one mr. In Old Castile a husband did not have to honour the debts of his wife if they exceeded five sueldos, although she could be called to account for larger ones after he had died. Exempt from the limitation were women who sold bread, the wives of pedlars and others who had to do business on behalf of their husbands. At Soria a married woman was not supposed to initiate suits against other citizens, whether women or men, and she did not have to appear as a defendant without her husband unless she was called to replace him when he had left town without paying a debt. Here, however, an exception was made for the townswoman who ran a shop selling articles like wax, oil and pepper. She paid her suppliers, collected from her customers, and could sue [91] and be sued by them without the need for her husband's intervention. He was necessarily implicated only when she was charged with a serious matter involving a public fine and having nothing to do with the conduct of her trade. At Sepúlveda the ceiling on a wife's transactions was one mr., whether for buying or selling, and engagements for larger amounts without her husband's consent were void. Here, however, a wife kept company with other female members of a household, explicitly unmarried daughters and widows who lived with a parent or relative of either sex. ⁽⁷⁴⁾ Such fixed limits usually reflected the maximum amount of credit an individual would extend without asking for an outside surety, and the head of a household, male or female, exercised broad authority to prevent its members from making formally binding engagements with creditors and depleting assets which supported the well-being of its members. In the conjugal household this person was the husband, and the one most apt to circumvent his power of the purse was his wife. The main difficulty for a husband was undoubtedly the commitments his wife made without his knowledge, while the main obstacle for her was his consent to spend money in ways he might not approve. Persuasion was obviously a legitimate tactic for bringing him around so that she could buy a new dress, lend money to a friend or go into business for herself. When persuasion failed, married women must have taken action anyway. Quite a few towns therefore made it a policy to limit a wife's spending allowance.

A husband's prerogative to manage his family's affairs did not necessarily mean that married women did not appear as litigants in the municipal courts, although it was widely expected that a husband would be on hand to assist his wife through the depositions and oaths of a case, even where plaintiffs were not required to defer complaints against a wife pending her husband's return to town. The Fuero Juzgo allowed a wife to represent herself in court. If she requested her husband to speak for her, she was not bound by the verdict, could appeal the judgment, and seek another representative. ⁽⁷⁵⁾ The Fuero Real made the judgment binding when a husband represented his wife at her request, but a woman could argue her own case although not those of others. This was the rule adopted at Soria where a husband was usually expected to be present for any serious legal business in which his wife was a litigant. ⁽⁷⁶⁾ At Salamanca the alcaldes would present a wife's arguments when her husband was sick or away. This was also the custom at Ledesma where citizens were not supposed to [92] pledge married women when their husbands were out of town. ⁽⁷⁷⁾ Many towns prohibited any person other than a woman's husband from defending her in the municipal court or outside it, especially against him, and the fines for such arrogation of a husband's duty and right to protect and defend his wife were exorbitant. ⁽⁷⁸⁾

As for punishing her, wife beating, permitted in canon law, was not altogether unknown. ⁽⁷⁹⁾ The Leonese town of Benavente, and other communities which adopted its customs in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, granted a husband immunity when, by chance, his wife died after he had thrashed her. It was expected that this was done only to correct and reprove her, just as mothers and fathers had to discipline their children, masters their apprentices, and teachers their students. It is said that a husband's exoneration depended upon their having led a good life together, 'as human beings do', but we are not told who evaluated their prior felicity. ⁽⁸⁰⁾ The husband's immunity seems to be circumscribed, so that he would not necessarily be let off if public opinion judged him a bully. If they quarreled habitually, he might think twice before delivering a serious beating lest he not be excused on the grounds of accidental homicide.

Connubial bliss cannot have characterized medieval marriages any more than those of other times, but the wife who rebelled was usually left to her husband's discipline. Occasionally municipal authorities could intervene to protect her, but many towns reinforced a husband's prerogatives of protection and direction, especially when fear or wrangling impelled her to leave home and seek refuge in someone else's house after a spat. She might be fined or simply turned over to her husband, occasionally with the support of the bishop but usually only by town officials who sometimes required her to explain her motives and collected the financial penalties from those who protected her. ⁽⁸¹⁾ At Coria, even if her ally was a relative, the latter was fined for each night she spent away from home, while the fugitive herself was dispossessed. At Plasencia a husband whose wife was missing was permitted to enter uninvited another citizen's house to look for her, just as he could go in searching for vagrant livestock. ⁽⁸²⁾ In Old Castile we hear of a woman named Urraca who had left home one night in the midst of a quarrel and was then mortally wounded by a rock. Since her husband had refused to let her back in the house, he was held responsible for her death and hanged. ⁽⁸³⁾ A husband was expected to protect and defend his wife, but others were forbidden to shield any married woman in derogation of her husband's obligation [93] and prerogative to do so. Spending the night away from home, even in the house of a relative, was a special disgrace since this absence most particularly raised suspicions of her infidelity. Moreover, a wife's protector was not invariably a kinsman or a sympathetic friend but sometimes a man who seduced her or, more serious, carried her off for good. ⁽⁸⁴⁾

A few small communities attempted to stabilize a theoretically indissoluble but shaky marriage by fining both spouses when they agreed to separate voluntarily. These exactions were not widespread but seem to be mainly seignorial levies designed to prevent the break up of a household when one of the couple decided to leave a settlement, a circumstance which several towns explicitly foresaw by permitting couples to divide their property and go their separate ways. ⁽⁸⁵⁾ Some towns recognized the bishop's right to intervene to reconcile a couple who had separated voluntarily. ⁽⁸⁶⁾ Now and then husbands and wives were both penalized when they fled with lovers, usually by confiscation of the offender's goods to the benefit of the abandoned spouse. ⁽⁸⁷⁾ Such regulations are rare, however, since many communities accepted legitimate discrepancies in the penalties for wives and husbands who deserted one another. Either the wife alone was punished or her penalties were more costly. At Pozuelo de Campos, for example, a wife had to pay twice the fine of a husband, while at San Román de Hornija near Toro hers was six times higher. ⁽⁸⁸⁾ In lower Navarre her husband confiscated everything 'down to the salt' and, while an effort was made here to protect the personal property of a wife whose husband had run off with another woman, the abandoned wife did not receive any of his goods. ⁽⁸⁹⁾ In practical terms it mattered little whether a wife had formally repudiated her husband or deserted him, since both usually meant that she had joined up with another man and left town, with her remaining property confiscated or sold to pay high fixed damages. It seems plain that wives did not invariably pass up opportunities for escaping from insufferable marriages. This was one of the more serious examples of rebellion and intolerable conduct a wife might set for other women of the community, as we shall have occasion to examine later in greater detail.

In conclusion, a wife plainly owed her husband respect, obedience and fidelity in return for his protection, support and, to some extent, control. These reciprocal obligations made the ideal relationship hierarchical in principle. A husband's precedence was fostered [94] everywhere by the necessity for married men to fulfil the demanding public duties of a town's military, governmental and law enforcement institutions. He was the senior partner in marriage, and hortatory slogans asserting his power over his wife as a woman were invoked occasionally to explain or defend his rights to dispose of their property or prevent her from doing so without his consent. In practice a husband's effective authority over his wife remained far from absolute since migration, settlement policies, and partible inheritance made marriage essentially an alliance of collaborators. A wife could be the mainstay of her family's support and was, at the least, a primary contributor to its well being. It was therefore necessary to hedge her husband's administrative authority with protections against the possibility of his taking advantage of her. Moreover, he possessed an illusory monopoly on decision making within the family since consensus rather than arbitrary management was often required to handle family matters. Both partners disciplined children, arranged their daughters' marriages and, above all, shared in the prosperity of a happily managed partnership. A wife directed female servants, dealt with male farm employees and occasionally acted as her husband's deputy in court. ⁽⁹⁰⁾ She was clearly the person in charge of the domestic establishment, especially when her husband was away. Since men regularly left town for fighting and other reasons, married women had to be counted on to keep households running smoothly during those times. At Cuenca a husband was called lord of the house: dominus domus, sennor de casa or padre de las compannas. His wife was domina, sennora or madre, 'mother of the household company', literally of all those who shared the bread of the house: children, relatives, retainers, employees. In the Latin texts she is called materfamilias, but a wife was not the materfamilias as defined by Isidore: a woman who at marriage passed into her husband's family. ⁽⁹¹⁾ The municipal sennora was not a foreign emissary dispatched by one family into another. On the contrary, she was an individual who retained invaluable links with her own relatives through property and affection. These ties, as well as good relations with her neighbours, mobilized public opinion and the law to defend a married woman against unjust treatment by her husband, although it was customary to assert and justify a law-abiding husband's prerogative to command her obedience and forbid anyone from interfering against him on her behalf. Ideally the marriage partnership was a stable, mutually beneficial and cooperative venture, but it seems plain that opportunities for dissolving, in fact [95] if not canonically, a marriage that was less than harmonious, were not always ignored by husbands or wives. Migration or, more accurately, flight remained a possibility that could weigh heavily in a married couple's treatment of one another.

1. Metz, 'Le Statut de la femme', pp. 95-6.

2. FAlcalá 85-8. FSepúlveda 186.

3. Most recently, Lalinde Abadía, Iniciación histórica al derecho español, 2nd edn (Barcelona, 1978), pp. 697-731.

4. E.g., FCuenca 10.21 and LF 240.

5. FAlcalá 75, 76. FBrihuega, p 155. FTeruel 438. FSoria 330.

6. FUclés 205.

7. E.g. LF 125. Cf. FEstella 2.12.5 and FSan Sebastián 3.6.5, based on FJaca 349, 251.

8. FPlasencia 591. FUclés 205.

9. FCuenca 10.14; FIznatoraf 191; FAlarcón 182; FAlcaraz 3.88; FBaeza 195; FZorita 198 with reversion stipulated; FBéjar 244; FPlasencia 489.

10. LV 4.2.16; FJuzgo 4.2.17. FSoria 334, 335; FReal 3.3.1, 2. PON 30, POL 36; FViejo 5.1.7.

11. E.g., Alfonso VIII, vol. 2, pp. 175-8, 301-2, 384-5; vol. 3, pp. 19-21 ('en casamento'), 236-7, the property grants are by 'hereditary right', standard usage, and name sons and daughters as heirs. Cf. FViguera 7. Female heirs to castles appear, e.g., in Becerro, Libro de las behetrías de Castilla (1352), ed. F. Hernández (Santander, 1866), p. 236.

12. LV 4.2.15, 16; FJuzgo 4.2.16, 17. For eighth- and ninth-century documentary evidence of a predominantly egalitarian society of acquisitions, see Martinez Díez, 'Las instituciones del reino astur', pp. 110-15. For later records, Prieto Bances, 'Los notarios en la historia de la sociedad legal de gananciales', Anales de la Academia Matritense de Notariado 9 (1957), 83-139; repr. in Obra escrita, vol. 1 (Oviedo, 1976), pp. 609-54.

13. PON 30; POL 36; FViejo 5.1 7. FBrihuega, p. 181; FFuentes 181. FAlcalá 66. FCuenca io.8, FIznatoraf 185, FAlarcón 179, FAlcaraz 3 82, FBaeza 189; FZorita 192; FBéjar 235; FTeruel 428; FPlasencia 461. FSoria 341. FCoria 81; Cáceres 88; FUsagre 89. Cf. LF 252; FViejo 5.3.10.

14. FAlcalá 279. Cf. FLa Novenera 122 and FViguera 404.

15. FCoria 80; FCáceres 87 (quinta, ed. Ureña and Bonilla, quarta, ed. Lumbreras); FUsagre 88. FBrihuega, p. 183; FFuentes 194. FZorita 205 excludes acquisition of permanent interest in a mill.

16. FSoria 336, 337, 343; FReal 3.3.3, 3.4.11. Martinez Gijón, 'El regimen', pp. 82-3.

17. FCuenca 10.21; FIznatoraf 198; FAlarcón 189; FAlcaraz 3.95; FBaeza 202, FBéjar 254, FTeruel 437; FPlasencia 476. FZorita differs here, above, n. 15.

18. E.g., FSanta Cruz (1165), ed. J. Ríus Serra, 'Nuevos fueros de tierras de Zamora', AHDE 6 (1929), p. 446. Cf. FLa Novenera 122; FViguera 404. Gibert, 'La "complantatio" en el derecho medieval español', AHDE 23 (1953), 737-67.

19. GM, vol. 3, no. 986 (1248); cf. nos. 909, 910, 913, 917, 918, 919, 921, 922, 931.

20. FSoria 335; FReal 3.3 2. Cf. FCuenca 30.6, inter fora alia, above, Ch. 1, n. 8.

21. Etymol. 9.2.17, and cf. 20.2.19. LV and FJuzgo 3.1.4.

22. PON 30, 52, POL 36; FViejo 5.1.7, 8.

23. FSepúlveda 64b. FEstella 2.11.10, 11. FSan Sebastián 3.9.10, 11. Cf. FLa Novenera 71, 221; FViguera 229, 315, the short FViguera 73, ed. N. Hergueta, 'Fuero de Viguera y Val de Funes, su apéndice', BRAH 37(1900), 449-58. FLedesma 378, 380. Cf. FJaca 176 but, ms B 96.

24. Formularium instrumentorum, ed. Sanchez, AHDE 3 (1926), 487-8, 497-8; 4 (1927), 383-5, 395. Partidas 3.18.58 is traditional, but see Lalinde Abadía, 'La recepción española del senadoconsulto Velleyano', AHDE 41 (1971), 335-72; Ourliac, 'L'Évolution de la condition de la femme en droit français', Annales de la Faculté de Droit et des Sciences Economiques de Toulouse 14 (1966), 55-60.

25. FSoria 343, FReal 3.4.11. FViejo 5.1.7. Cf. FLa Novenera 121.

26. LV and FJuzgo 5.2.4, 5, 7; LV 3.1.15; FJuzgo 3.1.6. D'Ors, El código, pp. 236-7; King, Law and society, pp. 105-8.

27. FSoria 297, applicable to both spouses, but 'commo si la deseredo'. Gifts tersely permitted in LF 264 (Logroño), FPampliega (1209, Alfonso VIII, vol. 3, p. 466), and later in Mejoría 12 (1285, ed. Ureña, Fuero de Cuenca, p. 841) and FPlasencia 748 (1286). But see Otero, 'Mandas entre conyuges', AHDE 27-8 (1957-8), 399-411.

28. E.g., FBrihuega, pp. 147, 148. FSepúlveda 64a. FSoria 400; FReal 3.185. But see below, Ch. 4, for significant variations.

29. FZamora 92 (ms S). PON 149, POL 40; FAntiguo 11; FViejo 5.1. 10. Cf. LF 239, FSepúlveda 65b, and FCoria 89.

30. FCuenca 29.19; FIznatoraf 633; FAlarcón 576-8; FAlcaraz 13, 17; FBaeza 658; FZorita 593; FBéjar 874, 875, FTeruel 554; FPlasencia 340, 341. For problems with these texts, see Martinez Gijón, 'El regimen', pp. 123-4; but then see FLedesma 285. Cf. LF 107. The charter modifying FMolina in 1283 (ed Izquierdo, Fuero de Molina de Aragón, p. 159) exempts all wives from debts they had not subscribed to in writing, but this was not universally customary.

31. FMolina, p. 73.

32. E.g., FPlasencia 26. FSoria 156; FReal 1.11.4.

33. FAlba 33. FCuenca 17.1, inter fora alia. Orlandis, 'La prenda de iniciación en los fueros de la familia Cuenca-Teruel', AHDE 23 (1953), 83-94.

34. E.g., FAlfambra 25. A man or woman had to be in the house by FSanta Maria de Cortes (1182), CD, p. 115.

35. FCuenca 17.1; FIznatoraf 445; FAlarcón 413; FAlcaraz 7.1; FBaeza 448, FZorita 374; FBéjar 579; FTeruel 141.

36. FAlfambra 21.

37. FLedesma 244.

38. FLeón 43; FCastrocalbón (1156), ed. L. Díez Canseco, 'Sobre los fueros de Valle de Fenar, Castrocalbón, y Pajares (Notas para el estudio del fuero de León)', AHDE 1 (1924), p. 376, FRabanal (1169), ibid. p. 380, FVillafranca (1192), Alfonso IX, vol. 2, p. 80. Cf., in lower Navarre, FLa Novenera 72 and the short FViguera 74.

39. FVillavicencio (1130?), MC, p 173.

40. FSanabria (1220), Alfonso IX, vol. 2, p. 515.

41. FCoria 191, 142, 32; FCáceres 197, 145, 35; FUsagre 200, 146, 34.

42. FPlasencia 35, 264.

43. FAlba 55. Cf. the earlier FMarañón (lower Navarre, 1134), MC, p. 496, stating a wife's normal immunity but permitting a creditor to take pledges from her after a few specified delays. FGuadalajara 18 permits him to pledge her on her husband's account.

44. LF 284.

45. LF 133, 134, with elaborations in FViejo 5.1.11, 13.

46. FCuenca 23.13-17; FIznatoraf 557-9; FAlarcón 496, 497; FAlcaraz 8.90-4; FBaeza 557-9; FZorita 484-8; FBéjar 721-5; FTeruel 194-6; FPlasencia 263-5.

47. LF 25. FTeruel 197.

48. FPlasencia 264. FAlfambra 22.

49. FCuenca 19.13, 14; FIznatoraf 487; FAlarcón 446; FAlcaraz 8.13, 14; FBaeza 489; FZorita 412; FTeruel 176, 177, with variations; FBéjar 631, 632; FPlasencia 221.

50. FCuenca 23.2-13; FIznatoraf 547-57; FAlarcón 491-6; FAlcaraz 8.79-90; FBaeza 549-57; FZorita 474-84; FBéjar 712-21; FTeruel 189-94; FPlasencia 258-63. Similarly, FSoria 135.

51. FCuenca 23.18; FIznatoraf 559; FAlcaraz 8.95; FBaeza 560; FZorita 489; FBéjar 726; FTeruel 197; FPlasencia 265. FAlarcón 498 omits the barragana.

52. FCuenca 23.25; FIznatoraf 562; FAlarcón 503; FAlcaraz 8.102; FBaeza 567; FZorita 496; FBéjar 735; FTeruel 202, 203; FPlasencia 720. FSoria 135. LF 133; FViejo 5.1.13. FPlasencia 272 and several of the above also name parents as possible substitutes. For the royal ban on private jails in 1285, see Valiente, 'La prisión por deudas en los derechos castellanos y aragonés', AHDE 30 (1960), 314-18.

53. FCuenca 23.21; FIznatoraf 561; FAlarcón 501; FAlcaraz 898; FBaeza 563; FZorita 492; FBéjar 729-31; FTeruel 198. Cf. FPlasencia 267.

54. FAlcalá 23; cf. cap. 127.

55. FCuenca 10.8; FIznatoraf 185; FAlarcón 179, FAlcaraz 3.82; FBaeza 189; FZorita 192, FBéjar 235; FTeruel 428; FPlasencia 461. FSoria 341 omits volition. For prepayment of debts before short absences, see FCuenca 23.20, et fora alia.

56. Orlandis, 'Sobre el concepto del delito en el derecho de la alta edad media', AHDE 16 (1945), 154-71.

57. FTeruel 46, with a similar restriction on clerics.

58. FLeón 25; FVillavicencio, MC, pp. 171-2; FPajares (1143?), ed. Díez Canseco, 'Sobre los fueros', p. 374; FCastrocalbón, ibid., p. 375; FRabanal, ibid., p. 380.

59. FToledo (1118), MC, p. 366; FToledo 28 (c. 1166); FEscalona 15, 26; FLorca, pp. 8, 13; FCarmona 16, 24; FCordoba-Cartagena, pp. 33, 36.

60. FSalamanca 63; FLedesma 32. But her half of movables is withheld by FVillavaruz de Rioseco 9 (1181), HD, p.83; FCastroverde (1202), Alfonso IX, vol. 2, p. 229; FSanta María de Vega 18 (1217), HD, pp. 112-13. By FPozuelo de Campos 23 (1157?, ibid., p. 67) she and their children keep everything, and he departs.

61. E.g., Cortes of Leon (1188), Alfonso IX, vol. 2, p. 27. Cf. FToro (1222), ibid., p. 536; A. Cuadrado, 'Texto de la primera carta de fueros dado a la villa de Toro por Alfonso IX de Leon', BRAH 80 (1922), 288-91. FCoria 348; FCáceres 340; FUsagre 361.

62. FAlba 3, 8, 17, 52 ('la meetat'). FCoria 348 ('su meatad'); FCáceres 340, FUsagre 361. 'Share' perhaps best conveys the sense of the terms.

63. This method of dividing their goods is already evident in Queen Urraca's 'Confirmación y adiciones de los antiguos fueros de Leon y Carrion (1109)', MC, pp. 96-7. FVillafranca (1192), Alfonso IX, vol. 2, p. 80; FSanabria (1220), ed. C. Fernández Duro, 'El fuero de Sanabria', BRAH 13 (1888), 281-91, and Alfonso IX, vol. 2, p. 20; Garcia Gallo, 'El fuero de León', pp. 45-6. For the relatives' protection in Castile, see e.g., FGuadalajara 54, like FTeruel 23, in opposition to FTeruel 22, below, n. 67.

64. FAlcalá 291. For the principle, FToledo 28, et fora alia, above, n. 59.

65. FUclés 59 (property of wife, parent, child). FBrihuega, p. 132 and FFuentes 41 (of wife only). FSoria 505 (of wife or husband, but separately unless necessary for a high fine). LF 301 (of brothers, an undivided inheritance only).

66. LF 23.

67. FCuenca 15.10; FIznatoraf 394; FAlarcón 359; FAlcaraz 5.58, FBaeza 394, FZorita 866; FBéjar 493, 494; FTeruel 22; FPlasencia 382. At Teruel, Plasencia and Zorita de los Canes the reforming motive is omitted, while Plasencia leaves out all the moralizing.

68. E.g, FCuenca 10.40, inter fora alia.

69. FCuenca 13.2; FIznatoraf 313; FAlarcón 293; FAlcaraz 4.89; FBaeza 312; Fzorita 309; FBéjar 395. Cf FAlcalá 7.

70. FSepúlveda 65, FPlasencia 749 (1286); Mejoría 1, ed. Ureña, Fuero de Cuenca, p. 837. For later repetitions, e.g., FVillamayor de Santiago (1333), ed. Sáez, Los fueros de Sepúlveda, Ap. 38, p. 258; FPuebla de Don Fadrique (1343), ibid., Ap. 20, p. 210.

71. FSoria 505.

72. FAlcalá 65. PON 34, FViejo 5.1.9. Illegal by FBrihuega, pp. 167, 170 and FFuentes 110, 122; FCuenca 19.4; FIznatoraf 478; FAlarcón 441; FAlcaraz 8.4; FBaeza 481, FZorita 402; FBéjar 618; FTeruel 168; FPlasencia 214. Cf. FSoria 400; FReal 3.18.5.

73. FMolina, p. 85.

74. FVillavicencio, MC, p. 173. FCoria 142; FCáceres 145, FUsagre 146. LF 239, FViejo 5.1.12. FSoria 135; cf. cap. 277. FSepúlveda 64.

75. LV and FJuzgo 2.3.6.

76. FSoria 147; FReal 1.10.4. Or he acted as a true procurator who required a warrant to represent his wife or another relative (FReal 1.10.5); by FViejo 3.1.2 a wife must have her husband's permission to have a representative other than himself. For pleitos in which women are represented by their husbands, LF, 44, 165.

77. FSalamanca 258; FLedesma 175.

78. FCuenca 13.3; FIznatoraf 314; FAlarcón 294; FAlcaraz 490; FBaeza 313; FZorita 310; FBéjar 396; FTeruel 523; FPlasencia 155. FLedesma 387.

79. Some northern French customs, moreover, recommended it (Ourliac, 'L'Évolution', pp. 50-1).

80. FBenavente, ed. Gonzalez, 'Fuero de Benavente de 1167', p. 626 (but addition of 1187), FMilmanda (1199), Alfonso IX, vol. 2, p. 181; FParga (1225), ibid., p. 654; FLlanes 61. A number of texts seem to omit the wife deliberately, referring only to children, younger relatives or, less frequently, apprentices: e.g., the Leonese FLedesma 196 and FPlasencia 52, in Castile cf. FCastrojeriz, MC, p. 39; FPampliega, Alfonso VIII, vol. 3, p. 466; LF 266; FAlcalá 22; FBrihuega, pp. 137, 150; FSoria 495, 504. FCalatayud 63 (ed. Ramos y Loscertales, 'Fuero concedido a Calatayud por Alfonso I de Aragón en 1113', AHDE 1 (1924), 408-16) characteristically names mothers and fathers as disciplinarians, as in, e.g., FCuenca 36.10; Guilarte, 'Cinco textos', pp. 196-9.

81. FViguera 390, 87. FEspinosa (twelfth century), ed. Gonzalez, 'Aportación de fueros castellano-leoneses', p. 640. FAbelgas (1217), ibid., p. 646. FParga, Alfonso IX, vol. 2, p. 650; FLlanes 17.

82. FCoria 64, 287; FCáceres 72, 276; FUsagre 72, 295. FPlasencia 155.

83. LF 261.

84. E.g., FLa Novenera 11, 12; the short FViguera 11, 12. FDaroca, MC, p. 540.

85. FSan Miguel de Escalada 18, HD, p. 81; FEspinosa, ed. Gonzalez, 'Aportación de fueros castellano-leoneses', p. 640; FVillavaruz de Rioseco 1 (1181), HD, p. 82.

86. FCoria 287; FCáceres 276; FUsagre 295: exceptionally, the bishop can fine the alcaldes for not enforcing his order. At Abelgas (above, n. 81) he intervenes to collect a fine from the wife absent overnight.

87. FDaroca, MC, p. 536. FBrihuega, p. 144.

88. FLSepúlveda 16 (1076). FEncisa (1129), MC,p.473. FCarcastillo (1129), ibid., p. 471. FPozuelo de Campos 27 (1157?), HD, p. 67. FSan Román (1222), Alfonso IX, vol. 2, p. 539. FUclés 12 (c. 1250).

89. FViguera 389-91, 399.

90. FCuenca 36.8; FAlarcón 722; FAlcaraz 11.73; FBaeza 815; FZorita 753 (all female servants) FAlcalá 143 (farm manager).

91. FCuenca 36.9; FIznatoraf 786; FAlarcón 723; FAlcaraz 11.74; FBaeza 816; FZorita 753; FLTeruel 465; FTeruel 679; FPlasencia 412. Isidore, Etymol. 9.7.13; 9.5.7, 12.