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Bibliographies Marriage in Fifteenth-Century England: Part II, Secondary Sources The following material has been made available in electronic form through the courtesy of the author. It may be copied, reproduced, and redistributed freely in its entirety provided full credit is given to the author. Distribution of portions of the text, or inclusion of all or parts in printed and published form should be performed only with the express consent of the author. The electronic distribution of this material does not preclude its later publication in other forms. English Marriages in the Fifteenth Century: A Discussion of the Secondary Sources Sharon D. Michalove, Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Sir John Paston, son of Margaret and John Paston, was betrothed to Anne Haute during the winter of 1468 69. Because she was a kinswoman of Elizabeth Woodville, the consort of Edward IV, this betrothal gave the Pastons a new tie with the court, which was necessary to them as they tried to safeguard the inheritance they had received from Sir John Fastolf. This inheritance included Caister Castle, which was coveted by the Duke of Norfolk, a powerful enemy. Therefore the Pastons needed a powerful protector. Sir John felt he had found one in Anthony Rivers, Lord Scales, the brother of the queen. Sir John was a courtier, and, with Edward IV's court, was primarily based in London. He left the running of the Paston property to his mother, Margaret, and his younger brother John II. The Pastons were moving up from minor to major gentry. But while the Paston family's thoughts were turned to marriage, not all the marriage news was good. Margery Paston, Sir John's sister, had clandestinely married Richard Calle the Paston's bailiff. Calle, who was a valued member of the Paston retinue, was not considered a suitable match, since he was only from a respectable merchant family. John Paston III complained that the couple claimed that he looked favorably on their marriage. Irate, he wrote to his brother Sir John, "if my father, whom God assoil, were alive, and had consented thereto and my mother and you also, |Calle| should never have my goodwill to make my sister sell candles and mustard at Framlingham . . ." Sir John's betrothal illustrates the type of marriage that historians of fifteenth-century England consider typical a marriage for property and prestige rather than a love match. But was Margery Paston Calle's marriage an anomaly? Was a love match the exception rather than the rule? I hope, through the secondary materials and primary sources, to find out. The Paston letters and papers are one of four great fifteenth-century collections. Three other family lives are illustrated the Celys, the Stonors, and the Plumptons. Their letters and papers have all been published, although not in as many editions as the Paston material. And while all of these families have been studied and written about, they have not been looked at as a group. I hope to bring together the various threads of these lives and see whether their attitudes toward marriage were similar and whether they can be used to draw any conclusions about marriage in the merchant and gentry families of fifteenth-century England. In searching the vast available secondary source material that either touches on or deals specifically with marriage, some are useful for pointing to possible methodological frameworks or for making comparisons. The study Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 by David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) is useful in giving a model of fifteenth-century marriage to compare against the English data. Herlihy's Medieval Households (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985) deals with "Domestic Roles and Family Sentiments in the Later Middle Ages" as its fifth chapter. Lawrence Stone's classic study The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500 1800 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1979) carries the story further in time, but also discusses methodology. His latest book, The Road to Divorce also has some insights that might usefully inform this study. Another study of England is Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, Press, 1990). Ingram's discussion of the differences between marriage theory and marriage practice, as seen through court records is valuable. And he makes the point that the attitudes prevalent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were already well established by 1500. Another book dealing with court records is London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation by Richard M. Wunderli (Cambridge, Mass.: The Medieval Academy of America, 1981). Wunderli is only dealing with crimes and spends very little time on the subject of marriage, but the small amount that he has to say is useful in setting the context. Alan Macfarlane, not to be outdone by Lawrence Stone, has an even broader sweep in Marriage and Love in England: 1300 1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). He looks at "the purposes of marriage" and the "rules of marriage." His study has an economic basis, and is interesting when viewing marriage as a business arrangement. Another legal study is that of Richard Helmholtz, who looks at canon law court cases and the theory of marriage in canon law in Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Two books that deal with medieval attitudes toward marriage are The Medieval Idea of Marriage by Christopher Brooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe by James A. Brundage (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). Brooke looks at law, theology, architecture, and literature and discusses famous examples including Abelard and Heloise and Henry VIII. While his approach may be too theoretical and literary to be of direct use in my study, his observations on demography and statistics give me yet another method for comparison. In Brundage's book, the chapter "Sex, Marriage, and the Law from the Black Death to the Reformation, 1348 1517," discusses law, theory, and practice in marriage in the social context of late medieval Europe. His geographical sweep is wide so comparative assessments can be attempted. Another general book that discusses medieval marriage is Shulamith Shahar's The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1983). Her chapter on married women deals with law, property, and status, all relevant issues when looking at the marriages in these families. English history in the fifteenth century, while not particularly popular with American historians, has seen a revival of interest among the British. Studies have been made, on a broad scale, of the Pastons and the Celys, although not of the Stonors and the Plumptons. Alison Hanham's The Celys and Their World: An English Merchant Family of the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985) is a study by the editor of the Cely letters for the Early English Text Society. Hanham looks at the Cely marriages in the context of merchant society, but she does not attempt to compare them to wealthy, nonmerchant families. As society became more fluid in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, aristocrats did marry the daughters of merchants, so a comparative view would be a logical next step. The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: The First Phase by Colin Richmond (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990) looks at the same issues for the Pastons, not comparing them to the Celys but to the aristocracy. This is the first in a four-part study. Richmond's paper "Landlord and Tenant: the Paston Evidence," in Enterprise and Individuals in Fifteenth-Century England, edited by Jennifer Kermode (Gloucester, England: Alan Sutton, 1991), 25 42, despite its title, also deals with aspects of marriage in the Paston family that are not in the larger work. The material on Paston gains from their marriage alliances may reflect material in later volumes. While Frances and Joseph Gies' Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages (New York: Harper & Row, 1987) is a general work on medieval marriage, one section is on the late middle ages. They use the Paston family in England and the family of Lapo di Giovanni Niccolini dei Sirigatti, a wealthy wool merchant in Florence as their two examples. The Gies stress "marriage strategies and clashes between parental wishes and children's consent" in looking at the differences in the marriages of sons and daughters in the Paston family over several generations. The Florentines do not seem to have so much difficulty over consent, so perhaps their daughters were more obedient. Other books that deal with the Pastons are Private Life in the Fifteenth Century: Illustrated Letters of the Paston Family edited by Roger Virgoe (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989) and the classic study by H. S. Bennett, The Pastons and Their England: Studies in an Age of Transition (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Bennett's book was originally published in 1922 and a new edition was published last year a testimony to the interest in the family and the readability of the book. Bennett has a chapter on marriage but interestingly discusses Margery Paston and Richard Calle in a chapter entitled "Love." Joel Rosenthal is one American historian who is interested in fifteenth-century England. His new book, Patriarchy and Families of Privilege in Fifteenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) discusses the idea of marriage as family strategy. He mentions the Celys and Stonors and discusses the Pastons at some length. But the Plumptons are missing from this study. Michael Hicks' "Descent, Partition and Extinction: The Warwick Inheritance," in Richard III and His Rivals: Magnates and Their Motives in the Wars of the Roses (London: The Hambledon Press, 1991), investigates the marriages of George, Duke of Clarence and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, to the daughters of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, known as the Kingmaker. Richard's marriage to Anne, the young widow of Henry VI's son, has been characterized by Paul Murray Kendall as a love match that his greedy older brother tried to thwart. But love match or not, Anne was a great heiress and Hicks believes that it was Anne's property, not love that attracted Gloucester. On the other hand, Anne also gained her inheritance by escaping from her brother-in-law's custody. Each had much to gain and little to lose. Several other papers are of some interest. Anthony' Smith's "Litigation and Politics: Sir John Fastolf's Defence of His English Property," in Property and Politics: Essays in Later Medieval English History, edited by A. J. Pollard (Gloucester, England: Alan Sutton, 1984), 59 75, is important in understanding the Pastons since they too had to defend Fastolf's English property when they inherited it after his death. In the same volume, "Rich Old Ladies: The Problem of Late Medieval Dowagers," by Rowena E. Archer (15 35), explains that some marriages had to be delayed because an estate was tied up by a widow who lived on into old age and might remarry several times. Her heirs had to wait for her to die because the income from the estate could be tied up in her jointure for decades. This was not only a problem in the gentry and aristocracy. Anne Crawford's article, "The King's Burden: The Consequences of Royal Marriage in Fifteenth-Century England," in Patronage, the Crown and the Provinces in Later Medieval England, edited by Ralph A. Griffiths (Gloucester, England: Alan Sutton, 1981), 33 56, argues that the financial settlement on a queen at the time of her marriage could be a major drain on the king's treasury. Finally, Keith Dockray looks at the question in "Why did Fifteenth-Century English Gentry Marry?" in Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Late Medieval Europe, edited by Michael Jones (Gloucester, England: Alan Sutton, 1986), 61 80. Dockray does look at the Plumptons, Pastons, and Stonors and discusses the love versus property argument. But he treats the gentry in isolation. I hope to carry his study further by comparing the gentry and the merchant class. Sharon Michalove,Academic Advisor Department of History, UIUC

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