We depend on documentary records for most of what we know about the conduct of marriages during the later middle ages, and for all that we know about marriage litigation during that period. This situation presents the historian with a problem: the survival of a document depends on medieval criteria for archiving, and we know that the vast majority of documentary evidence has not survived. Hence the material on which we must base our analysis is peculiar in two respects: first, it was written down under certain special conditions, and second, it managed to survive. Verbatim oral evidence has not survived at all from this period, when there were no court stenographers or tape recorders. Depositions record oral evidence only selectively and in a somewhat stylized, stereotypical form. Nevertheless, we can sometimes reconstruct both oral evidence and lost documents on the basis of the documents that remain.

In this chapter, by performing just such a reconstruction, I consider what kinds of negotiation preceded marriage in late-medieval England and what kinds of contracts were involved. I also try to ascertain whether or not people in the Middle Ages drew a sharp jurisdictional distinction between the “secular” and “spiritual” contracts made during marriage negotiations. The method chosen is to examine in detail the evidence of five fourteenth-century cases. One case was brought before Parliament, whereas the other four belong to the cause papers of the consistory court in York.