Based on one of the few surviving records of marriage cases brought before
ecclesiastical courts in fourteenth-century Portugal, this article offers a rare
glimpse of marriage practice in a small village in a remote corner of Western Europe
and the complex ties that bound its inhabitants and which secular and ecclesiastical
authorities sought to regulate. Clear parallels can be drawn with the patterns of
marriage litigation observed in England and Northern France, but evidence also
suggests that royal legislation played an important part in the resolution of marital
disputes and in the shaping of conjugal behaviour.