In Our Time - Marriage

Episode Date: March 21, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of marriage.‘To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.’ These marriage vows have been recited at church weddings since 1552, whenever two individuals have willingly pledged to enter into a relationship for life. But before the wedding service was written into the Book of Common Prayer, marriages were much more informal: couples could simply promise themselves to one another at any time or place and the spoken word was as good as the written contract. The ancients permitted polygamy and the taking of concubines so how did monogamy come to be the favoured mode in the West? Were procreation, financial stability, companionship, or love the reasons to get married? And what role has the state and the church played in legislating on personal affairs? With Janet Soskice, Reader in Modern Theology and Philosophical Theology, Cambridge University; Frederik Pedersen, Lecturer in History, Aberdeen University; Christina Hardyment, Social historian and journalist.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, to have and to hold from this day forward for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death us do part. These marriage vows have been recited at church weddings since 1552,

whenever two individuals have pledged to enter into a relationship for life. But before the wedding service was written, into the Book of Common Prayer, marriages were much more informal. Couples could simply promise themselves to one another at any time or place, and the spoken word was as good as the written contract. The ancients permitted polygamy and the taking of concubines, so how did monogamy come to be the favoured mode of the West? What was the purpose of marriage? Property, procreation, financial stability, companionship, or love? And what role have the state and the church played in legislating on personal affairs? With me to discuss marriage are Janet Soskis, reader in philosophical theology

at Cambridge University, Frederick Peterson a lecturer in history at Aberdeen University and Christina Hardiman, social historian and journalist. Frederick Peterson, the Babylonians had laws governing sexual relations between men and women. Did that include governing marriage?

Both yes and no. It included marriage in that it had certain presumptions about what marriage was, that it was usually monogamous, and it regulated crimes in marriage such as adultery if a married woman took an adulterous affair

she would have to be tied to her adulterous partner and drowned for example or if she refused sex with her husband the same punishment came about were the comparable punishments for men not really no but on the other hand if a man

did withdraw himself from his wife, he lost his property and he could be exiled. So there were quid pro quos, so to speak, in this situation. But as I understood it, there was a society that permitted polygamy as well. Usually the presumption was a monogamous marriage in the Babylonian codes, at least. A man would be allowed to take a second wife if, for some reason, the first wife could not have a child. and the second wife was sort of a second-rate wife. She was there for legitimate offspring rather than anything else. So we see marriage already then as being regarded as an essential form of social cement.

Maybe not so much a social cement as an institution that had to be regulated, an institution in which sexual activity could take place and which could provide a lot of conflict. And it's the conflict, is the regulation of that, conflict that the Babylonians are interested in limiting. So they're providing quick answers and quick solutions to the kinds of conflicts that might come up with adultery and with withdrawal of sexual favors.

We're talking about 2000 BC. Approximately 2,000. Well, fasting forward to classical Greece, is the situation much the same there? Well, Demosthenes in the 4th century, BC, says we have mistresses for our pleasure, we have concubines for our persons, and we have wives for the provision of legitimate offspring.

So marriage is a legal institution more than anything else. It is there to make sure that you know who are going to take over your property after your death. Was that the guiding motive back to the Babylonians and the Greeks, that the seriousness of the affair was providing a legitimate heir so that property could be legitimately transferred. Is that the underlying force of it? I think basically it is, yes. There is no expectation until the Christian church comes along

that marriage, for example, is supposed to be lifelong. It is just an institution that signifies that the offspring, that comes out of the institution is intended to take inheritance from the two parents. Christina Hardiman, the Roman Empire, Augustus, introduced laws to encourage marriage and to clamp down on adultery,

but not, I presume, prostitution. So were personal relations thought to be a matter of state to the Romans? Those laws were at the time of Augustus, around about 100 AD, and they actually reflected a population problem, the fact that there weren't enough upstanding, properly born citizens of the Roman Empire, which was a real worry. A Roman Empire was so well off by then.

They were having such a good time. A lot of people weren't bothering to get married. They were also cutting down the numbers of children they had. They were men and women were going off and having affairs with each other, and that was all an accepted thing that you could do. And so this is an interesting example of which we'll have many, of where the state steps in and says, hey, we need to get you people into line. But just to throw back a moment to Greece,

I think we should go much beyond thinking of this just as the bloodline. The bloodline in order to inherit property is vitally important. But actually, the really point about marriage is the mutual comfort and support, which is provided by a household. If you go to Xenophon, who wrote his economics,

talking about households, which is the meaning of the word, what he wanted to say is that a state, of politics, is absolutely useless without this body of households, and the household is made up of the husband and the children and the wife. And in fact, I think the attitudes

are much more sort of generous to women than has been suggested so far, which makes sense, if we think of the reality of human beings. There's a very nice line, again, you treat your children like a king, but you treat your wife like a statesman. So I think both in Greece and Rome, there is much more perception about the real use of marriage.

And I think ideally it was something that would continue, although that you would have ancillary help with it. You might well need a concubine to produce children or more children or a bit more fun if your wife was fed up with having children. So I think marriage is a very interesting institution in those times, very much less fenced in with legal. unless it hit the state.

And when the state came in and was worried, that's where we get laws. The Romans didn't believe in forcing marriages to take place, did they? And they also were great believers, as I understand it, and divorce. How did that feature? I think divorce is for the protection of women. And a great many laws to do with marriage have been made, recognizing the fact that potentially women are the weaker partners in marriage and having had children, they need support.

This is where something like the diary comes in. If you had a divorce, you can have a divorce right, but you lose your wife's diary, which was a very strong reason not to divorce, because that was, if you were obviously a well enough of wife, to be protected by a diary. And the terms of divorce were not, you know, there wasn't social stigma attached to it.

It wasn't regarded as a huge failure. In fact, some wonderful Roman matrons would say, You must go, you must divorce me and have children, and the poor weeping passionately in love, husband would say, no, no, yes, for the good of the state. And these are all recorded in literature, which of course may well have a political slant to it. Yes, it could be a bit of propaganda there, just never mind.

What do we get from the Old Testament, Janice Huskis, about this? There seems to be polygamy, monogamy, concubanage. Is there any one thing we can draw from the tales there? Well, the books of the Old Testament are written over a large period, and they cover peoples with many different customs, agrarian peoples, settled peoples and so on. And so you do get a huge diversity. For instance, King Solomon, who's supposed to be so wise, is reported as having had 700 wives and 300 concubines, although it is at least implied that that's one of the less wise things he did, and that's not condemned in any way. And even if you think of probably the most famous old Testament marriage is that of Abraham and Sarah. You know, they started as a young couple. They have to go to Egypt because there's a famine. Because she's so beautiful, Abraham says, pretend you're my sister, because otherwise they'll be jealous. Pharaoh takes her as his wife.

Then he finds out they're really married and says, Abraham, have her back. I didn't realize she was your wife after all. You know, they go on. They're barren for many, many years and so on. and Sarah says to Abraham, take a concubine and have a child, you know, much along the lines, which Christina has just indicated. Then when the child is born to the concubine, Higar, Sarah drives throughout. So this isn't, the Old Testament and the New Testament for that matter are not simple tales of ordinary family lives, great domestic templates. But there is a terrific building up of monogamy. We feel that Israelite religion moves from a polytheistic to then a he,

heathistic, that is, to a position where the God of Israel is the greatest amongst the gods, and then to monotheism. And as this has developed, the symbolism of betrothal and bridal symmetry of the love for God for Israel as being that of a bridegroom for a bride is developed. And that becomes very potent in Judaism and later in Christianity. And then we move, and this sort of rapid survey into it, we move to the New Testament, which is in which marriages and marriages, and those associations are much less prominent.

And St. Paul's notion seems to be the guiding notion that comes out of the New Testament. It is better to marry than to burn, but he would have preferred it if people didn't marry. He would have, yes. He says quite clearly it's better not to marry, because we now believe St. Paul's writing for an early fervent community that firmly believes the world will end soon with the coming of the Lord again. So he's not really anti-sex or even particularly anti-marriage. He just thinks there's not much time and you'd be better off spending it working for the coming of the kingdom, the coming of the people of God and so on.

And so he states explicitly that it's better not to marry, which was, of course, subsequently a problem in Christianity. And then in the Gospels, of course, are pretty ambivalent, really about marriage. Jesus says a couple of things, but also Luke gives us a genealogy of Jesus at the beginning of his Gospels, in which, amongst a long list of the ancestors of Jesus, he lists only four women, all of whom were in irregular sexual relationships. Irregular. Irregular.

I mean, Rahab was a prostitute. Tamar, after the death of her husband, disguised herself as a prostitute and seduced her father-in-law in order to have twins. Basheba was virtually had this affair, adulterous affair with David. And so you get these four women, it is very interesting why they're there, and it's probably done by the gospel writer to show that God can choose who he wants to choose. God is no respecter of whatever institutions you think are great, and God's chosen this humble man, this son of Mary. So that really, too, Jesus says, rather suggests it's better to be a unique for the kingdom of heaven,

So that early Christianity is not pro-marriage and was not perceived to be pro-marriage, rather the contrary, by the Roman world into which it moved. But St. Paul's idea, although it was, as you say, then for a specific time and almost for a specific purpose, has become a commanding idea in Christianity, didn't it? What consequences have flowed from that? There were a couple of things that I think we're perhaps ignoring

when we talk about St. Paul, and that is that he's also a pro-marriage in what he says that husbands should treat their wives with affection, with respect, sorry. And even though he may be the head of the wife, he should also be respectful of her. So I think there's probably a dualism

that comes out of St. Paul's letters. And that is one where marriage is seen as a good thing and one where you have, St. Paul's idea of celibacy being the best thing. Would it be true to say, Christina Hardiman, then, right up until the early Middle Ages or Middle Ages, you have the forces that control the morality in society, the behaviour in society,

in their hands of men whose were unmarried, and they were celibate or not as women. They were the nuns. These were the two men and women, the two great ways to be were to serve God and to renounce sins of the flesh and so on. If that is generally true, what effect did this have on marriage in that period in the West, that is? There is a problem with who writes things down. And if you've chosen the way, and only about two or three percent of women did choose to be nuns

and perhaps maybe 10 percent of, probably not even that much of men, you're the one who does write things down and what you do is a very good option. And equally, you get a great many women who feel having done their bit and produced a couple of theirs. Syllibacy, pilgrimages and so on is a very nice option, and I believe this now. I think there's a certain pragmatism in the celibate option in life, which given the fact people didn't have contraceptives and there were acknowledged dangers in having children, you can't blame people for adopting. Also, great many children is economic hazard.

I think that on the whole marriage was in the hands of, the people themselves. Most contracts are simply made by recognising witnessed. You just have to put your hand and you're betrothed. And if problems arise later, those witnesses are called in front of courts to decide the rights and wrongs of things. But there's an extraordinary amount of flexibility.

I don't think it would be true to say until quite a lot later that the church absolutely rules marriage with a heavy hand. So I think, in fact, there's been a misleading sense to generalise over what people's lives were like in marriage. That's what I was thinking compared with what we've heard, albeit briefly about what happened in Rome, for instance, and to certain extent, Greece,

the church, which was a big controlling factor in the Middle Ages, doesn't seem to interfere in marriage for a very long time. It doesn't. For centuries, we're talking about it. Not really until the 11th. century really, and then only because civic authorities rather collapse. It's basically the Christian groups

just accepted the marriage practices of the peoples they moved into. In Rome, it was, as Christine has already said, a consensus based, the emphasis was on consensus between the families, of course, probably more than anything, and on the couple themselves.

And the church did not try to legislate and nor was there any requirement to have church marriage. It was only the lesser clergy had to have a bishop or a clergyman at their marriage in the 4th century.

But ordinary people didn't have to have a church marriage. That wasn't until much later. Does this hands-off thing rather surprise you? Well, not really, because it is, after all, marriage is as ancient as the world. And it is, as Frederick has already pointed out, fundamentally about the generation of legitimate offspring. And so the church was not terribly interested in that

It wasn't hostile to marriage, and marriage had a due part in society, but it didn't view marriage as something it should control, except negatively. For instance, the Germanic tribes practiced a lot of kidnapping of brides, and this the bishops put their face against. And also, for instance, the civil authorities in Rome disallowed marriage between slaves, and an early pope allows this, although he's criticized for doing so. So where they thought things were deliberately violating Christian beliefs they'd weigh in, but otherwise no. Was the community in those centuries, did it feel itself involved in the marriage? Was it a sort of witness to the marriage? Was that part of it, Christina? Very much so. And I think it still goes on today. I mean, curiously enough, the same patterns of cakes and veils and processions to a holy place or an important place.

be at a church or a stone circle. And all your family and the whole local society being there to stand behind this marriage and recognise it was the most important part of getting married. I do think we have to remember that, again, although the written record and all the laws all concentrate on property and inheritance and so on, most people really wanted a help meet,

and that was the important part of a marriage. When did the word husbandry originate? Because that does suggest a relationship in this marriage which we can look at a difference, husbanding resources coming, I presume, from husband or husband leading to that. So the man being in charge of what we now think marriage was intended to put the woman in charge of, isn't it?

Well, the husband man was a man who was responsible for the house and a small estate around it, and the housewife was the woman on the house. whole man did the outside, man for the plough and woman for the needle and so on, and she did the inside. And this was the rather nice balance. And I think it's interesting that those words husband and housewife, or abbreviated to wife, remain the names given to what used to be a wonderfully balanced partnership. And when marriage gets into trouble, it's when the balance is upset, when the wife is infertile or incompetent or when the husband doesn't earn money or

isn't a breadwinner, that's when marriages fall apart. It's a breadwinner that's interesting, isn't it? Because the husband had the keys to where the bread was kept. They were his keys. He kept his great resource. If you look at Scandinavian laws, for example, in the 11th and 12th centuries, if a man gives the keys to the house, to a woman,

and she bears the keys for more than three years, she is legally, in Danish secular law, not in church law, but in Danish secular law. She is his wife. The breadwinner aspect in Icelandic law in the 11th century, one of the reasons that can be quoted as a reason for divorced by the wife is that, by both parties actually, is that the spouse is squandering their resources.

The idea, you've talked about legal recourse and so on, but we're talking about society where the word was the bond, and later that was the next. 19th century historian Frederick Maitland called it a seduces charter, this word being the bond. How effective was the word being the bond in the marriages? What evidence do we have that that allowed people to slip out of them and take them less seriously in that to be? Well, we have very good evidence that they can slip out if they want to, and we have very good evidence that they did so. But I think that what we have to take into account is the volume of

evidence that we've got for this, which is very small. If you look at the levels of litigation in society in general in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period and compare the parts of the litigation that have to do with divorce rather than the enforcement of marriage, then you find very few cases, relatively few cases. Now, people showed great ingenuity in getting out of marriage. Janet, when did the church start getting involved in marriage and how did it? Well, it appears it's all a little bit unclear, but it appears that basically there came to be more and more contested cases.

By the time the 10th or 11th century, most Europeans are Christians, and there come problem cases. And as already been mentioned, most of the records we have are where things go wrong, where someone wants to get out of a marriage and so on, and particularly where King's marriages go wrong, and they're without progeny.

So then you have these debates coming up. If the betrothal is made, but the ceremony, the pledge isn't fully made, is it valid? Can you get out of a betrothal? In general, betrothal was regarded very, very seriously indeed. And remember, it's the family that are going to weigh in on supporting it as well.

We're still in the society of the word being the bond, in a very important part of the society. And the surrounding, the families were utterly important to this. It was more about the coming together of the families in some ways than, than the partners themselves. And so you have these contested cases, is it a marriage if it's not consummated?

And then you begin to have to get more church law on this. But I want to mention something about celibacy. It's very important, and people often miss this, that the early fathers were not against sex. They were against marriage. I mean, this surprises people. They thought that the best state for the Christian was to work for the family of God.

And if you marry, you're going to have. naturally and importantly concerns for looking after your wife and children. If you're single, you can devote yourself to the poor. They consistently argued in this way. So it isn't really a dualism of a negative sort. It wasn't that they had a low view of marriage, but they had a very, very high view of celibacy as looking forward to the kingdom of God.

And of course, they used a lot of erotic imagery from the Bible to support this too. So I think that's important to put in place. Did the church get involved, Christina? I'd say that it got involved through the use of its courts to settle dispute. Was that the way the church was tugged into taking marriage as we were on board and taking more seriously and beginning to authorise and be authoritative about marriage? The Catholic Church was still talking about here, obviously.

Well, the church was used when people wanted it and it was there as a very useful umpah. I mean, for any sort of negotiations you need an umpah, and the church could do that. people did get married in the porch of the church to give a marriage weight, but that wasn't compulsory until 1540 or so the Council of Trent in the Roman Catholic Church. And even then, the Protestant churches didn't have to get married in England. You didn't have to get married in church until about 1750s when the Marriage Act came in. And so for a very long time, this word was absolutely vital, the word between two families, between two people.

And it ran on and on to an extent that even when legally you were supposed to get married in a church or indeed from 1836 in the civil office, you stood as late. There's a wonderful lady in the 80s who's explaining how, well, she wasn't so much married as leased because she and her husband had had the falling out. And then she had leased him to another woman and he had leased her to another husband. and this was a legal arrangement and this was very commonly done and it's linked to the famous wife sales

where you go along to market you say here she is with all faults will you take her and the man comes up with his I take her for two shillings and it's usually a set up job but this was again a thing between witnesses it was words being exchanged hands being shaken and finally enough from right back to the Roman time

when it was in manual put in the hand these handshakes continued So before we leave the Roman Catholic Church, did its move into marriage begin to shape marriage, begin to change the nature of marriage in the Christian contrast? It did. I think because when you get to the 11th or 12th century and the church is having more a say in these matters for whatever reason, you also begin to get a development of an understanding of marriage as a sacrament. That is reached in the around the 13th century, whereas the early fathers is thought, well, marriage is something that's there if you absolutely must. It becomes a sacrament in the 13th century. And there you bring in a lot of the symbolism of marriages is a reflection, a pale reflection, if you have, of the relationship of Christ to his church, which is a bridal image. Paul uses this bridal imagery very much.

And of course, it's there in the Old Testament in the Song of Songs, which is an erotic poem that somehow made it into the Old Testament, which was interpreted spiritually by Jews and Christians as the love for God for Israel or for the church. But you get this very strong symbolism about the overwhelming love and loyalty of God and the purity of the bride, the church. And of course, this, I think, puts a certain amount of pressure on actual human marriages that are the shadow of this. particularly in terms of their permanency, because the ideal is very, very strongly. God is never going to lose face. God is never going to divorce Israel, even in her hordom, as you get it put in the Hebrew Bible.

So this is the template for human marriages. And I think at that stage, it all becomes strength. And the divorce before was frowned upon. And I think largely, as Christine has indicated, because women in these situations could be completely bereft if their husbands couldn't put them away, they'd be without resource. But it becomes a sacramental thing through the 11th and 13th century. The Reformation Luther wrote very strongly for marriage, in favour of marriage, married,

and he thought the Pope should have no so whatsoever in whether he married or not. It was his business and God's business and not the Pope's business. Did the Reformation, let's use Luther as the way of Busting? Did the Reformation, again, bring about a proper substantial change in the way that marriage was viewed in the Christian countries. It's important to realise that reformers like Luther thought they were returning to purity, that it was all the accretion of the church and it wanting money. Actually, this was this huge edifice that was just trying to grab money through indulgences

or church courts and so on. And Luther and other reformers and the Lollards earlier wanted to go back to the pure simplicity where, in fact, the priests used to be able to marry. I'm not quite sure when. when the stopping priest, Mary, came in, and I'm sure that you know, Janet. I think, well, various times, but I think not until the 10th or 11th century in these aisles.

And certainly, concubines. Victorian reform. So it was quite an accepted thing. So Luther was on quite strong ground, apart from being very fond of a lady himself. And so it's quite interesting, the fact that it isn't really a change around. It's almost a belief that it's a restoring to simplicity and purity,

as indeed the Puritans later and Wesley, the Methodist will do. I think that there's also another aspect of what happens from the 12th century up to the Reformation in 16th century. And that is that the church becomes incredibly successful at doing the legal stuff. It claims the jurisdiction over marriage and people accept its jurisdiction over marriage.

They also want, the church to work for them. The church tries to work for them, tries to provide arbitration in conflicts in marriage, and is very successful at that. Because they're very successful, more people want to use the church as an arbiter. Because more people want to use the church, you have to get more people into the church to dispense the justice of the church. Eventually, there aren't, demand outstripped supply of justice, so to speak. And that's when the church starts charging higher prices for the legal process and where it begins to become compromised in people's eyes

because the justice that it was there to supply for people is no longer available. You're talking about dissolutions of marriage largely here, are you? Both dissolutions and... One of the things that is very, very important about marriage litigation in the Middle Ages is that it is the vast majority of litigation is about the enforcement of marriage. There is very little separation, there is very little divorce. And of course divorce is not available. There's very little protest.

I mean, if people don't mind divorcing, they just did it. They didn't need to go to court. If they turn up in the court, it's pretty little protest. because someone is objecting. So I think that's a slightly loaded evidence there. You're probably right that there's loaded evidence there, but we were talking about the function of the church and the church courts. And what the church courts are doing is that they're enforcing marriages.

They're helping people to set up the marriages, rather than to dissolve the marriages or to resolve conflicts that have arisen in marriage. They are resolving conflicts that have arisen in the construction of marriage, so to speak. Earlier on in this conversation, Christine, you spoke about the good balance between a man and a wife. Did the reformation, did the influence of the Roman Catholic Church on marriage, first of all, the entry into it, and then the reformation with the development of a different sort of relationship with God, did that affect the relationships between men and women? Are we seeing, are they behaving in ways substantially different or essentially different,

or essentially different from the way they're behaving in Roman times, for instance. I don't think that those sort of changes affected behaviour within marriage. What affects behaviour within marriage dramatically is agrarian and industrial revolution, and that's what turns things upside down. I think it's William Good, who read these massive tomes on divorce trends worldwide. He says divorce is a luxury for the rich. and compared with the Middle Ages, we're all rich in the 20th century.

And I think the fact that everybody has property, everybody has competence, they can all make choices as individuals, is such a different situation that we have to really jump out of that mindset if we're going to try and think what it was like in the Middle Ages or the 16th, 17th centuries to realize there that your better half was your life belt

in a wild sea, where one of you was probably going to go down any time now. and lifespans were much shorter. You really did need cooperation and support. You were very, very interdependent. And that's only changed when women can go out and earn money. Could I mention something about the Reformation? There's a big debate here about, is the Reformation good for women?

Because in some ways, Luther, of course, did endorse marriage and so on and said it was a proud thing to be a father and a husband. But on the other hand, in the earlier world, much as we may say, oh, it's awful that so much praise was given to virginity. In the earlier world, particularly in the Greek church, Adam and Eve, man and woman are roughly equal, particularly in their celibate state. It's only as they enter marriage and progeny

that the woman becomes subservient to the man. Now, if then you move into reliance only on screen, scripture, then the Pauline injunctives about the subordination to the wife to the husband. Frederick has mentioned how a husband should love his wife, but the distaff of that was that Paul's pretty strong on the subordination of a woman to her husband as the church is subordinate to Christ. Her husband should be a god to her. So you get things like John Knox's tract, first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women, appropriately named, and the subordination for Knox, you know, women aren't allowed to be rulers, they're not allowed

to be queens, they're not allowed to own property, they're not. They're not allowed to inherit, all based on Bible principles. So this isn't quite marriage, but there are things, there are ways in thinking that in some ways the Reformation was good for women, in some ways for bad. But I think Christine is basically quite right that marriage itself for most people is more affected by economic factors than by these religious debates.

Frederick Peters and Lord Hardwick's Marriage Act was introduced in 1753. Why did he bring it in and what were them, can you briefly tell us why he brought you in, And what were the main features of it? The main feature of Lord Hardwick's Marriage Act was the requirement of the presence of a priest at the exchange of a marriage file.

The church became involved. The registration of a marriage was necessary for the marriage to carry full legal weight. The act was an attempt on the government's part to make sure that young people did not have as much power as they had had in the past because you could just run off somewhere and marry somebody else than what your guardian had chosen for you.

In return for the increased parental control, the Marriage Act also abolished what is called feudal wardship, that is the ability of the guardian of the child to decide who they are going to marry. In other words, the control over the child's marriage is moved into the church and into the public domain rather than in the private sphere of the upper classes. And after that, we have the beginnings of a romantic ideal of marriage,

at marrying for love. Is it at that time, the end of the 18th century, just 50 years or so after this act, that, as it were, what we could almost call the modern idea was we see it appearing in literature. We see it appearing. Do we see it appearing in the way many people had their lives as well? That the idea of property, the line of inheritance,

wasn't as important as finding that you really loved this one person and come hell or high water. You would marry them. I think that's probably stronger in Jane Austen and a few selected wealthy middle and upper class poets and writers than in general. Ideally, from the beginning of time, people have wanted to find their twin soul, Plato, or their other half, and there have been lots and lots of recorded discoveries of affection.

I would pitch the almost demand for conjugal of actual pure romance in general, as it were, without romance, the marriage should end, idea. Quite a lot later, I would put it well into the 20th century. I don't know, would you agree. I would agree, because people simply didn't have. the economic freedom, as you've said. The idea was seeded at the end of the 18th, but the idea is much more than that. It's during the song of songs.

The ideal is always that marriage should be a marriage of beloved and lover and beloved, and that's very strong in Paul. It's the ideal, of course, of marriage, that it should be so. It comes in marriage sermons in the 13th century. For example, you have Richard of Saint-Victo. who writes a treatise called on the Four Steps of Charitable Love, where he describes sort of romantic love as, and this is the love for another person.

Do you not feel how your heart has been pierced by a flaming arrow, how you cannot turn away from the countenance of the beloved and so on and so forth? All the symptoms, the swooning and whatnot of romantic love, is described in this 13th century sermon. And it's described as an integral part of marriage. What the change is, we've always wanted love and marriage, horses and carriages, but what happens in the 20th century is rather than settling for second best, which is what for centuries people did, we've decided we must have, must have it.

And I think that's where we have got onto extraordinarily rocky territory, which is why we're all sitting here discovered marriage now. So you mean that now people think if the love goes, the marriage goes equally? which is quite a modern take. Very, very modern take. And the idea that you should seek all that happened as you're ever going to get inside this coupling, isn't it? Which Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence, was very fierce about.

He described marriage in the old sense with each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and suing in its own little privacy. It's the most repulsive thing on earth. But it's also quite a modern thing too, I think really people talk a lot about the change that's taken place to marriage.

And I think the real change has taken place to the family and to, all these people we've been talking about, these previous people expected that marriage would involve people in very large family units, what we call extended family. And that's changed forever. And so there's been so much pressure put on this one relationship as answering every kind of affection, every kind of need, whereas people in the past wouldn't have sought from their married partner so much as we do. We have a very high demand out of marriage at the moment. I think that's why the history of marriage is so fascinating, because what we can pull out of it, is what we should really make of marriage today.

Again, in one of these second marriage unofficial contracts, they don't actually get it together legally enough. But what they try and do is say, well, we're putting our hands together, and this is going to be a very good partnership because we're both in the same trade, and we can work together and make money, and this is going to be a good mutual partnership. The word love isn't used in that.

But it was a very clear idea, and will actually was a very good recipe for a successful long-term marriage. You see marriage is continuing because it's such an efficient way to organise your life? I think it probably is, yes. But I also think that we're very culturally biased. We've been talking about Western Europe, and we have all grown up in a Western European tradition. And we don't know sort of on the emotional cognitive level

how we would react to living in a polygamous society or in societies that do not have our historical background. We react to a very large extent emotionally because of the conditioning of our very extended Western European culture. Are you surprised at the comparative strength of marriage today, Janet? I'm quite impressed at how romantic people are about marriage. I'm impressed and terrified because it seems that we don't realize how much marriage in the past depended on the witnesses that were there, say, at the wedding ceremony. If you take a small example, it's lovely and romantic in some way that people choose to get married, scuba diving or whatever.

But a great important part of the historic marriage, whether secular or in the church, was to have witnesses because those witnesses were also people who would help you be married, not by just simply telling us. you not to flirt with other people, but by supporting you economically in all kinds of ways. And so I'm touched that people expect so much from marriage. But on the other hand, it frightens me because there's so little of the broader apparatus of support available now for most marriages. Christina, would you go along with that? Absolutely. I think marriage has changed from being an institution to a formality in a way, and it is touching that people still choose this formality. White weddings have never been bigger.

We want this right of passage, this demonstration, and we want to stay with somebody we love. I don't think it's necessarily the most efficient way to live together at all, but it certainly is the most comfortable making. Well, we'll leave on comfort. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Frederick Peterson, Christina Hardiman, Janet Hoskis, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.uk forward slash radio 4.