- EETS
Early English Text Society
In 1521, as the English government was intensifying its campaign against the theology of Martin Luther, Bishop John Longland uncovered a conventicle of dissenters in his diocese of Lincoln. The men and women whom he summoned before him admitted to heresies concerning the presence of Christ in the eucharist, the adoration of images and the usefulness of pilgrimage. They also confessed to a familiarity with vernacular biblical texts, the unauthorised translation and copying of which had been forbidden in England for more than a century. One of them was an Amersham woman named Agnes Wellis, who had come to Longland's attention through the testimony of her brother, Richard Bartlet.Footnote 1 Agnes and Richard were members of an extended family of dissenters: their father, their siblings Robert and Isabel Bartlet, and Isabel's unnamed husband were all implicated in heresy by Longland's inquisitors. Forced under oath to name their sympathisers, Agnes and her relatives were also asked a series of questions about their beliefs and religious practices. Had they conversed with anyone suspected of heresy? Had they attended the ‘readings’ of a heretic? Had they appeared on charges of heresy before Longland's predecessor, William Smith?
A detailed list of enquiries put to Agnes Wellis was among the questionnaires preserved in Longland's court-book. Agnes was asked about her relationships with prominent local dissenters, about her attendance at secret gatherings and about her views on the sacrament of the altar. Alongside these familiar staples of late medieval English heresy investigations, however, there appears another question: ‘whether she knew that those of the sect only married each other?’Footnote 2 Her reply does not survive, and her husband John Wellis was never summoned before Longland, but the query is striking nevertheless. Not only does it suggest a concern that heterodox views could circulate through the ties of kinship and marriage, but it also prompts questions about a largely unexplored dimension of dissenting belief. What did late medieval English heresy suspects think about sexuality and marriage, both for laypeople and for clerics?
Scholarship on Lollard attitudes toward marriage and sexuality is scarce indeed.Footnote 3 There are only two articles dedicated to the topic, of which the first, published in 1973, was unable to make reference to a number of Wycliffite and anti-Wycliffite texts which have since come to light.Footnote 4 Brief sections on marriage do appear in a number of recent studies, but most discussions tend to concentrate on the question of clerical celibacy, likely because the dominant historiographical tradition has held that Wycliffite views on the marriage of priests and nuns anticipated those of sixteenth-century reformers.Footnote 5
A more substantial body of work has been produced in the related sphere of Lollardy and gender. In 1978 and 1980, respectively, Claire Cross and Margaret Aston published groundbreaking articles on the role of women in Lollardy. They both argued that dissenting communities provided ‘outlets’ for women's spirituality not found elsewhere in the medieval Church.Footnote 6 Although it might be attractive to think of Wycliffites and their successors as equal-opportunity dissenters, the suggestion that heresy provided an alternative context for women's religiosity has largely been discredited. In 1995 Shannon McSheffrey forcefully demonstrated that ‘gender was a crucially important variable in participation in a heterodox movement – but not necessarily in the direction often assumed … Heterodoxy did not mean gender equality: challenges to orthodoxy did not lead inexorably to questioning of patriarchal social categories’.Footnote 7
McSheffrey has acknowledged that her analysis relies more on the records of heresy trials and other sorts of legal evidence than on the theological and polemical texts produced by Wycliffites and their clerical antagonists.Footnote 8 She is right to observe that texts of this second kind portray dissenters from the perspective of ‘clerical males of considerable education’ writing in an academic environment, but when read alongside the trial records, these writings can disclose essential clues to the theologies of sexuality and marriage with which late-medieval dissenters were conversant. Indeed, ideas about marriage appear in the records of no fewer than seventy-four heresy trials between the years 1381 and 1521, as well as in at least a dozen vernacular tracts composed during the same period.
Using these two corpora of sources, this article will chronicle the development of Wycliffite and Lollard views about sexuality, starting in the time of John Wyclif and focusing on the closely related but nevertheless separate constellations of questions about lay and clerical marriage. Wyclif's Latin writings suggest that he professed caution about clerical marriage and also articulated a culturally traditional theology of lay marriage. Whereas his hesitation at the prospect of a married clergy gave way to enthusiasm among later dissenters, Wyclif's ideas about lay marriage resonated with dissenting and mainstream writers alike. What is found in vernacular Wycliffite tracts and trial records, therefore, calls even further into doubt the view that Lollardy was an innovative movement on issues of sexuality and gender.
Wyclif's theology of sexuality
Recent investigations of Wyclif's theology have uncovered a thinker at once conservative and radical. Wyclif's theology of sexuality follows a similar pattern, combining reverence for chastity with scepticism about the authority of the Church and its courts. Unlike the more prominent doctrines of salvation and the eucharist, however, sexuality and marriage appear only infrequently in Wyclif's Latin works. Even when Wyclif did write about lay and clerical marriages, he did so highly unsystematically, and the reader sometimes has the impression that he felt himself to be on less than certain ground. What will, in this article, be called his theologies of marriage and sexuality, therefore, are less sequences of syllogisms than collections of occasional, though coherent, observations.
Wyclif's ideas about sexuality appear most prominently in his late works, written after his exile from Oxford in 1381. Trialogus and De veritate sacrae scripturae both contain sections on marriage and sexuality, and passing references can also be found in De ecclesia, De officio regis and Responsiones ad Radulphi Strode.Footnote 9 It was in his unfinished polemical tract Opus evangelicum, however, that Wyclif set forth his views on marriage most clearly. He quoted at length from Augustine's tract De sermone domini in monte, arguing that whilst divorce was permitted in the time of the Old Testament, Christ's law demands that his followers observe a set of higher sexual standards. Just how high a set of standards Wyclif made clear in his commentary:
It seems that this saint intends that all these temporal things which in this life we do be subordinated to love for Christ and the goods of heaven … And so Augustine seems to say that the good of matrimony, figuring the blessedness of heavenly marriage, is better than the procreation of children in this life. And this good was in Joseph and the Blessed Virgin and can exist among married people who do not render to each other the marital debt.Footnote 10
Like many medieval theologians and canonists, Wyclif held up the marriage of Mary and Joseph as a model. Although he acknowledged that a marriage which involved sexual consummation can prefigure a heavenly union, he nevertheless urged that temporal sexuality be put aside.Footnote 11
Whilst chaste marriage was his ideal, Wyclif acknowledged that not all have the charism of life-long celibacy. In Trialogus, his character Phronesis defines marriage as ‘legitimate conjugal copulation, by which the law of God permits the procreation of children without guilt’.Footnote 12 Phronesis proceeds to set forth a relatively positive account of marriage: God ordained it for Adam and Eve; Christ approved of it by saying ‘what God has joined, let man not separate’; and Christ intended for married people to have intercourse.Footnote 13 In response to an objection from his interlocutor Pseustis, Phronesis then qualifies his remarks. Marriage does not exist when any two people have intercourse. It requires a distinction between the sexes and hence a male and a female partner; it must entail the partners' consent; and it cannot exist where there is no possibility of procreation. Phronesis insists: ‘As for the aged who on account of a desire for temporal goods, out of hope for mutual help, or on account of satisfying their libido have intercourse with each other without a desire for children, their union is not true matrimony.’Footnote 14 In some cases, however, it is impossible for a disinterested observer to learn why a couple are proposing to marry.
It is at this point that Wyclif's theology began to stray outside the ecclesiastical consensus. From the middle of the twelfth century, canon law identified the exchange of consent in words of the present tense (‘verba de presenti’), or else the exchange of consent in words of the future tense (‘verba de futuro’) followed by intercourse, as the form of the sacrament of marriage.Footnote 15 Theologians, including Thomas Aquinas and Jean Gerson, concurred, describing the verbal exchange of consent as the efficient cause of marriage.Footnote 16 To the contrary, Wyclif argued that it is the approval of God and the mental consent of the partners that actually makes a marriage. An exchange between Phronesis and Alithia, his other dialogue partner, makes his distinction clear:
Alithia: But say, I ask, with what words and signs marriage should be celebrated; for it is often said, that it should be celebrated with words of the present tense, and not with words of the future tense, nor indeed an affirmation about the future.
Phronesis: In this matter I do not take much delight from the lips, especially since this custom was established by human beings and without much foundation. The truth seems to me, that the consent of the partners and the approval of God, leaving aside any sensible sign, will suffice … In words of whatever extrinsic appropriateness there is the possibility of deception.Footnote 17
What matters for Phronesis, and (as his other writings indicate) for Wyclif as well, are not the words of the mouth but rather the words of the heart. The precise form of the vows which the partners exchange is less important than their internal consent.Footnote 18 For that reason Phronesis concludes that the practice of rendering judgements about the existence of a marriage on the basis of the precise language of the partners' vows is not only unhelpful but in fact against the Gospel.Footnote 19
Wyclif recommended that ambiguous marriage disputes should be left to the consciences of the partners involved. The Church, he wrote, has taken the opposite route, tightening the laws of marriage and restricting the rules of consanguinity so that marriages which previously would have been allowed are now illicit.Footnote 20 In particular, Wyclif inveighed against what he took to be the Church's superfluous regulations on ‘divorce’, a term which in Opus evangelicum encompasses a range of possible terminations of marriage. Wyclif argued that the bill of divorce (‘libellus repudii’) had been invented not by God but by Moses; furthermore, Christ had forbidden its use ‘on account of its imperfection’.Footnote 21 Nevertheless, prelates have revived the practice of divorce and have drastically skewed the criteria on the basis of which separations are to be granted.Footnote 22 Wyclif criticised the institutional Church for applying inappropriate penalties in particular cases. Referring to the distinction between a divorce a vinculo (which freed the partners from the marriage bond and left them able to remarry) and a divorce a mensa et thoro (which simply enacted a separation, leaving the marriage intact and the partners unable to marry again), Wyclif pointed out that whereas cases of adultery normally result in a divorce a vinculo, the far more serious crime of heresy, or ‘spiritual fornication’, is not even punished by a divorce a mensa et thoro.Footnote 23 In contrast to what he viewed as inconsistent and un-evangelical jurisprudence, Wyclif insisted that questions of marriage and divorce should be resolved by an appeal to conscience: ‘human laws seem to be shut away and to be made subject to the arbitrariness of the judges on account of demons coming in against the law of Christ’.Footnote 24 Whether the appeal to conscience could provide a practical solution to actual marital disputes remains uncertain.
When ecclesiastical censors began to scour Wyclif's writings for erroneous propositions, they rejected only a few of his ideas about marriage. Three articles condemned first at a provincial convocation in 1396 and again by an Oxford committee in 1411 all revolved around his objections to the institutional Church's practice of regulating marriage. One was the proposition that ‘divorce on account of consanguinity or affinity is a purely human ordinance’; the second was the view that ‘the words “I will take you as my wife” are more suitable for the contract of matrimony than the words “I take you as my wife”, and in the case of a person contracting with one woman by words of the future tense and then with another by words of the present tense, the first vow must not be frustrated by the second’; and the third was that ‘those who, without hope of children, marry in old age for temporal goods, for mutual succour, or to provide an outlet for their lust are not truly married’.Footnote 25 Each of these propositions either appears in or follows logically from Wyclif's arguments in Trialogus.Footnote 26
Perhaps surprisingly for early historians accustomed to seeing Wyclif as the so-called ‘morning star’ of the Reformation, none of the condemned propositions concerned the marriage of priests and nuns. Wyclif was not an ardent advocate of clerical marriage, but nor did he follow other medieval theologians in holding that the sacrament of orders was an impediment to marriage.Footnote 27 The crucial question, for him, was not whether priests can marry but whether, in fact, they should.
According to Wyclif, enforced celibacy is often the source of sexual vice, and although he did not exempt secular priests from criticism, he singled out the members of the fraternal orders for special abuse: ‘Now it is a legal custom that the lady of the house can have a friar hear her confession in the absence of her husband; yet widows and especially nuns are seduced by their confessors in this way.’Footnote 28 He made what would have been perceived to be a more serious charge in Trialogus, where Phronesis suggests that celibacy among male religious can lead to sodomy: ‘It seems to me, therefore, that … the devil knows to teach youths this most grievous sin apart from the company of women, and especially when a number of virile young men are separated from women, living delightfully and at leisure from work.’Footnote 29
The institutional Church, Wyclif argued, has mistakenly focused on clerical marriage when greater sins deserve attention. In his political tract De officio regis, Wyclif used a New Testament metaphor to compare clerical celibacy with the wealth of the Church: ‘And like the Pharisees we focus on the gnat and yet swallow the camel, fearing marriage among priests like venom, but approving simoniacal transactions … for the health and defence of the Church.’Footnote 30 He pursued a similar line of argument in De ecclesia: ‘It is less foreign to Christ's priesthood for priests to receive from secular lords the use of their wives … than to receive civil dominion. Both are horrible, but the second more horrible, since carnal procreation can exist alongside priesthood.’Footnote 31 In De veritate sacrae scripturae, Wyclif made an argument from history, appealing to the practice of the primitive Church, when married bishops lived continently with their wives.Footnote 32
It is clear, then, that Wyclif did not consider holy orders a bar to marriage, nor vice versa. Nevertheless, he emphasised the need to distinguish between permissible and suitable acts. Both clerics and laypeople are called to chastity, he argued, and sexual faults are more severe in a priest than in a layman.Footnote 33 Especially since many clerics commit fornication and other sexual sins, Augustine's dictum that ‘at certain times, those things which are licit are to be abstained from’ has particular force in the contemporary Church.Footnote 34 Priests should accordingly choose not to marry, and married priests should agree with their wives to remain chaste, lest they become a cause for scandal.Footnote 35 Wyclif's distinction between that which is possible and that which is appropriate is most transparent in De veritate sacrae scripturae: ‘while it is right (oportet) that every priest of every land should always preserve chastity, it is permitted (licet) that he may render the marriage debt to his wife’.Footnote 36
Whilst it seems that Wyclif neither endorsed nor rejected the possibility of clerical marriage, it remains an open question whether he would have been a proponent of married priests had he lived in a time of greater (perceived) ecclesiastical virtue. What is clear is that Wyclif's views on clerical marriage were more complex than some commentators have remarked. It seems less than accurate, for instance, to argue that Wyclif's position was that ‘clerks should be allowed to take wives … because they fornicate if they are not allowed to marry’.Footnote 37 Like his ideas about lay sexuality, Wyclif's position on clerical celibacy was fundamentally a traditional one.
Lay chastity, clerical marriage: sexuality in Wycliffite texts
Just as Wyclif's Latin works contain no systematic discussion of sexuality, so also the majority of Wycliffite authors addressed the subject only in passing. With one substantial exception, ideas about marriage and sexuality are peripheral to the concerns of many of the vernacular dissenting works composed between Wyclif's death in 1384 and the decline of learned Wycliffism in the 1420s. Where they do occur, comments about the marriages of clerics and laypeople are commonly to be found embedded in the course of larger arguments about ecclesiastical authority, the status of canon law and the sins of the clergy and prelacy. Read with care, however, such oblique references have the potential to disclose dissenters' attitudes toward marriage and sexuality. In general, Wycliffite texts adopt a more pessimistic view of lay sexuality than Wyclif's. On the question of clerical marriage, however, they depart from Wyclif in the opposite direction, strongly advocating the marriage of priests, minor clerics and nuns.
Since it represents perhaps the most comprehensive monument to early Wycliffite thought, it might seem natural to think of the cycle of English Wycliffite sermons as a prime source for Wycliffite theologies of sexuality. The sermons, however, reveal relatively little of their authors' views. The text for the ‘Missa pro sponsalibus’, for instance, is a highly compressed exegesis of the passage in which Jesus responds to the Pharisees' question about divorce: ‘Wher it be leeueful to a man to leeue his wif for ony cause?’Footnote 38 The preacher does little more than to emphasise that God instituted marriage for the end of procreation; to cite Augustine's claim that the benefits of marriage are ‘feiþ, children and chastite’; and to argue that the marital bond will survive death and endure in heaven. He proceeds from these premises to a typical Wycliffite diatribe against the glossing of Scripture.Footnote 39
Other sermons have little to add. Four utilise the trope of describing the relationships between God, Christ and the Church in terms of a marital union. Another comments on the wedding at Cana, which, following medieval tradition, the preacher takes to be the wedding of John the Evangelist. He suggests that Christ's presence at the wedding ‘bytookneþ loue þat God hadde to his chirche, how he wolde bycome man and be newe weddit to it’.Footnote 40 Whereas Christ has been faithful to his spouse, the Church has not been equally loyal; Christ is now wedded ‘wiþ newe wenchis’, though he continues to seek the salvation of his spouse.Footnote 41
Only once does the sermon-cycle mention the marriage of priests. In a short sermon for the vigil of John the Baptist, the preacher argues that:
Here men may dowte and trete of þe staat and lif of preestis, how þei ben dowyde and wifles a
en Godis auctorite; for Crist forfendid dowyng boþe in hym and hise apostles and approuyde weddyng in apostles and money oþre. And þis is þe cast of þe feend to kyndely fuyre in herdis; for or þei moten boþe brenne, or þe kepere mut leue his craft, and traueyle to kepe þis fyer. And preestis schal not do boþe wel.Footnote 42
Anne Hudson has commented that ‘it seems unclear whether this [passage] is intended to encourage clerical marriage or to discourage it’, and indeed, the text leans in both directions.Footnote 43 The first sentence in the excerpt I have quoted suggests that Christ prohibited his disciples from gaining worldly lordship but encouraged them and others to marry, but to the contrary, the Church validates worldly lordship and prohibits marriage. The following sentences, however, somewhat complicate the picture. The preacher appears to be suggesting that the devil encourages lust among clerics so that they will either pursue destructive affairs (‘þei moten boþe brenne’) or else lose sight of their pastoral responsibilities and divide their time between family and Church (‘leue his craft and traueyle to kepe þis fyer’). Though the sermon remains ambiguous, it may be that the preacher is subtly reproducing Wyclif's argument that even though it is not against God's law for priests to marry, it is none the less unseemly.
Like the English Wycliffite sermons, the prose text An apology for Lollard doctrines touches briefly on sexuality. The Apology was attributed to Wyclif by its nineteenth-century editor but is unlikely to have been composed by the Oxford thinker. It does, however, bear the marks of having been composed in a learned environment, and it shares many of Wyclif's views. For example, though the tract does not express an opinion on clerical marriage per se, its author maintains that priests should be held to a higher standard of behaviour than laypeople; thus, ‘þe prest in doing fornicacoun doþ sacrile, and brekiþ his wow; for bi þe vertu of his degre, he made þe vow of chastite’.Footnote 44 Like Wyclif, the Apology also expresses scepticism about the Church's regulations regarding marriage. The author suggests that the Church has mistakenly prohibited clerical marriage as well as marriages between those whose relationships fall within the third and fourth degrees of consanguinity.Footnote 45 The ensuing discussion is reminiscent of Wyclif's ideas about the relationship between ecclesiastical and divine authority: the Church can only solemnise a marriage if God has already ratified it, ‘and if it be ratified of God, þan þe kirk mai not depart it, for no man may depart þe þing þat God haþ joinid’.Footnote 46 Thus, when the Church makes marriages on the basis of its own authority, and not on God's, it effectively forces people to commit sin.
Though the Apology for Lollard doctrines confirms that at least some of Wyclif's arguments remained current after his death, the text provides few other details about its author's views. Far more helpful are the anonymous Lollard sermons edited by Gloria Cigman. Like Wyclif himself, the preacher of Cigman's collection argues that the marriage of Mary and Joseph should be taken as a model. In the first place, the union of Mary and Joseph demonstrates that a marriage need not be consummated to be perfect: in his sermon for Christmas Day, the preacher argues that the story of the nativity gives ‘autorite aenst hem þat seiyn þat fleschli couplynge of man and womman makeþ matrymonie, for a blessider matrimonie or wedlok was þer neuere þan was þis, vnder whiche was born þat blesside chyld þat was boþe God and man’.Footnote 47
The preacher allows that married people who engage in sexual activity within marriage are committing no sin, but they are not perfect in chastity. He offers advice to people in the various states of life: single men should not seek wives, widows should not seek second husbands, and married men should abstain from sex on feast days and during their wives' menstrual periods.Footnote 48 It is clear, however, that the preacher would much rather see couples living abstinently together, for in his sermon for Sexagesima Sunday, he describes three ascending degrees of sexual virtue. Borrowing his language from the Matthean parable of the sower, he argues that chastity exists thirty-fold among married people who faithfully render to each other the marital debt. Sixty-fold chastity obtains among widows, who avoid ‘al manere flescli couplynge þat hee mai þe more freliere ӡeue tente to Goddis seruice’.Footnote 49 But hundred-fold chastity exists only among lifelong celibates, by whose virginity ‘þe mynde is couplid alweie to God as to þe spouse’.Footnote 50 The Lollard sermons thus leave the reader with the impression that virginity is a supreme good that cannot be equalled in marriage and that although sexual acts are not always sinful, they are nevertheless to be avoided.
A similarly traditional, but somewhat more pragmatic, view of marriage is embedded in the vernacular text Of weddid men and wifis, edited by Thomas Arnold in his collection of English works attributed to Wyclif. Whilst Hudson has called the text only ‘questionably’ Wycliffite, the fact that Of weddid men is the only tract with potential Wycliffite affiliations which is dedicated primarily to marriage, child-rearing and sexuality means that it deserves close attention.Footnote 51 As in the case of many such works, the scant palaeographical and bibliographical evidence makes it difficult to locate the text along the spectrum of dissenting and orthodox belief. Nevertheless, in at least two of the manuscripts in which it is preserved – Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, ms 296 and Westminster School, ms 3 – the tract keeps company with other heterodox writings.Footnote 52 It employs several elements of the Wycliffites' distinctive polemical idiom; the friars, for instance, it calls the ‘newe religions’ and the ‘newe ordris’.Footnote 53 Finally, the tract alludes to Wyclif's ideas about salvation and clerical marriage. A careful study of its contents reveals that it also shares many features, not least a pessimistic theological anthropology, with Cigman's sermons and may have been produced within a similar theological milieu.
The tract begins, conventionally enough, by comparing marriage between persons to the spiritual relationship between Christ and the Church. The author writes that God established matrimony in Paradise, that Christ could not have been born outside of wedlock and that Christ sanctified the institution of marriage by attending the wedding at Cana. Twice the author suggests that when men and women procreate, they ‘fulfille þe chosen noumbre of seyntis in blisse’, a comment that seems to allude to the predestinarian ideas of some early Wycliffites.Footnote 54 The remainder of the tract articulates a pessimistic theological anthropology: men and women are so frail, and fornication is so great a temptation, that God established marriage not only for laypeople but also for clerics: ‘God ordeynede prestis in þe olde lawe to have wyves, and nevere forbede it in þe new lawe, neiþer bi Crist ne bi his apostlis, but raþere aprovede it’.Footnote 55 The author does not, however, wholeheartedly commend matrimony. Virginity, he writes, is far superior to marriage: Christ himself maintained lifelong chastity, as did his mother and John the Evangelist. Were human beings less prone to temptation, more might follow in their footsteps, but virginity is a virtue that only a few may hope to attain.
The author proceeds to spell out the rights and duties of married men and women. Marriage must be made with the consent of both parties and should be contracted between two partners of roughly equal age. A young man should not marry an old widow, for instance, since she will be unable to bear him children. Sexual relations within marriage should take place for three reasons only: ‘þe firste for to geten children, to fulfille þe noumbre of men and wymmen þat schullen be savyd; þe secunde to kepe his wif fro lecherie of oþere men; þe þridde is to kepe himself fro lecherie of oþere wymmen’.Footnote 56Of weddid men quotes at length from the Epistles of Peter and Paul to justify a traditional view of the relationship between husband and wife. Wives, its author writes, should dress modestly, learn in silence and not presume to teach publicly. Husbands should take care not to consume too much drink or delicate meat and should exercise restraint in demanding the marital debt. Both spouses should take it upon themselves to teach their children God's commandments, a duty that should not be left only to a child's godparents.Footnote 57
Of weddid men is thus in many ways a paradigm of dissenting ideas about sexuality. Whilst the tract acknowledges that marriage is licit for both clerics and laypeople, not least because it helps them to avoid falling into fornication and adultery, it sets its sights higher. Virginity is an ideal that few can hope to achieve, but even those who do not attempt to lead a celibate life should regulate themselves to the greatest extent possible; married people, for instance, should have intercourse only to procreate and to keep one another from lust. In this way the tract further supports McSheffrey's thesis that many dissenters retained the patriarchal structure of the orthodox family whilst disputing other aspects of the late medieval theological consensus.
Whereas the texts so far considered have expressed almost ascetic ideas about lay sexuality, they advocate the marriage of clergymen. Both the Apology for Lollard doctrines and Of weddid men make the point that Christ did not prohibit his disciples either from marrying or from enjoying intimacy with their wives, and we have already seen that a passage from the English sermon-cycle might be construed similarly. Other Wycliffite authors likewise argue for the legitimacy, if not in fact the necessity, of clerical marriage.
The third and eleventh of the Twelve conclusions posted on the doors of Westminster Hall in 1395 call for an end to celibacy among clerics and religious women. The relevant passages deserve to be quoted at length:
þe thirdde conclusiun sorwful to here is þat þe lawe of continence annexyd to presthod, þat in preiudys of wimmen was first ordeynid, inducith sodomie in al holy chirche … Resun and experience prouit þis conclusiun. For delicious metis and drinkis of men of holi chirche welen han needful purgaciun or werse. Experience for þe priue asay of syche men is, þat þei like non wymmen; and when þu prouist sich a man mark him wel for he is on of þo. þe correlary of þis conclusiun is þat þe priuat religions, begynneris of þis synne, were most worthi to ben anullid …
þe xi conclusiun is schamful for to speke, þat a uow of continence mad in oure chirche of wommen, þe qwiche ben fekil and vnperfyth in kynde, is cause of bringging of most horrible synne possible to mankynde. For þ0ou sleyng of children of þei ben cristenid, aborcife and stroying of kynde be medicine ben ful sinful.Footnote 58
The suggestion that the combination of exclusively male company and fine food and drink leads to homosexual activity had already been made by Wyclif in Trialogus, and the anonymous authors of the Conclusions extend his warning about sodomy among friars to the clergy as a whole, though the corollary to the third conclusion still lays the blame for sodomy primarily at the doors of the fraternal orders. Nevertheless, the writers of the Conclusions appealed not to Wyclif, who had died a decade earlier, but rather to the categories of reason and experience. Like the tract Of weddid men, the Conclusions depict marriage as an antidote to the potentially disastrous consequences of repressed sexuality, but yet they do not suggest that virginity is preferable to marriage.
At least three other vernacular texts attribute the prevalence of sexual sin among the clergy and religious orders to their vows of celibacy. Of prelates, for instance, argues that clerical marriage is not prohibited in Scripture and that the tradition of clerical celibacy was instituted by the devil: ‘Prelates … forsaken as venym matrimonye, þat is leffel bi holy writt, til newe vowis of conynense of worldli clerkis weren brout in bi disceit of þe fend.’ Because priests cannot marry, they now ‘defoulen wyues, maidenes, widewis and nunnes in eche manere of lecherie, and children ben morþerid, and synne aenst kynde is not clene fleed’.Footnote 59 The text Of the leaven of Pharisees makes similar charges, adding that lecherous priests also kill women who withstand their sexual advances.Footnote 60 The General prologue to the Wycliffite Bible specifically warns against lechery, simony and sodomy among the scholars of Oxford, though it does not explicitly associate these vices with the discipline of clerical chastity.Footnote 61 Only one English text, De papa, appears to approve of a celibate clergy, but even here traditional Wycliffite concerns emerge: whilst the author maintains that priests should not have wives or children, he is also concerned that clerics should not enjoy temporal lordship.Footnote 62
Thus, English dissenting authors embraced a range of opinions about marriage and sexuality. On the one hand, whether they considered marriage a good in and of itself or merely a means to avoid fornication, Wycliffite writers endorsed an end to mandatory vows of celibacy. Those who wrote about lay sexuality, on the other hand, tended to take a more cautious line. Not only did the preacher of Cigman's sermons and the author of Of weddid men call for sexual restraint even between spouses, but they also upheld virginity as superior to marriage. In doing so, dissenters moved away from Wyclif, whose arguments had instead reflected his scepticism about the Church's regulation of marriage. Apart from the suggestion in the Apology for Lollard doctrines that the Church has sinfully prohibited some marriages, such as those between partners related in the third and fourth degrees, Wycliffite texts are generally unconcerned with Wyclif's distinction between marriages endorsed by God and those approved by the Church. Likewise, no vernacular writer expressed Wyclif's cynicism about the words of the marriage contract. The reason may have to do with the sexual politics of dissenting communities: McSheffrey has shown that many such groups were led by men; if she is right, then it is unsurprising that writers already in a dominant position would have sought no change in the sexual status quo.
The ‘orthodox’ context: contested views of marriage in late medieval England
It may be helpful at this point, before turning to the records of the heresy trials where ideas about marriage and sexuality were contested, to remember that Wycliffites were not the only medieval English writers to discuss the theory and practice of marriage. There remain extant a number of late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts the authors of which articulate theologies of marriage which, however controversial, were perceived to remain within the bounds of orthodoxy. Whilst those texts which explicitly respond to dissenting ideas uniformly reject the position that religious men and women should not be bound by vows of chastity, other writings express a range of opinions on the merits of marriage and virginity. Just as dissenting authors did not always find consensus among themselves, so also did those who stood within the mainstream of late medieval religion hold disparate views. A brief survey will help to contextualise the ideas that have already been encountered.
An overt refutation of Wycliffite views on clerical marriage can be found in the Dominican friar Roger Dymmok's Liber contra XII errores et hereses Lollardorum. His reply to the Twelve conclusions is in part an argument from church history and in part an apology for the intrinsic holiness of the friars' vocation. Responding to the charge that priestly celibacy provides an occasion for sodomy, particularly among members of the religious orders, Dymmok first argues that vows of chastity have their origin in Christ's earthly ministry. He acknowledges that priestly celibacy was prohibited in the time of the Old Testament and that the first person to take a vow of chastity was Jesus' mother, Mary, who, ‘before she was married, took a conditional vow of virginity, such that, if it pleased God, she would remain in chastity after the marriage made between her and Joseph by divine inspiration, her husband consenting’.Footnote 63 The coming of Christ definitively cancelled the prescriptions of the old law, and so vows need no longer be conditional. Dymmok writes that Christ and his disciples all observed chastity: those who had wives did not have intercourse with them, and those who did not have wives never married.
But why should Christ's priests be chaste, if their predecessors in the Old Testament took wives? Dymmok offers three reasons. First, he argues that the Christian priesthood is more sacred than its Levitical counterpart: Christian priests administer holier sacraments, especially insofar as they consecrate and distribute the body of Christ. Second, he notes that since the Levitical priesthood was hereditary, it required sex to perpetuate itself; the Christian priesthood has no such limitation. And finally, Dymmok points out that since priests must abstain from sex before consecrating the sacrament, it is fitting for priests to be perpetually chaste. On a practical note he adds not only that priests with wives would be less likely to devote themselves wholly to their ministry but also that married priests would require additional benefices to support their families.Footnote 64
Dymmok dedicates a more substantial portion of his text to the dissenters' accusation that male clerics, in the absence of female company, will turn to sodomy. His argument attempts, with varying degrees of success, to distinguish between the institution of clerical chastity and those clerics who break their vows. Dymmok first points out that male clerics do not avoid the company of women at their own behest: the ordinance of the Church and, more important, the command of the Holy Spirit require them to do so. He emphasises that many clergymen find it difficult to abstain from women and that some even require medicine to help them do so.Footnote 65 Whilst he thus builds up a picture of the clerical world as one in which priests' desires are exclusively heterosexual, Dymmok does admit that some clerics commit sodomy. He argues, however, that neither the Church nor the fraternal orders are at fault; after all, the orders' rules prohibit sodomy just as they prohibit heresy and blasphemy. If an individual friar commits a sinful act, his order cannot be held responsible for a crime that its rules proscribe: ‘if a religious commits sodomy or any other criminal act, he does not stain his order, but his order remains, as before, untouched’.Footnote 66 The same logic, Dymmok claims, applies to the Church as a whole. Besides, he notes in conclusion, sodomy can be traced back long before the founding of the religious orders.
Nevertheless, Dymmok's text betrays the sense that its author was caught off-guard by dissenting views on clerical sexuality. There is not to be found here the stately rhythm of his arguments against Wycliffite ideas on the eucharist, for instance; instead, there are admissions of clerical vice and attempts to shift the blame from structures to individuals. At the same time, neither Dymmok nor the later anti-Wycliffite writer Thomas Netter wrote at length about the marriage of laypeople, instead dedicating their energies to refuting the view that marriage is licit for clergymen. It is in texts closer to the day-to-day lives of medieval Englishmen that mainstream treatments of lay sexuality may be found.
One such is Dives and Pauper, a tract of the early fifteenth century which discusses a series of theological topics by means of a dialogue between a poor man, Pauper, and a rich one, Dives. Though the text appeared as evidence against heresy suspects in the 1430s, Hudson has written that ‘the well-instructed reader cannot suppose the author of Dives and pauper to have been a Wycliffite, of however conservative a cast’.Footnote 67 The text's views on marriage can, therefore, serve as a yardstick against which dissenting opinions may be measured.
It is in Pauper's exegesis of the sixth commandment that the text's theology of marriage emerges most clearly. Like the author of Of weddid men, Pauper's view of sexuality and his theological anthropology are pessimistic. Marriage, the character says, was ordained by God for two reasons: ‘to bryngyn forth childryn to Godis seruyse. Also into remedie to flen fornycacion and lecherye’.Footnote 68 Sexual activity is licit only when it tends to one of these ends. Pauper shares with the authors of the Twelve conclusions an especially strong disregard for women's abilities: husbands must pay close attention to their wives because they are ‘mor frele’ and hence more likely to fall into sin.Footnote 69 Women should, in addition, be subject to their husbands. Whilst Pauper may justly be accused of misogyny, he acknowledges that men too can be guilty of sexual sin, though they are frequently able to escape punishment.Footnote 70
Dives and Pauper's account of lay sexuality is in some ways similar to the Wycliffite texts we have discussed. Nevertheless, Pauper allows the institutional Church a substantial role in the regulation of marriage: first, he specifies that husbands who discover that their wives have committed adultery must obtain the Church's endorsement to dissolve the union.Footnote 71 He urges Dives to turn to the observances of traditional religion when tempted by lust: sinful thoughts may be overcome by refraining from fine meat and drink, by fighting against the urge to look at or think about women, and by meditating on Christ's passion.Footnote 72
Whereas there is little about Dives and Pauper that suggests that its author intended either to refute or to endorse Wycliffite ideas about marriage, the same cannot be said of John Mirk's Festial, a collection of sermons the author of which, an Augustinian canon, was a vocal opponent of Lollardy. Mirk's biographer, Susan Powell, has speculated that though the sermons may not have been disseminated widely, ‘it may be that the circulation of the Festial in the central midlands … was officially encouraged in opposition to the Lollard sermon cycle’.Footnote 73 Compared with a text like Of weddid men or even Dives and Pauper, Mirk's ‘Sermo de nupcijs’ contains a positive theology of marriage.
The sermon describes marriage as a sacrament and discusses its benefits under three headings: ‘furste for gode begynnyng, sython for gode leuing, and aftur for gode ending’.Footnote 74 Mirk proceeds to compare the marriage ritual with the creation of men and women in the book of Genesis. Just as God formed Eve from Adam's rib, so should couples resemble each other in age, health and social status. When during the marriage rite the priest gives the woman to the man, he represents God giving Eve to Adam. Under the rubric of ‘holy … lyuing’, Mirk recounts the story of the wedding at Cana, noting that Christ's presence there sanctified marriage for all time.Footnote 75 Finally, as for marriage's ‘gode ending’, Mirk notes that ‘þeiþ at keputh it wel in hure lyuing, þei schul come and ben takon in at þe gret weddyng þat schul ben aftur þe day of dome’.Footnote 76 In comparison with Wycliffite writings on the subject, Mirk does not teach that marriage is primarily a remedy for concupiscence; he instead stresses its sacramental aspect and treats it as an independent good. Nevertheless, Mirk urges his audience to conduct their marriages within the bounds of church law: he reminds his hearers of the consanguinity rules and makes it clear that partners should not enter into marriage without the intention of having children.Footnote 77
Even this brief overview of the texts produced in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by writers who stood within the religious mainstream reveals a surprising diversity of opinions about marriage. Whilst no such author joined extreme Wycliffite writers in advocating clerical marriage, their views of the sacrament of marriage differed substantially. On the one hand, for instance, Mirk appears to have regarded marriage as an independent good, whilst on the other, the author of Dives and Pauper seems to have considered it primarily a means of avoiding sexual sin. Taken together, these texts highlight the inadequacy of the single label ‘orthodox’ for late medieval English texts that cannot be traced back to Wycliffite dissenters. It was not only the theologically deviant who found little common ground where marriage was concerned.
Sexuality in heresy trials
Like dissenters who wrote about these topics, the more than seventy heresy suspects whose depositions and abjurations contain ideas about marriage and sexuality sometimes differed in their approaches. Most common among the defendants was the view that marriages need not be solemnised in church, but they also articulated ideas about the equality of men and women, about the relative worth of marriage and virginity, and about the consequences of clerical celibacy. Nevertheless, records from heresy trials must be read with the greatest of care. Not only did bishops and other heresy-hunters bring to the table a set of often inaccurate presuppositions about what defendants might say, but the process of recording suspects' views also had the potential to misrepresent their beliefs.Footnote 78 The stereotyping effects of inquisitorial presuppositions were very much in force where ideas about marriage and sexuality were concerned, and confusion about the boundaries of orthodoxy and heterodoxy complicated the situation still further.
After Wyclif's death in 1384, the first heresy trial to involve controversial statements about sexuality was the process in 1389 against William Ramsbury of Salisbury diocese. While his trial is justly famous for the light it casts on the liturgical practices of English dissenters, more important for our purposes is Ramsbury's position on questions of sexuality. He confessed to having taught that sex with a nun is no sin; that priests and laymen may rightly have intercourse with any woman in order to propagate the species; that it is better for priests and religious men to take wives and be apostates rather than to live in chastity; and that if a man's wife cannot bear him children, he should put her away and seek another.Footnote 79 This last position would have garnered support from some canonists, but Ramsbury's ideas were hardly well received by Bishop John Waltham's inquisitors.Footnote 80 He abjured these and eleven other articles, received a penance, and apparently performed it well.
As has recently been emphasised, Ramsbury may have been indebted more to continental ‘Free Spirit’ ideas than to English Wycliffite ones.Footnote 81 Indeed, other suspects' views were less permissive. Sir Lewis Clifford, one of the so-called ‘Lollard knights’ and a retainer first of Edward the Black Prince and then of his son Richard ii, was reported to have confessed that marriage, having been ordained directly by God, is superior to virginity and priesthood.Footnote 82 Clifford argued that all men and women who are not married should get married, or at least desire to get married; otherwise, he said, they were guilty of having wasted the opportunity to bring forth children. Finally, he suggested that a man and woman can marry simply by exchanging consent: ‘that is sufficient, without major obedience having been made to the church’.Footnote 83
It is possible that Clifford's views were distorted by Lancastrian propagandists keen to associate their Plantagenet predecessors with heresy as well as revolt and nepotism, but one of the beliefs that Clifford abjured was common among English dissenters. The view that church weddings are unnecessary and that couples can marry without solemnising their union in front of a priest occurs frequently in the records. Curiously, this belief, which at least four dozen defendants abjured, was not actually heretical, since the institutional Church taught that clandestine marriages were valid, even if not ideal. Nevertheless, approval of clandestine marriage remained a litmus-test of heterodoxy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Twenty-four of the defendants who appeared before Bishop William Alnwick of Norwich during the period 1428–31 admitted to having believed that the consent of the partners alone makes a marriage, as did ten suspects from the dioceses of Salisbury, Ely, Lincoln and Hereford and a dozen defendants brought to trial during Archbishop William Warham's purge of Canterbury diocese in 1511–12.
The groups of defendants from Norwich and Canterbury arouse the suspicion that inquisitors may erroneously have attributed identical views to large numbers of suspects. Indeed, all but five of the Norwich suspects whose trials included material about marriage confessed to the belief that solemnisation in church is not necessary. Their depositions and abjurations follow a pattern which seems to have been established during the trial of Margery Baxter, the first suspect to admit to heterodox ideas about marriage. Among the witnesses who testified in her case was Joan Clifland, one of Baxter's fellow-parishioners in Norwich. Clifland reported that Baxter had said ‘that only the consent of mutual love between a man and a woman suffices for the sacrament of matrimony, without any other words or solemnisation in church’.Footnote 84 The very same text, with only cosmetic changes, appears in the deposition of John Skylly of Flixton, the next suspect to appear in the records.Footnote 85 It also occurs, with only minor textual amendments, in the trials of Sybil Godsell of Ditchingham, John Reve and Matilda Fleccher of Beccles, Robert Cavell of Bungay, Thomas Mone and John Wroxham of Loddon, John Fynche of Colchester, Robert Gryggs and Isabel Chapleyn of Martham, and William Masse of Earsham; a literal English translation of the same words appears in the records associated with John Pert of Loddon and Richard Fleccher, Richard Beccles, Richard Grace and Baldwin Cowper, all of Beccles. The phrases of Clifland's testimony appear alongside other views about marriage in the abjurations and depositions of Hawisia Mone and Edmund Archer of Loddon, John Skylan of Bergh, William Hardy of Mundham and William Bate of Seething.Footnote 86
Nevertheless, just because Bishop Alnwick's inquisitors employed a stock phrase to describe their defendants' ideas about marriage does not mean that no defendant emerges from the records as an individual. Whilst we know nothing of fourteen suspects beyond what Margery Baxter reportedly told Joan Clifland, in other cases the Norwich records preserve additional details about their subjects. William Hardy, for instance, confessed to having taught that the solemnisation of marriage in church was invented by avaricious priests in order to extort money from their flocks.Footnote 87 Hawisia Mone said that the consent of the partners suffices to create a marriage ‘withoute symbred asking’, an obscure phrase which may imply the view that potential partners should not be subjected to the ritual of a public inquisition into their family relationships.Footnote 88 And William Colyn of South Creake, who also claimed that he would rather touch a woman's privy parts than the host, maintained that women should be held in common and marriage itself abolished.Footnote 89 Whilst it is true, therefore, that the Norwich records do obscure some of the variations in belief that existed in fifteenth-century East Anglia, it is to the inquisitors' credit that something of the defendants' idiosyncrasies can still be found. In Canterbury diocese, however, the opposite situation obtained: nearly the same form of words was abjured by all twelve defendants who confessed to heterodox ideas about marriage, which makes it all but certain that Archbishop Warham's officials painted their heresy suspects with the same brush.Footnote 90
Apart from the mass persecutions of Alnwick and Warham, defendants' beliefs about marriage and sexuality ran the gamut from the highly technical to the lecherous. The most complex set of views on marriage was abjured sometime between 1400 and 1403 by the leading Wycliffite John Purvey. Of the seven opinions of which he was accused by the Carmelite prior Richard Lavyngham, three are strikingly reminiscent of Wyclif's views: that canon law enables men to circumvent God's rules about marriage; that if a woman knows of an impediment of consanguinity but cannot prove it to the satisfaction of a church court, she should leave her husband anyway; and that it is better to release the parties to a disputed marriage to their own consciences than to run the risk of compelling them to live together adulterously.Footnote 91
Few defendants approached Purvey's legal and theological sophistication. As the complexities of early Wycliffite belief gave way, later defendants who spoke of marriage did so in practical terms. In 1412 the layman William Mundy abjured in Salisbury diocese the view that any married person is equal in status to a priest. Though many defendants throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries spoke of what later reformers would call the universal priesthood of all believers, Mundy was the only one to discuss the relative status of marriage and ordination.Footnote 92 About half a century later, the Lincoln suspect John Qwyrk confessed that the Church cannot separate couples whose marriages had been solemnised, a view that was echoed in Scotland in 1495, when eight suspects from Kyle abjured the claim ‘that after Matrimony by [sic] contracted, and consummate, the kyrk may make no Divorcement’.Footnote 93
With the sole exception of Ramsbury's inflammatory comments late in the fourteenth century, clerical marriage does not appear in the trial records until 1424. In that year, the Franciscan friar John Russell, an unlikely candidate for membership of a dissenting community, appeared in the Canterbury provincial convocation to answer to the charge that he had preached that religious men can have sex with women without sinning.Footnote 94 It is likely that Russell was no more than a discontented celibate, but his views were echoed four years later by a more obvious Lollard, the preacher William White. In 1428 White confessed to Bishop Alnwick of Norwich that after abjuring heresy in the diocese of Canterbury, he had moved to Norwich, given up his habit and tonsure, and married a woman named Joan. He taught that popes had mandated clerical celibacy against the freedom of Christ and argued that once priests in England were prohibited wives, they became greedy and lecherous.Footnote 95 Around the time of White's trial, seven other Norwich defendants confessed to believing that marriage is permissible and indeed desirable for priests and nuns. One of them, the servant John Burrell, reported that his master Thomas Mone had recommended that priests should take wives, ‘just as many priests do in remote regions’.Footnote 96 Though a question about clerical celibacy made its way into a questionnaire commissioned in 1428 by Bishop Thomas Polton of Worcester, clerical marriage did not resurface in a heresy trial until 1488, when John Nowers of Lincoln diocese argued that the marriage of men in holy orders is lawful; it recurred in 1490, when Richard Petesyne of Winchester diocese maintained that prelates should have wives.Footnote 97
It remains to ask whether these records reveal any patterns. It is striking that the majority of suspects who expressed opinions about marriage and sexuality articulated roughly similar views. At their trials, few dissenters expressed the sexual traditionalism that can be found in Wyclif's Latin writings and some of the texts produced by his early followers. It must be acknowledged, however, both that inquisitors were more likely to focus on questions whose answers could be judged clearly orthodox or heterodox and that heresy trials are not the optimum venue for discussions of sexuality. The high numbers of suspects from the dioceses of Norwich and Canterbury who confessed to dissenting views about marriage may suggest that inquisitors in those dioceses believed more strongly than their counterparts elsewhere that marriage could be a site for heterodox discourse.
Two chronological trends also deserve attention. On the one hand, the view that marriage should not be solemnised in church recurs frequently through the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, even though the incidence of clandestine marriage seems to have decreased over the same period.Footnote 98 On the other hand, it is interesting that, with the notable exception of William Ramsbury's trial in 1389, controversial claims about clerical marriage do not enter the records until the 1420s. Whether or not that may have been due to the lingering effects of Wyclif's caution on the topic remains an open question, though it is unlikely that many lay dissenters would have been more familiar with Wyclif's works than with the many vernacular tracts which urged an end to clerical celibacy.
Recent scholarship has revealed in gradually clearer terms the substantial theological gaps which existed between John Wyclif and those dissenters who came after him, and marriage and sexuality were among the topics on which Wyclif and his successors did not always agree. Whereas Wyclif had expressed scepticism about clerical marriage, declaring it to be possible but nevertheless inappropriate, many later dissenters embraced it enthusiastically. The suggestion that priests and nuns should be allowed to marry appears often in Wycliffite texts and trial records, and it was a sufficiently controversial idea for at least two orthodox polemicists, Roger Dymmok and Thomas Netter, to devote considerable energy to its refutation. Wyclif's views on lay marriage met a different fate: only a few features of his theology of sexuality can be found in his followers' tracts on the subject. Indeed, many authors moved beyond the Oxford thinker in articulating so pessimistic a view of human nature as to render marriage merely a remedy for lust.
This study of dissenting theologies of marriage and sexuality therefore calls even further into doubt the view that Wycliffites and their successors subverted the sexual status quo of the later Middle Ages. With the exception of their objections to the practice of church weddings, Wycliffites who wrote about lay marriage recapitulated traditional themes, and they rarely praised the abilities of women. Against the background of such ideas, even the ostensibly ‘liberal’ suggestion that clerical celibacy should be abolished can be read in terms that buttress patriarchy and sexual traditionalism. Wycliffite texts repeatedly warn that celibacy has given rise to sins ranging from sodomy to infanticide, and it is no stretch to imagine that their authors regarded the marriage of priests and nuns more as an opportunity to regulate clerical libidinousness than as an exercise in Christian liberty. As McSheffrey has noted, the abolition of celibacy would have struck especially hard at the opportunities available to medieval women, for a slim minority of whom the convent provided ‘the possibility … of living outside the structures of the patriarchal family’.Footnote 99
But why, then, has Lollardy been thought of for several decades as a movement – or, more accurately, a set of more or less interconnected communities – that appealed especially to women? The notion of Lollards as sexual pioneers remains strange indeed, not least because English heretics were rarely themselves accused of libertinism. Vern Bullough, among others, has documented the ways in which accusations of heresy and sexual immorality tended to go hand-in-hand among the opponents of sects like the Cathars and Waldensians of southern France. Against this background, it is particularly surprising that few accusations of sexual vice in late medieval England were made against Wycliffites by their clerical opponents.Footnote 100 The reason may be that English dissenters were not themselves especially scandalous: only two suspects' views bordered on indecency, and William Ramsbury and William Colyn both seem to have existed at the margins of Wycliffite or Lollard dissent, if indeed they can be described in these terms at all.
The substance of dissenting ideas aside, the history of Wycliffite and Lollard attitudes toward marriage and sexuality reveals important patterns of doctrinal development. Despite the tendency of the extant sources to pigeonhole ideas about marriage even more noticeably than those about other topics, Wycliffite texts and trial records both witness to the multivalent views about marriage and sexuality to be found within dissenting circles. Each side of the dialogue between dissenters and their antagonists reinforced the other: when the former priest William White abandoned his tonsure, got married and preached on clerical marriage in Norwich, it was unsurprising that inquisitors there asked later defendants about the same topic. But however stereotyped the records might be, careful reading reveals that dissenters' ideas about marriage and sexuality were hardly unitary. We do not know if the Buckinghamshire suspect Agnes Wellis, in whose company we began, told Bishop Longland that she and her fellow dissenters only married one another. But even if they did, it was by no means clear what they thought their marriages entailed.
