Sex, sin and repeat offenders: what medieval church records reveal

It was a seriously bad idea to commit adultery or have sex outside marriage in medieval England, but that didn’t stop people from doing it.

University of Auckland history PhD student Nicholas Ringwood’s thesis examines how church courts in medieval England controlled sexual behaviour, drawing on a rare, self-contained set of 14th-century court records from Lincolnshire.

The records, originally written in ecclesiastical Latin, cover a period from 1336 to 1349, and contain around 1,000 cases, most involving the sins (treated as crimes) of ‘fornication’ (sex outside marriage) and adultery.

Ringwood says each case is brief – usually just a name, the sin, a statement of guilt or denial, and the punishment – but across 13 years, they revealed all sorts of interesting information about the lives of the so-called sinners.

“I found that over a third of all of those cited would go on to offend again, and after the third or fourth citation, people became more likely to reoffend than reform, so there was a big problem with reoffending,” he says.

To crunch all the data, he took “a mathematical approach,” using a large spreadsheet featuring all 1,000 cases, what they were accused of and their punishments; which varied from a set number of ‘floggings around the church’, forced pilgrimages, being made to walk in front of religious processions or just being fined; and in some cases, you could pay a fine instead of any of the harsher physical punishments.

“A lot of the physical penances were able to be redeemed for a small financial payment to the church, so if they had the money, that’s what people did,” Ringwood says.

Unlike many medieval sources, these records focus on normal parishioners as opposed to the aristocracy or landed gentry, which made them a valuable window into the everyday world.

“I wanted to know what ordinary people were doing around this time, and these records are such a clear and direct insight into their lives.”

During his research, he discovered a slight emphasis on those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, including people described as ‘vagrants’ or of ‘no fixed abode’ as well as changes in female names over time, suggesting different life stages.

“So you might start out as Joanne, daughter of Frank, then as you got a bit older it might be a location-based name, like Joanne of the Moor, and then later still, become Joanne Seamstress or Joanne Farmer, to reflect your occupation.”

Ringwood also identified around 28 clerics punished for sexual misbehaviour, often under the label of ‘incontinence’ rather than fornication or adultery, and who generally faced much softer, more negotiable punishments. Ordained priests were supposed to remain celibate.

Women who slept with priests, on the other hand, faced some of the harshest penances, Ringwood says.

Sexual misbehaviour in these church courts was framed as a sin as opposed to a secular crime (for which there were royal courts) and organised into a hierarchy, with fornication at the lowest level, adultery above that, various forms of incest higher again and ‘non-procreative’ acts such as sodomy and bestiality at the top.

Rape was generally treated as a violent crime and fell under the royal courts, and incest was complex.

“In the Middle Ages, there were three types of incest: blood relations, but also something called affinity and spiritual relations,” says Ringwood.

“Affinity created incestuous links between yourself and the family of anyone you had previously slept with, so you would be incestuous if you married the cousin of someone you had slept with, for example.”

And spiritual affinity went even further.

“If you took part in a sacrament with someone, you were essentially brought into their family, so if you acted as godmother at a baptism, it would then be incestuous for you to sleep with anyone in that family.”

Lesser sins, of the type Ringwood documented, came to the attention of ‘travelling courts’ which would do the rounds of the parishes roughly every six months and have people tap them on the shoulder to report the various sins of their neighbours.

The church courts also routinely threatened excommunication, which had major consequences, including being excluded from sacraments and loss of standing in other courts; although Ringwood found the courts frequently lifted these decrees after due penance and the person was then accepted back into parish life.

Given all these restrictions, Ringwood says it’s surprising people in the same village could actually find someone they could legitimately marry and have sex with, and less surprising there were so many transgressions.

One of his main case studies follows Robert Basage and Emma Thorif, a couple charged with adultery together 17 times over 13 years. Both were married to other people, and Emma was related to Robert’s wife and had been involved in the baptism of their child, classing their relationship as both adultery and incest under church law.

“This is a couple that realistically today we would just see as two people in a long-term relationship, estranged from their respective spouses, raising a child together," he says, “and yet here they were facing all these horrible punishments.”

Three Minute Thesis (3MT) final
Nicholas Ringwood is one of two finalists from Arts and Education in the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition. He’ll be competing in the University of Auckland finals on Friday 17 July from 5pm to 7pm in the Owen G. Glenn Building. The doctoral winner of this event goes on to the Asia-Pacific 3MT Competition.

Register here to attend.