Most English people in the late Middle Ages married at some point in their lives, although a sizable minority of adults had not, or had not yet, married.¹ The age at which late medieval London men and women married for the first time varied substantially, both according to gender and especially according to socioeconomic status. Our best data come from the highest reaches of late medieval English society, the aristocracy, where women first married while young, between thirteen and eighteen, and men often only in their mid twenties or later (although some men, especially orphaned heirs, married very young).² Elite...

Perhaps more than any other time in a medieval person’s life, the preliminaries to marriage demanded particular behavior on the parts of both the prospective husband and the prospective wife. Medieval and modern commentators have often used the potent metaphor of the dance to describe these rituals and negotiations of courtship. Among late medieval Londoners, the courtship dance was relatively free-form, with only a few required elements. But a virtually inviolable rule was that the man should take the lead while the woman followed. Transgressions of this choreography were rare; to do differently was to act improperly and disreputably, and...

In the spring of 1488, Margaret Heed and William Hawkyns discussed marriage. Both were of London’s merchant elite: Margaret was the daughter of Henry Heed, ironmonger and citizen, while William Hawkyns was later described as a citizen and a salter. Sometime in early to mid-April, Margaret agreed to marry William, and banns were issued twice in Margaret’s parish of St. Sepulchre over the coming weeks. The marital process apparently progressed normally—in addition to the banns, wedding clothes and ornaments were prepared—until Whit week (the week following Pentecost, seven weeks after Easter), when Margaret began to show reluctance to...

The help, influence, and force that those surrounding a courting couple offered and imposed on them extended beyond the process of identifying a prospective mate and making a contract. Integrally related to the process of making a marriage contract in late medieval England was the possibility of enforcing, or challenging, that contract through the ecclesiastical courts and through associated legal processes such as arbitration. Legal proceedings were—alongside emotional appeals, the withholding of financial settlements, and threats of physical force—powerful tools for the enforcement of marital norms. Spurned partners, neighbors, and parents and guardians could use court action to...

Recently, medievalists, inspired by sociologists, geographers, and other social scientists,¹ have begun to explore how space and place both shaped and were shaped by social relations in the Middle Ages.² Space in the late medieval city was socially complex, resisting easy categorization by gender or station. The model of a private, domestic female sphere and a public, exterior male sphere³ cannot take account of households where the male workplace (the shop) was integral to the home, nor can it accommodate more generally the central importance to the identity of the paterfamilias of the governance of the household. Anna Dronzek, for...

In the late medieval English urban world, households were ideally patriarchal—ruled by the husband-father. The formation of marriage discussed in Part I reflected assumptions that fathers ruled the households from which the man and woman marrying came and that the new husband would rule the household that would be formed by the newly married couple. Late medieval English patriarchy was not confined to the household, however; the ideal of the father-ruled household extended beyond the family into society as a whole, so that men rather than women, and particularly older men, were seer as the natural rulers and governors...

Maintenance of reputation was of the utmost importance in late medieval society. The concepts of honor and reputation were, however, gender-specific values: women’s value and identity were more closely tied than men’s to marital status, marriageability, and above all, sexual repute. But this does not mean that men’s sexual acts and attitudes were irrelevant to their good name. Male sexual reputability was contested territory, as notions of self-governance, Christian morality, and honor battled with an ethic in which male status and identity were defined by the sexual conquest of women.

Complicated stories about sexual reputation and its relationship to a...