Firm rules, flexible time: revisiting Romeo and Juliet of Stonegate (York Cause Paper E 248, 1345-1346)
This year is the thirtieth anniversary of my Borthwick Paper “Romeo and Juliet of Stonegate: A medieval Marriage in Crisis’. The pamphlet focused on Cause Paper E 248, a case that lasted 19 months from May 1345 to November 1346. The case created a scandal in York, when, during Corpus Christi celebrations and in the presence of the Mayor of York and many others, Simon Munkton abducted his wife, Agnes Huntington, from the York Minster. The relationship of Simon and Agnes had always been characterised by conflict, though initially the conflict involved Agnes’ parents who attempted to prevent Simon marrying her. The case was christened “Romeo and Juliet of Stonegate” by Canon Purvis in his register of the York Cause papers because witnesses describe how Agnes and Simon thus faced their own Montagues and Capulets enacting their own balcony scene in defiance of Agnes’ parents centuries before Shakespeare wrote his play. My Borthwick Paper concluded that, foreshadowing Juliet’s fate, Agnes of Huntington faced a different, but equally star-crossed future becoming a domestic abuse victim at the hands of her Romeo. However, she also used the court in York to protect her substantial fortune from her husband when he attempted to force her to consent to his sale of land she inherited in Huntington outside York. In the absence of any conclusive evidence about the later lives of Agnes and Simon and basing myself on some striking features of final set of depositions in the case I surmised that the case probably ended in a compromise that preserved the marriage and suggested that Agnes may have died in the plague around 1350.
Thirty years ago, I ignored the nuts and bolts of the legal procedure that allowed Agnes to resist Simon for so long, In this paper, I shall comment on how both parties used the legal system, both in and out of court, and on how they used their knowledge of the rules of law to speed up or slow down the machinery of the law in their attempts to reach their desired legal outcome.
Frederik Pedersen is emeritus senior lecturer in History at Aberdeen. He has published widely on the history of law, sex and family in later medieval Europe. He has also publications on the Viking age, Scandinavian Secular Law and the history of the German Hanse. His main focus of interest is medieval canon law and its reception, medieval marriage and the history of sexuality.
- Venue
- Taylor A37, and online
- Contact
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Contact Prof Karin Friedrich for the online link: k.friedrich@abdn.ac.uk.