RESEARCH REVEAL JANUARY AS THE MONTH WITH HIGHEST DIVORCE RATE AND WHY
January is a strain for most people.
It’s dark and the festive lights don’t
disguise this anymore. You’re back at
work and the next holiday may be
some way off. You’ve just had to
spend a large amount of time with
your family. This has consequences.
Lawyers have a worse than normal
return to work after the Christmas
break: they go back to stacks of
divorce papers. So many couples
seek the help of professionals to
have their marriage dissolved after
the strains of the Christmas season
that the first Monday of the first
working week of the year is known
among lawyers as Divorce Monday.
Lawyers ascribe the sudden surge in
divorce work to the release of
tension after temporary truces for
the sake of the family over the
Christmas season.
But it’s doubtful that lawyers, or
their clients, know how long the
history of the time period is.
This may appear to be a relatively
new development (the earliest
statistics online date from 2008), but
my recent research into litigation
records surviving from the medieval
church courts in York shows that the
same pattern prevailed as far back as
the 14th century.
A third of the litigation heard by the
church court in York (which had the
power to enforce and dissolve
marriage) was initiated in the month
of January. So medieval lawyers
would have been as familiar with the
January rush to the courts as their
modern colleagues, although the
marriage disputes they helped
settle were very different.
Medieval marriage
It was incredibly easy to contract
marriage in the middle ages. All that
was needed was that a man and a
woman said the words “I marry you”
to one another. There was no need
for a priest or even witnesses, the
spoken words married them before
God. But getting out of it was more
difficult.
Unlike today, people couldn’t legally
divorce: they had to have their
marriages annulled instead. What
God had joined together could not
be seen to be put asunder by Man.
So, couples had to convince the court
that they had married someone else
previously, or that they had never
consented to the marriage in the
first place.
Most people were well aware about
the law regarding marriage and in
many cases it is clear that sometimes
both they and the courts engaged in
an elaborate deception to allow
couples to separate or to marry. The
clear deception meant that the court
had to enforce marriage in most
cases.
Only in cases of really extreme
domestic violence did the church
court step in as a kind of heavy-
handed marriage counsellor,
attempting first to reconcile the
litigants, and, if that was
unsuccessful, by granting the
spouses the right to live in separate
households (but not to have sexual
relations with anyone) and by
providing alimony for the wife.
The big rush
So why the January divorce rush?
Was the medieval Christmas just as
stressful as ours, did the strain of
family over the festive period prove
too much for the couples of old?
Perhaps, but the medieval version
actually has more to do with the two
annual rhythms that dominated life
in the middle ages: the Church year –
which was extremely busy in the
month of December – and the
demands of the farming year.
After the summer court recess began
in late July, the month of August and
the first three weeks of September
had low litigation levels: only urgent
cases were heard at specially
convened courts. The last week of
September and the month of
October saw litigation pick up, when
16% of annual litigation was
initiated after the court’s long
summer recess.
But after that legal activity fell dead.
Between 1300 and 1500 not a single
case was opened in York in
November. The court did convene
this month, so the total absence of
litigation is initially baffling. But this
becomes more understandable
when one considers the agricultural
year. November demanded a lot of
heavy activity (slaughtering,
smoking and curing livestock in
preparation for the winter), but it
was also a period of celebration and
much drinking as people feasted on
the easily spoilt fatty meats of newly
slaughtered animals before such
meat became inedible.
Then work and feasts of the late
autumn combined with the
Christmas season to provide little
opportunity to pay attention to legal
matters. The proctors, advocates and
judges of the medieval church courts
often left the city to help their
families in the country in the
autumn, and, unlike their modern
colleagues they were priests and
therefore had to balance their time
in court with their liturgical duties in
the Advent period.
So when month of January arrived
both litigants and their
representatives at court were had to
attend to an avalanche of legal
disputes.
Against this background, it is perhaps
ironical that most medieval
illuminated calendars show the
peasants’ days in the month of
January being taken up with
activities such as repairing
household items and mending
fences in the fields. The court
records of medieval York suggest
that, just like today, the jolly family
activity of “mending fences” was not
the first thing on the minds of
everyone directly after Christmas.
By Frederik Pedersen, University of Aberdeen
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