This was a disciplinary case: Henry Newlond and Joan Gardyner had gone ahead and formalized their marriage despite Henry having been strictly forbidden from entering into any marital contracts while another case against him was pending. There are some interesting aspects of his brief examination. First, it is odd that Newlond claimed not to know the surname of the Katherine who was suing him (perhaps this was a tactic meant to convey how baseless her case was, as he did not even know her). Second, Newlond took advantage of the loopholes emerging from the jurisdictional complexity of the late medieval church. He would have had a hard time persuading his or Joan Gardyner’s parish priest to solemnize their marriage, as they would have known that he had a marriage case pending in the courts. There were, however, other quasi-independent ecclesiastical jurisdictions – such as this Hospitaller chapel in Hertfordshire – that turned a blind eye to such prohibitions as long as fees were paid for dispensations.[1] And thirdly, although Henry Newlond and Joan Gardyner were given public penance for their disregard for the ecclesiastical courts’ prohibitions, they would still have been married according to the canon law. So it was a strategy that often worked as an end-run around the courts’ consideration of two rival claims to a marriage; though it likely cost more than the standard church solemnization and carried a humiliating penalty, perhaps Henry Newlond and Joan Gardyner thought their irregular marriage worthwhile.
LMA, MS DL/C/A/001/MS09065, fol. 252r
Response of Henry Newlond, Defendant, 29 Jan. [1494]2
Henry Newlond admits that when there was pending a marriage case between him and Katherine, whose surname he does not know, before Master Kerver,[3] this witness acquired an inhibition against Master Kerver from the lord’s [court of] audience,[4] and afterwards as the case pended at the court of Audience, this witness procured the solemnization of marriage between him and Joan Gardyner by a certain rector whose name he does not know, outside their parish churches, in the chapel of St. John of Dinsley called The Temple near Hitchin.[5] And he did this at the advice of a certain Cowper, king’s esquire.[6] And then both he and Joan swore to undergo the penance enjoined on them, in the presence of Sir William Dory, John Idis, and Henry Aprece. And then the judge assigned them this penance, that is on the next Sunday and the two Sundays following, they are to walk before the procession into the cathedral church, the man [with his head bare?] and the woman with her head covered with a hood.
[1] See Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 39-40.
[2] The year of this entry is unclear; it is written on a folio bound out of order towards the end of the manuscript, above an entry dated 20 June 1494. The folio includes a number of short entries in different hands, possibly rough copies, including a short account on the verso in the hand of Nicholas Parker, who was scribe at the Consistory court in the 1460s and 1470s (see LMA, DL/C/0205).
[3] John Kerver or Carver, the bishop of London’s commissary general. See A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A. D. 1500, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 1:365-66.
[4] This likely means the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Court of Audience.
[5] This was the chapel of the former Templar house, known as Temple Dinsley, near Hitchin, Hertfordshire, which after the suppression of the Templars in the fourteenth century was transferred to the Hospitaller Order. There was a chaplain there in the late fifteenth century. “Preceptory of Temple Dinsley,” A History of the County of Hertford, vol. 4 (1971), 445-446.
[6] A king’s esquire, sometimes called esquire of the body, was what we might call a security official at the king’s court; Cowper was likely a man with some connections and know-how.
Consistory 