ABSTRACT
The question arises as to whether the ecclesiastical courts’ matrimonial jurisdiction was in anyway adequate to deal with the generality of unhappy marriages. Who would wish to use a procedure that was both costly and slow, and offered no practical benefit to the successful complainant? Nor did a divorce a mensa et thororeferred to by Lewis in 1805 as the ‘suit for alimony’ – offer any realistic advantage to separated middle-class wives left without financial means of support. For if the husband would not voluntarily support his wife it was unlikely that the court order would be respected through threat of spiritual censure. A more likely explanation was that a middle-class wife who was cruelly treated, or found her husband’s adultery intolerable, sought the Church’s seal to live apart from him in a time when violation of spiritual standards of matrimonial accord might result in ostracism within her social strata. The ecclesiastical decree would show the wife to be morally blameless. Similar argument explains the husband’s resort to the ecclesiastical court. But all this is conjecture. Unfortunately, many of the post-Reformation ecclesiastical records that have survived destruction at the hands of librarians seeking space in overcrowded archives remain uncatalogued and intractable. However, study of available sources suggests the ecclesiastical courts’ matrimonial jurisdiction was seldom used.
