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I know that under modern laws (even within the Catholic Church), children born in a marriage that is later annulled are still considered legitimate, because they were born of a putative marriage. Was that also true in the Middle Ages?

"Bloody" Mary and Elizabeth were both declared illegitimate and then legitimate several times, if I understand correctly, but was that the necessary result of annulment, or just their father's decree so he could choose his successor?

sempaiscuba
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NyaNya
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    I think it is important to note that there is no "medieval European" law code. Laws differed from country to country. – MCW Aug 28 '17 at 11:33
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    Is this in anyway related to Jon Snow's birth and that of his half-siblings? :P – NSNoob Aug 28 '17 at 11:51
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    @NSNoob Of course not, whatever makes you think that? ;) Yeah, that's why I'm asking. I think an annulment doesn't automatically make children illegitimate, but there are plenty who disagree. – NyaNya Aug 28 '17 at 12:35
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    @MarkC.Wallace And many medieval countries had practically no written law, so whether that child was legitimate or not would completely depend on whoever made the decision. – gnasher729 Aug 28 '17 at 12:44
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    @gnasher729 - that is a very perceptive comment. Probably should be somewhere in a library that we could all reference, because that affects many of the questions we deal with here. In an autocracy, "law" depends on who makes the decision. – MCW Aug 28 '17 at 12:56
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    @MarkC.Wallace Annulments weren't decided in national courts, but in church courts, all (theoretically, at least) under a single jurisdiction in most of medieval Europe. – sempaiscuba Aug 28 '17 at 18:26
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    True - but legitimacy is a civil construct, decided in state/national courts - this question is deceptively complex and interesting. Bounty time. – MCW Aug 28 '17 at 18:34
  • @MarkC.Wallace Obviously, but there were more similarities than differences, it seems to me, not to mention that the Church was universal up until the reformation and its laws were the same everywhere. Do you maybe know of a western country in which annulments resulted in automatic illegitimacy? – NyaNya Aug 29 '17 at 08:54

1 Answers1

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An annulment does not "break" a marriage, as does a divorce. It declares that the marriage never happened in the first place.

This meant that the married couple would revert to their previous legal status (the "wife" would revert to being a "spinster" if she hadn't been previously married).

However, any children from an annulled marriage would still be considered legitimate in every sense, unless this had been declared otherwise in law. As Harold J. Berman observed:

Where the parties married in good faith, without knowledge of an impediment, the canonists held that the children of the marriage were legitimate and that the marriage itself was valid up to the day it was declared null.

  • Berman, 2009, p228

Interestingly, in most cases, children would remain in the custody of the father. We have examples of this in the case of the daughters of King Louis VII of France and his wife Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine. Louis and Eleanor were eventually granted an annulment of the ground of consanguinity, and their daughters Alix of France and Marie of France were given into the custody of their father. In this particular case, the girls were declared illegitimate in the courts, but not because of the annulment.

The question of the legitimacy of the daughters of Henry VIII was entirely to do with the Royal succession. Of course, there were some - particularly in continental Europe - who did not recognise the legitimacy of the marriage of Elizabeth's mother, Anne Boleyn, to Henry VIII. For these people, Elizabeth had never been a legitimate daughter of Henry in the first place.

Source:

sempaiscuba
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    Was there any point in time when children of an annulled marriage were automatically declared illegitimate? In the West, that is? – NyaNya Aug 28 '17 at 10:07
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    @NyaNya Not according to Berman. In fact, it seems that in some places, for example medieval Wales, even children born out of wedlock could be regarded as "legitimate" if they were acknowledged by their father! – sempaiscuba Aug 28 '17 at 10:10
  • Berman's wording "the marriage itself was valid up to the day it was declared null" seems incorrect to me, or perhaps it indicates a change in what annulment has been understood to mean. My understanding is that (at least in modern Catholicism) to obtain an annulment, it must be shown that no valid marriage ever existed. – sumelic Aug 28 '17 at 17:34
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    From this point of view, I think the correct way of explaining the legitimacy of the resulting offspring is that they are the result of a marriage that was thought to be/presumed to be valid at the time they were conceived. This seems to agree with the description I found from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/marriage-and-family/marriage/annulment/ – sumelic Aug 28 '17 at 17:36
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    Diocese of Des Moines also seems to gives the same explanation, saying that an annulment means "the marriage existed but was invalid in the eyes of the Church. This has no effect on the civil aspects of marriage, divorce, alimony, or on the status of the children.": http://www.dmdiocese.org/divorced-and-catholic-faqs.cfm – sumelic Aug 28 '17 at 18:01
  • @sumelic That may be the case now, but the example of Eleanor of Aquitaine shows that was not necessarily the case in the medieval period. In 1149 Pope Eugene III issued a bull confirming her marriage to Louis VII was valid. In 1152 it was annulled (with the approval of Pope Eugene) on the grounds of consanguinity. I suspect that the definitions in canon law have refined in the years since, but for the medieval period I defer to the expertise of Professor Berman. – sempaiscuba Aug 29 '17 at 02:13
  • I'm no historian, so perhaps I should have been more tentative in my previous comment, and I certainly can't fault you for sticking to what Berman says. That said, I don't think the Eleanor of Aquitaine example is really a counterexample to the current Catholic conception of annulment as described in the above links. The confirmation of validity occurred before the annulment; at a time when the marriage was thought to be valid. The later annulment can be understood as saying that it was later discovered that the marriage was not valid after all. – sumelic Aug 29 '17 at 02:18
  • (If their relative positions in time were reversed, that would be a real counterexample.) I'm pretty sure that Catholics recognize that papal bulls can be mistaken about things like the validity of a particular marriage. – sumelic Aug 29 '17 at 02:19
  • @sumelic Remember, in the 12th century Popes were still "infallible"! ;-) We know that the evidence of consanguinity was presented in 1149, but the Pope decided that marriage to a third cousin once removed was OK. I suspect that the reality was probably that the political situation in 1152 (no male heir & the Barons getting antsy) demanded an annulment, and the Pope was forced to back down. Either way, Professor Berman has (presumably) read the contemporary canon law and based his analysis on that. – sempaiscuba Aug 29 '17 at 02:35
  • Well, Catholics still consider popes to be "infallible", but only in certain circumstances when speaking about certain topics. As far as I can tell, a Catholic wouldn't say that this kind of Papal bull is infallible. Wikipedia says the current formalization of this doctrine occured in the First Vatican Council of 1869–1870, but as far as I can tell this wasn't a retreat from an earlier consensus about more general infallibility even in non-doctrinal matters. – sumelic Aug 29 '17 at 03:00