early church; it was a contract made between two people that could be blessed
by the church if they wished. Nor was bastardy seen as the shame it became in
the later Middle Ages. Many of the great real or legendary figures of the age
were bastards, or were said to be–Arthur, Charlemagne, Charles Martel, and
of course William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy. This came to worry the
established church, especially in cases where the inheritance of land or money
was concerned. A British synod of 786 stated that only legitimate children
could inherit estates, and that a man should confine himself to just one wife
and a woman to just one husband. But it took a long time for the idea to catch
on. Welsh laws allowed people to enter trial marriages for seven years and, in
Scotland, a year’s trial marriage was allowed right up to the sixteenth century.
The church’s attempts to impose moral controls on their congregations
were somewhat undermined by the behaviour of the churchmen themselves.
Pope John XII turned the church of St John Lateran in Rome into a brothel; he
was eventually tried for perjury, simony, sacrilege, murder, adultery and
incest, and deposed in 963, but his successor, Leo VIII, was little better. He
was not even ordained when he became Pope, and died in the act of adultery!
DARK AGE CRIMES