Recent research has emphasized the nexus of separation customs and marital property systems in medieval Europe. Indeed, the practice of marital separation across the late-medieval Franco-Belgian region may have been influenced by its communal property system. Charles Donahue Jr has observed that ‘a system of marital community property, which existed all over the Franco-Belgian region, virtually requires that a separating couple obtain a public declaration that they have separated’, whereas the English ‘separate marital property system’ more markedly fostered informal ‘do-it-yourself’ separations. Donahue's observations have been corroborated by a recent article by Monique Vleeschouwers-Van Melkebeek, focusing on separation and the division of property in the late-medieval southern Low Countries. There, the ‘customary property system in the Franco-Belgian region spurred the couples on in their demand for a judicial separation’, in contrast to England. From the Franco-Belgian region, hundreds of preserved divisions of marital property can also be found in secular court records as a material consequence of judicial separations, granted by ecclesiastical courts.