Let us depart from the law as stated and ask about the law as applied. Our sources for this are annoyingly incomplete, nothing like what they are, for example, for the English central royal courts, but we do have substantial pieces of the picture, runs of records from various courts in various places at various times. The four cases I have chosen as examples are all typical of English marriage-formation cases. They differ from those on the Continent in ways that we will come to in later chapters. They differ from most of the other English cases only in that these examples have left particularly full records.

DOLLING C SMITH

In our first case, Alice Dolling appeared in the consistory court of Salisbury on 10 July 1271, claiming that William Smith was her husband. William denied the charge, and Alice was told to produce her witnesses before the rural dean of Amesbury (Wilts). In September, the depositions of her three witnesses were published in open court. In October, William confessed that he had had intercourse with Alice but denied that he had married her. He claimed that he had been in another town on the St Stephen's day (26 December), almost three years previously, the day on which Alice alleged that they exchanged the words of marital consent in Winterbourne Stoke (Wilts). The dean of Amesbury was to examine William's 10 witnesses.