In a splendid but controversial paper read at the Fourth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law in Toronto in 1972, Charles Donahue presented the arresting argument that Pope Alexander III (1159–81) pursued a consistent policy in his judgments and consultations relating to matrimony, intended to undermine the prevailing structures supporting seigneurial and paternal control of marriage. ‘Alexander’s rules on the formation of marriage’, he wrote, ‘constitute a conscious, and at least partially successful, attempt to use the canon law to influence the course of social development.’ Further, he argued that the ‘rules’ were new, that they did diminish the influence of family and feudal lords on the choice of marriage partners, and that ‘the rules were adopted, at least partially, in order to achieve that effect.’ This broad and bold thesis was endorsed fifteen years later in 1987, in James Brundage’s major study on Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, which concluded, even more emphatically, that ‘[Alexander] clearly wished to recast the law of family relationships…. He consistently sought to free marriages from the control of parents, families, and feudal overlords and [to] place the choice of marriage partners under the exclusive control of the parties themselves.’ For both scholars, Alexander’s ‘policy’ was profoundly revolutionary. And so it would have been, had such a policy existed.

To someone with even a passing knowledge of ‘the law and custom of the English realm’, to use Glanvill’s oft-repeated phrase, these confident assertions are hard to square with the evidence. The problem with the thesis is that it depended not on an examination of immediate historical circumstances, of which Professor Donahue was not unaware, but on matrimonial cases from English ecclesiastical courts recorded over a hundred or even two hundred years after Alexander’s death. These reveal a preponderance of cases relating to ‘informal marriages’, and a corresponding willingness to recognize the validity of such marriages, if they could be proved; he interpreted both findings as direct and intended consequences of ‘the Alexandrine rules’, despite the time lapse and a frank acknowledgement that ‘the barriers of evidence are most formidable to establish the proposition’.