Lesson Ten ~ Marriage and the Roles of Men and Women
The early Irish had nine forms of marriage to choose between, whilst the Welsh had ten! These were mainly defined by which partner had the most money. The laws around marriage were called the Cain Lanamna, which also includes matters of divorce. Lanamnas is a word that originally meant a legally defined relationship between two unequal people, like a parent and child, or teacher and pupil. Eventually it was mostly used to describe a marriage.
The laws imply that the Irish saw marriage as mainly for child rearing. Being childless was grounds for divorce, and those types of relationships which did not produce kids did not require any kind of legal wedding service. For example, there are no surviving accounts of gay marriages, though there are suggestions of same-sex love surviving even the censorious Church scribes. These marital forms show some similarities to Roman law, which may have been either a direct influence or simply a parallel development.
Lánamnas comthichuir : Both partners enter the union with equal financial resources.
Lánamnas mná for ferthinchur : The man is the richer of the two.
Lánamnas fir for bantichur : The woman is the richer.
Lànamnas fir thathigtheo : The man visits the woman in her home with her family’s consent, but doesn’t live with her.
Lànamnas foxail : The woman elopes openly with a man without the consent of her kin.
Lànamnas taidi : The Soldier’s Marriage (woman is secretly visited without knowledge of her kin).
Lànamnas eicne no sleithe : The woman is forcibly raped or seduced by stealth.
Lànamnas fir mir : Marriage of two “insane” persons.
The word mir used in the last type of marriage can described anyone who was declared mentally incompetent, because they were insane, simple-minded, etc.
When a woman married each year her husband had to pay a sum of money called a coibche, the amount of which reflected her social status. In the first year this went to her family. In the second year most of it went to her family, but she kept a cut for herself. In third year her cut got bigger, and so on until she kept the whole lot for herself. This was her cash to be spent on anything she chose. A husband had no rights over his wife’s personal wealth (or vice versa). The humorous competition between Medb and her husband Aillil in the Tain may be seen as a financial power-struggle, not just to brag about who had the most wealth but to see who had legal dominance within the relationship (and thus the kingdom).
If the couple divorced and the fault was on the man’s side, the wife could keep all or most of her coibche. If the fault was on the woman’s side, she had to pay back all or a large part of it to her husband.
To the modern mind, these assorted styles of marriage may seem terribly unromantic. The cheesy influence of Mills & Boon bodice rippers and Hollywood romance films pervades our culture, giving everyone the expectation of undying love, unending passion and all the rest of it. Which may go someway to explaining our divorce statistics, when the reality fails to live up to the fantasy. Whilst many modern people may not like the idea of fiscally-based marriage contracts, the pragmatism that underlay the Cain Lanamnas may well be something worth reflecting upon. Entering into a union with a clearer idea of who is responsible for providing what, might make disillusionment less likely.
The grounds for divorce varied between men and women. Women had more grounds for disposing of their husbands, and could also use the law to censure them for failing to do their “marital duty” ~
“The husband who, through listlessness, does not go to his wife in her bed must pay a fine.”
That law must have made for an entertaining court case! A woman’s legal grounds for initiating divorce against her husband were as follows:
her husband rejected her totally for another woman or a man,
the husband failed to support her financially,
the husband telling derogatory lies about or satirising her,
seducing her into marriage by trickery or sorcery,
the husband striking her hard enough to cause a blemish,
his impotence,
his being so grossly obese that sex became impossible,
his sterility,
his telling tales about their love life,
his joining a celibate Christian order.
A number of these grounds focus on the inability to breed. A man’s reasons for divorce (which you can see were somewhat fewer) were:
unfaithfulness,
persistent thievery,
inducing an abortion on herself,
bringing shame to his honour,
smothering her child,
being without milk through illness.
It is curious that sterility was assumed to be a fault of the man, when in so many other cultures the woman has automatically carried the burden of blame. The issue of breast milk presumably only applied to marriages in the lower classes, where they could not afford to hire a wet nurse. As you can see one of the common themes here yet again is childlessness. A relationship that produced children ~ even if it were by rape or a one-night stand ~ required some sort of legal status to protect the child and to make one or both parents financially responsible. A relationship that did not produce children did not require legal protection, and so could be dissolved, in order to allow the parties to move on and find a relationship where children were a possibility.
However, the law must have recognised that love could override childlessness. It allowed for either spouse to enter into a legal contract with another party for the sake of pregnancy. So a woman with a sterile husband could arrange to sleep with another man in order to get pregnant. This would not constitute adultery, if done with formal approval of the law, and the resultant child could be classed as legally belonging to her husband rather than the biological father.
There is also evidence that at least a number of tribes allowed for polygymy (and some older evidence for polyandry too). Law commentaries from within the Christian period sought to justify this practice with reference to Old Testament practices ~ possibly it was such an ingrained hang-over from Pagan times that many people refused to give it up in favour of monogamy. One law makes it clear that men could have several wives ~
“If the chief wife scratches the concubine but it is out of rightful jealousy that she does it, she is exempt from liability for injury. The same does not hold true for injuries by the concubine.”
In some cultures there are very clearly defined expectations of how men and women should live and behave. Some jobs are considered suitable for women, others for men etc. It is very difficult to get a picture for how the early Celts viewed matters of gender. With jobs, for example, there does not appear to have been any barrier in either direction. Women could be Druids, judges, merchants etc. There do not appear to be records of any careers or daily activities from which men were excluded. This does not mean that women had total equality, or that getting into some professions was easy ~ just that it was possible. There may also have been differences between tribes as to what one regarded as manly/womanly and another did not.
Some cultures consider pretty clothes and cosmetics to be “girly”. Yet there are numerous accounts of big beefy warriors primping and preening, and making a vain display of how handsome and well-dressed they were. Many cultures see violence and courage as “laddish” traits, yet Celtic myth and history is full of warrior women behaving in very ferocious ways.
The qualities that were highly valued seem to have been valued in both sexes. Honesty, bravery, commitment to the tribe, generosity and being a good host were traits expected of everyone.
There are accounts of some single-sex situations. In legends told of the Irish adventurer Bran mac Febal, he and his fellows encounter an island called Tir na mBan, which is inhabited only by women. The Fomorian giant Balor imprisoned his daughter Eithne on an island with only women for company, to prevent her getting pregnant (there being a prophecy that her future child would kill Balor). In late Welsh lore Arianrhod lived on an island where no men were allowed to live, perhaps an analogy to a convent or a distant memory of some older practice. In Celtic Christian tradition the Abbess Brigit founded a community for both nuns and monks, but there was an area in which a sacred flame was kept burning and into which no men were allowed to step foot. Indeed, it was said that a man who even peeked into the sanctuary would go blind. This was not in keeping with the practice of the wider Catholic Church at that time, so it could easily have been a practice carried over from Pagan times.
There do not seem to be any surviving stories about all-male islands or communities, but this does not mean that such things may not have existed. The reasons for why such communities may have formed in societies where gender-restricted behaviour seems irrelevant are unclear. Perhaps they did have ideas that there were certain things easier to achieve in a single-sex community than in a mixed one. It is unlikely to have been out of a desire to encourage celibacy. Early Christian nuns and monks could marry and have children. It was only at the insistence of the Vatican that the clergy eventually became celibate. There does not appear to have been any strident restrictions against men having sex with each other, or women doing likewise. The great hero Cuchulainn maintained a very intimate relationship with the warrior Ferdiad, and sang love songs over his corpse. Such relationships appeared to have no stigma about them, so people in single-sex religious communities are unlikely to have been bereft of offers!
It is possible that single-sex communities may have been composed of people who only wanted sex with their own gender, but when the adventurer Bran mac Febal arrived on an island of women, he and his male colleagues were welcomed with open arms. It seems unlikely that these were communities of early lesbian separatists, at least in the minds of the scribes!
It may be that such groups formed because of beliefs around certain types of magic, either in the view that some forms of magical energy were more easily raised in an all-female (or all-male) environment, or because the magic was directed towards some goal that was only of interest to one gender. Unless a long-lost text turns up to answer these questions, we will never really know for sure.
Some questions for you to think about:
How do you view gender in the modern world ~ what do you consider proper masculine or feminine behaviour?
Are there any insights into modern relationships that we could gain from studying the marriage and divorce laws of the Brehons?
What are some of the advantages of single-sex communities? Have you ever participated in a single-sex ritual? If so, how do you feel it differed from a ritual with both men and women present?
Practical exercise:
Organise an activity with a group of friends the same gender as yourself ~ it doesn’t have to be anything particularly Druidic, it could be a night on the town, walk in the woods, a sporting event, etc.
Use the opportunity to watch how a group of men (or women) interact with each other ~ is it significantly different from when they interact in a mixed setting? Reflect