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  • Aristocratic Marriage, Adultery and Divorce in the Fourteen Century: The Life of Lucy de Thweng (1279–1347) by Bridget Wells-Furby
  • Hilary Jane Locke
Wells-Furby, Bridget, Aristocratic Marriage, Adultery and Divorce in the Fourteen Century: The Life of Lucy de Thweng (1279–1347), Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2019; hardback; pp. 258; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781783273676.

The medieval period presents the scholar with challenges simply because of the lack of surviving source materials. Each research project is constructed through threading together thin strands of remaining evidence, usually found in a myriad places. By extension, constructing accounts of the lives of medieval women is even harder. Bridget Wells-Furby, an independent scholar who researches the landed gentry in medieval England, has done a remarkable job in trying to unravel the story of Yorkshire heiress Lucy de Thweng. Thweng, who lived an eventful life of three marriages, divorce, a lengthy widowhood after her second marriage, and an extramarital relationship that resulted in birth of a bastard son. In her recent monograph, Aristocratic Marriage, Adultery and Divorce in the Fourteenth Century: The Life of Lucy de Thweng (1279–1347), Wells-Furby attempts to piece together and understand the life of Lucy (and, by extension, other medieval women who had similar experiences), by exploring stages in her life, such as wardship, marriage(s), divorce, widowhood, and adultery.

The monograph is structured around the concepts of marriage, divorce, and separation, exploring Lucy’s story chronologically. It is meticulously researched, with each chapter revealing a plethora of detailed information. In order to contextualize Lucy’s story, Wells-Furby presents different cases of separation, divorce, remarriage, and adultery that appear in the records. For example, Chapter 3, ‘Separation and Divorce’, provides an extremely detailed survey of numerous cases of why separation and divorces were sought, looking at particular cases where, it should be stressed, a wide variety of reasons were claimed for divorce to be granted. Importantly, these cases show that contemporaries were grappling with issues of divorce and separation, more so than perhaps historians have thought in the past.

Lucy de Thweng, in particular, sought a divorce in 1303 from her first husband William Latimer for unknown reasons, and left the marriage after Latimer went to war in Scotland. Wells-Furby uses Lucy’s case to show that medieval women who wished to seek separation or divorce needed to have alternative sources of support—in Lucy’s case her uncle. Divorce also came with other risks. Medieval women were vulnerable to abduction by their husbands if seeking separation and divorce, but also if they were widows or divorcees and had some personal wealth. Wells-Furby concludes that Lucy was likely abducted after her divorce from Latimer—due to her having land from the divorce settlement—as Lucy was already romantically involved with a man called Nicholas Meinill, to whom she bore a bastard child, but eventually married a man called Robert de Everingham. As such, it is through Lucy’s story that Wells-Furby is able to unpack the very troubling conditions some women were exposed to throughout this period, and the risks that some took in order to leave their marriages. [End Page 255]

The main issue with the monograph stems from gaps in the source material. Due to the lack of surviving records on medieval women, and Lucy in particular, the monograph does devote more space to the details of other cases than to Lucy herself. As Wells-Furby states in her conclusion: ‘medieval historians are never more at the mercy of their source material than when considering personal feeling and trying to deduce them from stray incidental references’ (p. 196). While she is aware of these problems, Wells-Furby chooses to undertake an extremely detailed examination and survey of cases of separation, divorce, adultery, and remarriage on a large scale. It is understandable that this research accompanies Lucy’s story in order to provide adequate context, which Wells-Furby acknowledges is crucial. However, it often means that an exploration of Lucy’s story is relegated to the end of the chapters and often feels supplementary to the monograph. Wells-Furby is able to summarize all of Lucy’s...

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