Coverture and the medieval common law: embracing, complexity and bedspreads

This paper took as its point of departure a pair of case law examples from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries: Ralph de Tony v. Roger son of Richard de Hereford (1292) [TNA JUST 1/302 m. 32d; JUST 1/303 m.21] and Anon (1311) [Seipp 1311.219ss], both dealing with arguments about right and wrong ways for a defendant in a land case to make a voucher to warranty, i.e. to oblige somebody else to come and back up the defence, and possibly provide alternative land if the case should be lost. In situations in which the land was originally granted by a married couple, and one of the spouses was dead, while the other survived, it was not a straightforward matter to work out whether only the grantors’ heir should be vouched, or whether it was necessary also to vouch the surviving spouse. Certainly, no easy answer could be deduced from a nascent ‘doctrine of coverture’. There are, clearly, specific issues here about understanding of the rights of husbands and wives in relation to land, and the rules of the common law pleading game, but the aspect on which this paper focused was the image of the husband-wife relationship which is to be found in both of these sources: the wife cannot do certain things with regard to land because she is ‘within the arms’ of her husband.
It is well known that the law on spousal relations is full of figurative language, from ‘coverture’ itself, with its suggestions of protection, stifling and/or bedspreads, through the various expressions of fleshly unity and domination. The image of the wife ‘within the arms’ of the husband is not common, but it is, I think, worth our consideration, for the additional nuances which it brings to understanding of medieval ideas of coverture/marriage, and for its utility as a prompt for more general consideration of issues in medieval coverture.