Valentine's Day in Late Medieval England

Learn about the medieval origins of Valentine's Day from Shannon McSheffrey, professor of history at Concordia University and the translator of Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London.

Valentine's Day in Late Medieval England

February is now firmly associated in much of the world with Valentine’s Day, a celebration of romantic love. My little 1995 book, Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London, seems appropriate reading for this month, although the content is less Hallmark-ready than the title might suggest. Published in the Documents of Practice series from TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies), the book offers translations of court cases over marriage disputes from fifteenth-century London for classroom discussion. People, of course, went to court to sue only when there were problems—happy marriages don’t go to law—so the testimony discusses some distressing situations of emotional and physical abuse. Witnesses also spoke, however, about happier times before something happened to the relationship in question, about courtship rituals, the exchange of gifts, and mutual affection.

These marriage cases, involving people from the middle strata of English society in London and the surrounding area, don’t fit the common stereotype that medieval people had child marriages or unions orchestrated by parents. Though royals and aristocrats did indeed marry by family arrangement and often when the partners (especially the brides) were very young, in England and other parts of northwestern Europe non-elites followed a very different marriage pattern: they married in their twenties and to partners they themselves chose. The extent of personal choice indeed meant that a significant number elected not to marry at all, especially in times when women’s work opportunities were most favorable: as many as one-quarter remained single. Those who did enter into marriage weighed a number of factors when they chose their partners. Practical considerations such as earning potential, marriage portions or dowries, and family connections were undoubtedly important. Marriage was also, however, an intimate and sexual relationship, so high up on the list was the admixture of physical attraction and psychic connection that we label love. Indeed, they called it that, too: the language of love is all over the testimony in the cases in Love and Marriage. John Miller, for instance, testified that when his step-daughter Joan Cardif asked him whether he thought a certain John Brocher wanted to marry her, he replied that “if she could find it in her heart to love John as her husband, John would be hers forever.”

It may be no coincidence that Miller’s words about hearts and forever-love sound similar to the verses on today’s Valentine’s cards, as the romantic rhetoric of love connected to St. Valentine’s Day originated around this time in western European literary culture. St. Valentine himself, a Christian martyr of the fourth century, had been a feature of texts, sermons, and images for many centuries before this, but his feast day came to be associated with romantic pairing only in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the earliest surviving reference to Valentine as patron of love, the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in 1382 that “on Saint Valentine's Day / …every bird comes … to choose his match.”

In the century that followed Chaucer’s use of the idea of birds selecting their mates on St. Valentine’s day, the celebration of February 14 as a festival of love became widespread in western Europe, showing up in poetry, songs, and even Valentine’s letters in England, France, and Iberia. Though most of the examples we have come from aristocratic culture, the marriage cases from late medieval London show that more ordinary people also embraced Valentine’s Day. The best example is from a case that I learned about too late to be included in Love and Marriage, but you can read it in an online database of marriage cases I’ve compiled. In February 1486, a young London artisan named John Wells was courting a servant, Alice Billingham. According to one witness, on February 13 the pair met in the house of mutual friends, and he said to her that “the next day was St. Valentine’s day and that, because of the many customs that pertained to that day,” he had come there to meet with her “to choose you to my wife and to my valentine forever.” According to several witnesses, they became betrothed that day and all those present drank ale in a toast to the couple. It didn’t end well: John afterwards denied that any of this had taken place and so Agnes sued him for breaking the betrothal, probably unsuccessfully. Then, as now, Valentine’s Day could raise romantic expectations that would not be fulfilled.

Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London

In the first volume in the Documents of Practice series, published by MIP and TEAMS, Shannon McSheffrey presents depositions (or testimony) in marriage cases brought before fifteenth-century English church courts, which reveal the attitudes and feelings of medieval people towards the marital bond.

© 1995

978-1-87928-853-9 (paperback), $14.95

978-1-58044-514-6 (PDF), $12.00