Running Naked in the Streets: Repression of Adultery in the Later Middle Ages - Medievalists.net

By Lucie Laumonier

Adultery was a serious crime in the Middle Ages, where marriage was sacred, indissoluble, and monogamous.

The repression of adultery transformed and varied across time and space, though it was usually punished by a combination of religious penance, fines, corporal punishment, and public humiliation. While the term ‘adultery’ pertains to all types of extramarital relations – even between unmarried individuals – the harshest punishments applied to women who had cheated on their husbands. The focus on adultery as a female crime has a long history, rooted in anxieties about the production of legitimate heirs and the protection of a family’s reputation.

Adultery was usually repressed by ecclesiastical courts of justice, as was the norm in England or northern France. In the south, meanwhile, secular authorities, such as municipal governments, had taken on the responsibility to frame and punish adulterers. One very peculiar punishment for adultery, found in the laws of many towns and cities of southern France, was called “the run” (la course in French). This punishment saw to it that the cheating wife and her lover were sentenced to run the gauntlet through the streets, usually naked or in their undergarments, sometimes with the woman holding a leash attached to her lover’s genitals. They were sometimes beaten at specific crossroads by the people attending the run.

With the run, the prevailing punishment was, obviously, public humiliation. How this castigation came into existence and how it evolved are among the topics explored here, an investigation into the repression of adultery in southern France at the end of the Middle Ages.

Repression of Adultery up to the Fourteenth Century

Late Roman law and early Germanic law severely repressed adulteries committed by wedded women. In the Lex Julia of the first century BC, female offenders were exiled. The law acknowledged a right of private vengeance allowing for the killing of the adulteress, but in practice, the conditions for vengeance were so restricted that it could rarely happen. In the fourth century AD, Constantine modified the law and instituted the death penalty for adultery. Emperor Justinian changed the law in the sixth century AD and imposed beating and relegation to a monastery for two years for female offenders. Once the two years had elapsed, husbands could choose to take their wives back or to leave them in the convent.

The Germanic law corpus shows great diversity in the repression of adultery – or, more specifically, of adulterous wives. Punishments went from the mutilation of body parts to humiliation practices, such as the public shaving of one’s hair. Murders of adulterous wives happened. The wives were oftentimes killed by members of their kin rather than by their husbands. These honour killings reveal the extent of the shame families felt from female marital misconduct. Repudiations of adulterous wives were fairly common in the early Middle Ages and more frequent than their murder.

By the twelfth century, however, society had profoundly changed. The Church had now established its grasp on private law, especially on marriages. Canonists had rendered marriage a sacred and indissoluble institution whose integrity should be protected at all costs. This new ideology of marriage, and the drafting of a rich corpus of canon law, signalled transformations in the repression of adultery. Adultery was still a grave offence that disrupted marriages, families, and society as a whole, but because marriages were now indissoluble, repudiation of adulterous wives was out of the question. The killing of adulterous wives was even more forbidden and severely condemned by canonists. To deal with adultery, penance, forgiveness, and reconciliation should prevail, they wrote. The Church and its lawmakers, therefore, embraced mercy rather than repression, and penance rather than ostracization. Their point was to facilitate reconciliation through lighter punishments to preserve the unity of marriages. Ecclesiastical courts followed suit. While whipping of adulterous wives was still imposed in some thirteenth-century cases judged by Church courts, penance, contrition, and fines prevailed by the fourteenth. At the Pope’s court of justice in fourteenth-century Avignon, adulterers were solely sentenced to a fine.

Dealing with Adultery in the South of France: The ‘Running’

Secular authorities took a comparable direction, visible in the transformation of southern French codes of law from the twelfth century onwards.

In twelfth-century legislation issued by towns and cities, adulterous wives were, for instance, punished by the confiscation of all their goods and sometimes by corporal castigation. But, by 1200, the “run” had become the most common punishment in the towns of the south of France. The run’s origins are unclear. Although Roman sources mention a comparable usage in Germany in the first century AD, the custom seems to have disappeared afterwards. At the end of the eleventh century, however, the run appeared in a charter of custom from Gascony, in southwestern France. The practice expanded eastwards in the twelfth century, attested in French Catalunya, on the shores of the Mediterranean, before reaching Languedoc, then Camargue and Provence.

Towns and cities each had their own way of framing the run, but all shared some common points. The runners did not necessarily run – they often walked! The route of their walk was, in some cases, affixed by the charter of custom. Usually, the two adulterers were preceded by the town crier, who alerted the community by calling on his trumpet and shouted the sentence, “Qui aital fara, aital pendra,” or “who will do that same thing [adultery] will have the same treatment.”

The town crier was there to make sure the dishonour was public and that a crowd would attend the show. The punishment was “exemplary,” in the sense that it should teach both the adulterers and the attendees a lesson. To ensure the presence of a dense crowd, the customs of the town of Millau specified that the run should be held “not at night but during the day.” To push the humiliation further, the culprits should run naked, a clear reminder of the sexual nature of their crime. But, in some towns, men were allowed to keep their underpants on and women to keep on their undergown.

In other communities, the shame of the run was aggravated by the fact that the naked woman would walk first, holding a rope attached to her lover’s genitalia. The use of the “leash” was widespread in the Toulouse area, as the manuscript of their customs vividly illustrates, but absent from Catalan or Languedocian sources. In Languedoc, its use often required the participation of the crowd, responsible for beating the runners at certain pitstops of their route. The 1204 charter of the city of Montpellier, and the 1232 customs of Narbonne, included such provisions.

Secular courts of justice followed the law and regularly sentenced offenders to the terrible humiliation of the run-up to the end of the fifteenth century. The point of the sentence, as established, was public humiliation. Humiliation was construed as a point of entry towards penance and repentance, and as a good way to teach a public lesson. The issue, however, was that running the gauntlet was not only humiliating for the culprits; seeing the two lovers publicly exposed meant that people would find out the identity of their cuckolded spouses. The run, then, shamed both the cheater and the cheated and made their damaged conjugal bond even more fragile.

Too Harsh a Punishment

In some cases, betrayed husbands refused to subject their adulterous wives to such humiliation. A bourgeois man from Toulouse, for instance, refused to allow his wife, sentenced to “running” in 1398 by the city’s officials, to go through such a mortifying process. The shame of the punishment could moreover extend to the spouses’ entire families. Many considered it best to keep such things as adultery a private matter. In the late fourteenth century, for example, the anonymous author of the Ménagier de Paris praised the wise husbands who kept their wives’ infidelities secret to protect their family’s honour.

To safeguard the stability of marriages and limit the shame that “running” brought to kin groups, more and more towns started to enable the payment of a fine instead of sentencing the adulterers to the run. The choice between a fine and the run emerged in the mid-thirteenth century. In the fourteenth, the fine was the first option. Running was only imposed to inveterate adulterers or in cases of aggravated adultery, namely a pregnancy (an illegitimate birth) or an affair with a clergyman.

From c.1250, therefore, it became possible to escape the mortifying experience by paying a fine. In Marseille, for example, the fines for adultery were higher than fines for a fistfight, but lower than the fines imposed on thieves and on people who had engaged in a sword fight. The fine was usually affixed at between 45 and 60 sous tournois, which corresponded to a week or two of work for a middling-milieu individual. The fine was not terribly expensive, though it remained unaffordable for the poor.

The side effect of these new laws was, indeed, that people too poor to afford the fines were still sentenced to the run. Underprivileged adulterers were more at risk of being gravely humiliated than the middling-milieu individuals or privileged town dwellers. Moreover, historians suggest that because women usually had less access to cash than men, they were sentenced to “running” far more often than their male lovers.

In southern France, then, adultery went through progressive decriminalization that translated into the softening of punishments against female adulterers. The reason, legal historian Leah Otis-Cour argues, is that the emphasis on the monogamous and indissoluble Christian marriage called for more tolerance towards extramarital affairs. Adulterers were still punished by courts of justice, and more severely so by ecclesiastical and royal courts, but even there, judges encouraged the spouses to find concord and peace. Preservation of the conjugal unit and a family’s reputation meant that adultery should be dealt with privately. In the late fourteenth century, some southern French couples began to solve their conflict privately. To that effect, they had a notary draft what we could call a “reconciliation contract”. With or without the recourse to arbitrators, the spouses, encouraged by their kin, settled on the often-financial terms of their reconciliation.

This relative leniency towards adultery was sometimes criticized. But the run and the fines emerged in documents at a time when reconciliation between the spouses was preferred to a separation. Jurists, court officials, and private individuals were striving to find peaceful resolutions to marital conflicts to safeguard the conjugal unit. If the run may have been an acceptable option in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the humiliation soon appeared too intense and probably too disruptive to the conjugal unit. The more discreet payment of a fine was then the choice for safeguarding the institution of marriage and public order.

Lucie Laumonier is an Affiliate assistant professor at Concordia University. Click here to view her Academia.edu page or follow her on Instagram at The French Medievalist.

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Further Reading:

Otis-Cour, Leah. “‘De jure novo’: Dealing with Adultery in the Fifteenth-Century Toulousain.” Speculum, vol. 84, no. 2, 2009, pp. 347–392.

Otis-Cour, Leah. “Réflexions sur l’application de la peine dans le Midi de la France à la fin du Moyen ge.” La peine: discours, pratiques, représentations, edited by J. Hoareau- Dodinau and P. Texier, Presses Universitaires de Limoges et du Limousin, 2005, pp. 99–110.

Carbasse, Jean-Marie. “Current Nudi: La répression de l’adultère dans le Midi médiéval (XIIe-XVe siècles).” Droit, Histoire, Sexualité, edited by Jacques Poumarède and Jean- Pierre Royer, Publications de l’espace juridique, 1987, pp. 83–102.

Verdon, Laure. ”La course des amants adultères: Honte, pudeur et justice dans l’Europe méridionale du XIIIe siècle.” Rives Méditerranéennes, vol. 31, 2008, pp. 57–72.

This article was first published in The Medieval Magazine – a digital magazine that tells the story of the Middle Ages. Learn how to subscribe by visiting their website.