Gender and Authority of Oral Witnesses in Europe (800–1300)

Abstract

Between 1068 and 1070 an extraordinary dispute was settled at Bonneville-sur-Touques in Normandy. Duke William, who had recently become king of England, and his wife Matilda, heard the story of a contested property at Bayeux which centred on the identity of a rented child. The story goes as follows. A man called Stephen had married a widow called Oringa by whom he had a small son (puerulus) who lived only a short while. When the boy died, Oringa substituted for him, without her husband's knowledge, the son of a woman called Ulburga at Martragny (Calvados, c. Creully), to whom she paid an annual sum of 100solidi. Stephen made the boy his heir and left him his property. When first Oringa and then Stephen died, the boy's natural mother emerged and demanded rent from the couple's surprised relatives. The family refused to pay and Ulberga turned to Duke William and his wife Matilda. Having heard die case Duke William, in consultation with Archbishop John of Rouen, Roger of Beaumont and others, decided that an ordeal of the hot iron would be die most appropriate way to establish the truth. William and Matilda sent their chaplain Rainald to Bayeux to organise the ordeal, which took place in the monastery of Saint-Vigor in the presence of Rainald himself, two named archdeacons, RobertInsuleand his wife Albereda, Euremarus of Bayeux and many otfier good men (meliores homines) of Bayeux. Ulburga emerged unscathed from the ordeal by fire and therefore her son was returned to her.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.