This is the one about marriage, consanguinity, divorce and all that
> stuff.
Dear Angus and others with similar knowledge -
from one whose Latin is poor, slow and unreliable -
Under "Consanguinity", does Pope G. make any distinction between a
legitimate and an illegitimate child with respect to consanguinity on the
father's side - given that an illegitimate child technically and legally had
no father ?
I have been conducting a correspondence with a fellow genealogist about a
twelfth century Breton noblewoman named HAVOISE who is the mother of the
founder of the de la Zouche line.
My 18th C Breton genealogy is silent on the subject of her paternity but
later trees name her father as Alan IV Fergent Duke of Brittany. This is
superficially plausible, given that the name "Havoise" was a common name in
the ducal family.
However, Havoise's eldest son (not La Zouche but his elder brother) Eudo II,
Count of Porhoe"t married Bertha, the legitimate granddaughter of Duke Alan
aforementioned.
If Havoise was Duke Alan's daughter, then Eudo and Bertha were FIRST COUSINS
and surely too far within the bounds of consanguinity as to be marriageable
by any mediaeval standard. (I have found no trace of a dispensation - that
doesn't mean there wasn't one.) I thought that SEVEN degrees of
consanguinity were prohibited at this period - middle 12th C.
However, if the consanguinity rule only applied to legit. children on the
father's side, this might be construed as evidence that Havoise was Alan's
bastard - and certainly not his legitimate child has some have postulated.
If the consanguinity rule applied to bastards on the father's side as well,
it might be construed to mean that Havoise was not Duke Alan's child at all.
If you think this question ought to have been posted to a genealogy site, I
apologise for taking space, but it seems to me more a matter of canon law
than of genealogy.
BMC
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