IT WAS THE CUSTOM of Gaunt’s father, King Edward III, and his Belgian queen, Philippa of Hainaut, to name their children after the places where they were born. Philippa gave birth to her fourth son, John, in 1340 in the industrial city of Ghent, where so much English wool was spun into woolen cloth. Ghent lay in Flanders, a couple of hundred miles from the small county of Hainaut. Both Flanders and Hainaut are incorporated into the modern state of Belgium. Ghent in England was pronounced “Gaunt,” hence the name John of Gaunt.
As was usual with medieval kings, the marriage of Edward III to Philippa had some political significance. Ever since the time of Edward I (d. 1307), grandfather of Edward III, the English Crown had had an eye on Flanders, which was the market for England’s main export product. Hainaut was no Flanders; it was a small and rural territory. But it bordered on Flanders as well as France, and Edward III by his marriage to Philippa gained a foothold in the Belgian world.
It was, however, a real love match. Edward III adored his vivacious, statuesque, and hardy wife. Together they produced seven children. Philippa inherited Hainaut from her father, and she made frequent visits to her homeland, even during one of her many pregnancies. That is how it happened that her son John was born in Ghent.
In the mid-fourteenth century a child was regarded as an infant until the age of seven and lived in a nursery surrounded by women. Only three years after leaving the nursery, John of Gaunt was in the military camp of his elder brother, the first son of Edward III and Philippa. This brother was a great knightly warrior, and he was the general when the English army won its two great victories at Crécy and Poitiers over the French king early in the Hundred Years’ War.
The elder brother of John of Gaunt was Edward, Prince of Wales; he was the heir to the throne and was known as the Black Prince, from the color of his armor. He would never gain the throne, because his father reigned for four decades. Edward III was succeeded in 1377 by Richard II, the Black Prince’s ten-year-old son by his much-adored wife, the beautiful Joan of Kent.
John of Gaunt grew up in the shadow of the Black Prince. He accompanied him on many campaigns in France and Spain. The ideals and behavior of his brother, John embraced as his own. The Black Prince’s ideals and behavior pattern were those of the chivalric code—its belief in military prowess, treatment of other nobles with civility, and lifestyle of courtly love. The Black Prince was the most admired knight in Christendom.
Many in the nobility and gentry were honored to serve under Prince Edward. The Black Prince and his father founded the Order of the Garter, the most exclusive aristocratic club in Europe, modeled after King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The Order of the Garter exists today and bears an honorific aura still.
John of Gaunt grew up in the saddle, fighting alongside his brother in France and Spain until, when Gaunt was twenty-five, the Black Prince contracted malaria in Spain. The disease painfully enfeebled Prince Edward for the rest of his life. He had to withdraw from the battlefield, and John of Gaunt aimed to replace him as head of the English army.
The one time Gaunt was allowed to lead the English army in France, he demonstrated that he was no general. He marched his superb army around in a big circle for several months, never got the French to take up the challenge of battle, and accomplished nothing except to waste the resources that Parliament had provided through heavy taxation.
In his long lifetime, Gaunt fought in France, Spain, and the lowlands of Scotland. Only in the latter country did he gain a modicum of glory, if it was possible to gain glory by defeating the impoverished Scots.
The Black Prince set for his younger brother Gaunt examples beyond the chivalric code, which never had a place for generous treatment of the lower orders of society. After taking a French town through a long siege, the Prince of Wales killed all the male burgesses. He licensed “free companies” of knights to lay waste to the French countryside and slaughter the peasants. John of Gaunt too licensed companies of knights to devastate the western third of France.
Back in England the peasants were needed for their productivity. They were protected by the legal system. In France there was no restraint or respect. They could be slaughtered like rabbits and their property looted. The Church taught that the peasants had souls, but to the aristocracy and the wealthier gentry, the souls were dirty and of a lower grade. Absent the need for the peasants’ labor and the protection afforded by the common law, peasants could be treated savagely.
This was the world in which Gaunt grew up and matured—from the exquisite clothing and cuisine and elegant manners of the Order of the Garter to slaughtered peasants in French fields. But even in England it was a world crumbling economically and with regard to public health. It was a world of poverty, terror, and death.
The economic and demographic expansion of Plantagenet England slowed and flattened out in the last two decades of the thirteenth century. All arable land was in use, and younger sons of the gentry and the peasants found real estate too expensive to purchase and thereupon establish households.
In the second decade of the fourteenth century there were crop failures and famine—for two summers the sun did not shine, being blotted out by great clouds of ash from volcanic eruptions in Indonesia. In 1346-1349, England was devastated by bubonic plague and anthrax, which carried off 40 percent of the population. Faith healing did not deliver protection from the Black Death.
An archaeological dig in Scotland has confirmed that the pestilence involved anthrax. An archaeological find in southern France confirms that bubonic plague was also at work in the Black Death. Anthrax was a cattle disease that migrated to humans. Bubonic plague was spread by fleas living on the backs of rats.
The royal family and the great lords offered no leadership to countervail the Black Death. Edward III, Philippa, and the Black Prince ran off to distant country estates until the pandemic had passed. But the Plantagenets could not entirely escape the shadow of the pandemic. Gaunt’s young sister Joan, age twelve, was affianced to the heir to the throne of Castile. On her way through Gascony to reach Spain, Princess Joan died of the plague along with some of her entourage, including a Spanish minstrel, in the port town of Bordeaux, which was particularly susceptible to the spread of the Black Death. The mayor of Bordeaux, to stop the spread of disease, set fire to the port, and fire consumed an old Plan-tagenet castle on the waterfront. Joan’s body was never recovered for burial.
But the biomedical disaster proved to be very fortunate for John of Gaunt. A new outbreak of the Black Death in 1361 killed his father-in-law, Henry Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, leaving Gaunt to inherit Grosmont’s property and eventually his title through Blanche, Gaunt’s wife and Grosmont’s daughter and heiress. This was the turning point in Gaunt’s life.
Henry Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, was the richest man in England next to the King and the Prince of Wales. He was literate and pious and was delighted to marry his youngest daughter, Blanche, to the son of Edward III and Philippa. He had another daughter, married to a Dutch lord. She would have shared Grosmont’s estate with Blanche, but she died shortly after her father, leaving the whole vast estate, most of it in northern England, to Blanche and Gaunt.
Blanche was fecund and lucky. Her son Henry Bolingbroke became King of England; her daughter Philippa, Queen of Portugal. Known, because of her name, as the White Duchess, Blanche was reputed to be a great beauty. The poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote under Gaunt’s patronage, has left this picture of her: “And good fair White she was called; that was my lady’s very name. She was both fair and bright … She had right fair shoulders, and long body and arms, every limb plump and round but not over-large hands; full white and pink nails, round breasts, a straight flat back and hips of good breadth.” According to Chaucer, Blanche’s hair was “gold.” “And what eyes my lady had! Gentle, good, glad, steadfast, simple, of good size, not too wide.” She liked to sing and dance. (The Book of the Good Duchess, in The Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, translated by J.S.P. Tatlock and P. MacKaye [New York: Macmillan, 1928]).
Is this the way Blanche really looked? Probably. It is certainly the way Gaunt wanted to remember her.
Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess was an elegy on the recently deceased Blanche, written for the Duke. When he was dying early in 1399, Gaunt specified that he should be buried next to Blanche. His third wife was still alive. This was his former mistress Catherine Swynford. By this time Gaunt had forgotten about his second wife, Constance, the Castilian princess.
Blanche was everything chivalric culture prescribed in a woman. She was a faithful Guinevere, everything good that the Arthurian culture so heavily imbibed by the Knights of the Garter could conjure up about a woman. Gaunt loved Blanche dearly. She was the best thing in his life.
Blanche of Lancaster and Philippa of Hainaut. They stand out against an aristocratic horizon featuring strong and capable women. Joan of Kent, the wife of Edward the Black Prince, would be another outstanding woman of the late-fourteenth century chivalric culture. Joan cared for the Black Prince through his many years of bad health.
This culture had achieved much in its impact upon the great families, making their males more civil, literate, refined in taste, and admirable in deportment. These high nobles were unrestrained in their use of the arts of clothing, jewelry making, and cuisine, and in sponsoring domestic entertainment to amplify their status and exhibit fastidious tastes.
Fancy cloth was ordered from Flanders or Florence and turned into tunics, doublets, and gowns by master craftsmen, often aliens brought in for the purpose. Silks, imported by Italian merchants from East Asia, were greatly prized. Jewelry and aristocratic clothes were conjoined, since pearls and other precious stones were sewn right into the clothing.
What was special about cuisine were meat pies and elaborate desserts of custard or spun sugar. Barbecued meat was still the staple served at aristocratic tables, but the better chefs learned how to season the roasted or broiled meat with Oriental or Islamic spices. Pickled fish was also considered a delicacy.
Entertainment was minstrel poetry, recited and sung. Skilled performers were much in demand. They imbibed the Arthurian motifs, which included the celebration of the minds, hearts, and bodies of aristocratic and enormously wealthy women. In the romantic literature of the thirteenth century the usual theme was the perilous quest. The object of the quest could be spiritual—the Holy Grail, the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper. It could be the body and mind of a golden-haired and highborn woman. Often it was both.
Chrétien de Troyes, a cleric writing at the court of Champagne in the late twelfth century, was the master of the literature of the perilous quest. Whether in pursuit of a kidnapped blond beauty or of the Holy Grail, the hero had to fight his way against a myriad of evil knights and monsters. The combat scenes and eroticism were much enjoyed by audiences in aristocratic households.
It is hard nowadays to give social credibility to chivalric culture, to see the lifestyle of the great families and their male exemplars like John of Gaunt as something historically important. However, their patronage of the arts of poetry, music, sculpture, and painting had a lasting impact on European civilization. Women found a prominent place in this refined and elaborate culture; this too would have enduring social impact. A subtle feminization of aristocratic life occurred.
Some handbooks prescribing conduct under the code of courtliness have survived. The woman’s touch is prominent in these books on courtliness. “He who speaks badly of women is a boor for we are all born of women,” says one such feminist clarion. “Be debonair … and see that you know how to speak franceys” is another piece of advice. Be moderate in all your behavior.
At table, “do not grab the tastiest morsels, or you will be reproached for being a rustic.” When you belch, look up at the ceiling.
Cut back on sex and hot baths in summer (presumably to protect your health).
A well-brought-up great lord can not only ride and joust but also “play the harp, pipe, sing and dance.” (All translations are by J. Gillingham.)
The ancient Greeks saw little use for women except to produce children. The elite males of ancient Athenian society preferred homoerotic relationships. Their ideal beauty was the body of a ten-year-old boy.
The aristocrats of ancient Roma were more inclined toward heterosexuality than the Greeks, although they too greatly admired and sexually cultivated boys. There is a large body of heterosexual love poetry written in Latin from the ancient world.
The early medieval nobility derived from the Roman provincial aristocracy and the barbarian chieftains were decidedly heterosexual. But even noble women held a subservient place in early medieval society. They were defined in terms of their roles as mothers, mistresses, and nuns.
The shift toward a more egalitarian view of highborn women occurred in eleventh and twelfth-century Spain among the Muslims and Jews. The elite males in Iberian society still appreciated the bodies of boys. But they also expressed their erotic attachments to women of the upper class.
From Iberia, a new appreciation of feminine beauty and recognition of the free and equal status of highborn women migrated across the Pyrenees into Aquitaine in southwestern France, and from there to the court of Champagne in northern France and then to the royal court in Paris.
The city of Narbonne, nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees on the French side, was a bustling commercial city owned by its lord, Emmengard of Narbonne. Emmengard was addressed as “lord” even though she was a lady. At her court in the 1140s were troubadours writing and singing the new erotic poetry coming up from Muslim and Jewish Spain. Emmengard was a troubadour herself as well as a patroness of troubadours.
At least 10 percent, perhaps even 25 percent, of the population of Narbonne were Jews, most of them migrants from Spain. As the rabbis in Spain sought to impose on Iberian Jews a closer commitment to Talmudic learning and neotra-ditional observances, the highly literate Jewish mercantile class found in Narbonne under Emmengard’s protection a freer world where an erotic culture could still be cultivated.
William X, Duke of Aquitaine, was a troubadour who passed down this liberal culture to his granddaughter Eleanor. One of Eleanor’s daughters by her first marriage, to gloomy Louis VII of France, Marie, set up a great troubadour court in Champagne. By her second marriage, to Henry Plantagenet of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine gained the opportunity to introduce the erotic genre into English court circles.
It is significant that courtly romance always had about it a transgressive air, not only because of its intrinsic message of sexuality and adoration of women, but also because of the Jewish role in its early diffusion.
The fact that feudal property law allowed daughters to inherit estates in the absence of male heirs also contributed to an elevation in the status and wealth of aristocratic women in the Francophone world of the twelfth century.
The most important cause underlying the improvement in the status of aristocratic women was the existence of tough-minded daughters and wives in the great families in England as well as France.
Queen Mathilda, the mother of Henry II; Eleanor of Aquitaine, the queen of Henry II; Eleanor of Provence, the queen of Henry III and mother of Edward I; and Philippa of Hainaut, the queen of Edward III, showed the way to recognition of the independence of mind and high moral status of women in the great families. They served as models for women of the nobility. They had their own coteries of highborn ladies and favored knights and ever-ready priests who formed their courts.
The priests gave assurance and spiritual comfort to the highborn women and wrote treatises stressing their equal status with males in their families and communities. Courtly love—heterosexual—was given ambivalent clerical approval.
Dress was erotically provocative. The high line of aristocratic women’s dresses brought attention to their breasts. Men showed off their legs in court dress, and their short doublets focused attention on the male sex organ.
Paintings and sculptures highlighted the shape of both men’s and women’s bodies. The portrayal of the Virgin as Madonna was often sexually suggestive. In Paris and Florence painters and sculptors were showing a new appreciation for the contours of the human body, especially that of the female.
Above all, in aristocratic courts the centrality of the theme of heterosexual love in poetry recited daily, often to music, gave legitimacy to intimate relations between the sexes. It was something, this emphasis on heterosexual love, including promiscuity and adultery, that John of Gaunt had drummed into his ears several evenings a week, and he behaved accordingly. The poets and musicians adored highborn women and advocated their prominent and autonomous place in society.
John of Gaunt’s own behavior showed his appreciation of such women and his dependence on them. His life was marked by the three women he married, each so distinct from the others. He fathered nine children by them.
Blanche of Lancaster represented for Gaunt everything good in his life. He gave her his unstinting admiration and love. She was the dream woman. She was the kind of white shining feminine figure that appeared often in poetry of the era. She was remembered by Gaunt through a halo of gold. That she was the richest heiress in England who brought Gaunt the foundation of his enormous wealth and his title of Duke of Lancaster only made Blanche the more to be revered, and
remembered as a kind of saint. Gaunt buried Blanche in an elaborate tomb in London and shared the tomb with her when he died.
Gaunt’s second wife, Constance, the legitimate but unlucky heiress to the throne of Castile, was treated very differently by Gaunt than Blanche was. Eventually Constance was shunted off and forgotten. Even though Gaunt was inclined to treat women of the aristocracy and gentry with consideration and respect, he mistreated Constance.
Their marriage in 1369 was a diplomatic one, made so that Gaunt could claim the throne of Castile through Constance. They did, however, cohabit long enough to produce one child, a daughter named Catherine. Constance’s claim to the Castilian throne was successfully contested by her cousins Henry of Trástamara and Juan I from the illegitimate line of the Castilian dynasty, which had the support of the nobility and the towns.
Under the terms of a deal that Gaunt made with the King of Castile in 1387, Gaunt and Constance forfeited their claim to the Castilian throne for a great sum of money, and their daughter married the heir to that throne. From this marriage came a line of Castilian monarchs who were descended from Gaunt.
Constance was totally deferential to her husband and did not complain of her loss of her legitimate claim to the Castilian throne. There was, however, nothing left of love between John of Gaunt and Constance. After their return to England, he parked her on a distant Lancastrian estate until her death a few years later.
Constance was buried in the city of Leicester, probably on the grounds of a nunnery. Hers had not been a happy life. The daughter and heiress of Pedro the Cruel and also Duchess of Lancaster by her marriage to John of Gaunt, she died alone and in obscurity. In effect, Gaunt betrayed her and then abandoned her. She was not a member of the Anglo-French elite. She was a poor little rich girl from Spain.
Perhaps one reason Gaunt treated Constance so differently than he had treated Blanche can be found in another attachment. For many years Gaunt had maintained a relationship with Catherine Swynford, who came from the Belgian gentry and had immigrated to England with her father, one of the entourage of Queen Philippa of Hainaut, and her sister, who became Geoffrey Chaucer’s wife. The sister, also named Philippa, perhaps also briefly was another in Gaunt’s string of mistresses.
This Belgian woman, born Catherine de Roet, was Gaunt’s long-standing mistress and, after Blanche, the great love of his life. At the time she met Gaunt, Catherine was married to a member of the upper gentry named Sir Hugh Swynford. After she had a child by Swynford, she became involved with Gaunt, and her marriage to Swynford became nominal and asexual. Hugh Swynford died on a military campaign in France. Gaunt continued his relationship with Catherine and had four children by her. He placed Catherine in the position of governess to Blanche’s two daughters and she raised them after Blanche died.
Five years before his death, Gaunt married Catherine, to the shock of aristocratic Europe, and he took great pains to have his family by her legitimated. Their offspring were given the name Beaufort. One of them, Henry Beaufort, received a Latinate education and became a bishop and later a cardinal. He was an important politician in the next generation at the court of his nephew Henry V.
A daughter of Catherine and Gaunt named Margaret Beaufort married Edmund Tudor, the son of Henry V’s widow and her Master of the Horse, a young Welshman by the name of Owen Tudor. Margaret and Edmund’s son was Henry, Earl of Richmond. A Lancastrian, he would overthrow the Yorkist king Richard III, marry Elizabeth of York, and rule as Henry VII. Thus the Wars of the Roses ended and the Tudor dynasty was born.
Gaunt showered gifts on Catherine Swynford—expensive jewelry, fine cloth for gowns. He also gave her more mundane gifts, such as barrels of red wine from Bordeaux and wood for her fireplaces. He deeded Lancastrian manorial properties to her so that she would always have a steady income.
Catherine was a vivacious and shrewd woman who blended in easily at the royal court. She got along with Alice Perrers, old Edward III’s mistress.
The relationship between Gaunt and Catherine was founded neither on aristocratic courtliness nor on diplomacy and politics. It arose from carnal passion that was surprisingly long-lived. Gaunt found Catherine physically attractive, clever, and accommodating. He came to love his children by her, and this, coupled with his advancing age and the fact that there were no more thrones to yearn for, made it possible for him to flout custom and public opinion and marry her.
There are many things we can say about Gaunt. Among them is that he was a man who loved women and was obviously loved in return.
Five hundred pages of Gaunt’s business letters have survived, but not one personal letter. There is no evidence from late medieval England that aristocrats wrote personal letters at that time. From mid-fifteenth-century England there have survived many letters from the Paston family, upper-level gentry who held extensive lands in East Anglia. One of the Paston letters is from a prominent member of the family, away on business, to his wife, expressing his sexual longing for her. But from an aristocrat there is no comparable personal letter.
If John of Gaunt had written to his mistress Catherine Swynford, it might have been along these lines:
My beloved Cate: I hope you received the wood from my estates, the two barrels of Bordeaux claret, and the pearl necklace from Egypt that I sent you. It is now four years since I first saw you in the Nursery taking care of my two daughters. I was immediately struck by your beauty and the fine figure of a woman you represented. I admired your breasts in particular. Constance, the Spanish wife smelling of garlic and olive oil, was still alive. But the first time I saw you, I knew I had found the woman to replace my late lamented Blanche. The first time I slept with you I knew you would be the great love of my later years. Now that you are pregnant with our child, our love will be long-enduring. Take good care of yourself. Lancaster.
Gaunt was a passionate man, and women meant a great deal to him. By the time he married Catherine Swynford his military career had ended, at the age of fifty-five. Contrary to rumor at the time, he did not want to supplant his nephew Richard II as King of England. Gaunt undoubtedly would have liked to be king, but there is no indication that he was willing to usurp the throne from his nephew. On the contrary, Gaunt tried to prop up Richard II.
Therefore the two other things in life that meant the most to him—being a great military leader and taking the kingship—were cut off for Gaunt by 1396. What was left was to fulfill his personal happiness with the woman he loved. Courtiers might sneer at the high aristocrat who married his commoner mistress. Members of royal families elsewhere where in Europe might be scandalized. Gaunt did not care. Getting on in years, he chose the route of personal happiness. Only someone of his wealth, status, and bloodline among the aristocracy could do that.
Gaunt was one of those men who get along better with women than with men. This condition is not uncommon today but was rare in the Middle Ages, given the patriarchal nature of society.
Gaunt had thousands of male followers and colleagues. But he lacked a close male friend other than his brother Edward the Black Prince, who died in 1376. Gaunt had been respectful of, but distant toward, his father, Edward III. He had been on closer terms with his mother, Philippa of Hain-aut. He was friendly with Joan of Kent, the Black Prince’s widow. He seems to have had no problem with Alice Perrers, old Edward III’s mistress, and he protected her from her middle-class enemies in Parliament.
Above all, there were his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster, and his long-standing mistress and third wife, Catherine Swynford. Aside from the Black Prince, they were his closest friends.
What Gaunt most enjoyed, apart from being in a military camp in France or Spain, was a two-week Christmas holiday at one of his country residences, to which he would invite hundreds of people, including many women. After luxurious dining, he would listen again to the stories of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot. He would relish some new love story a poet had dreamed up.
After song and story, Gaunt would dance with some of the assembled ladies, showing off his fine legs and well-proportioned body. Essentially, the Christmas feast was a women’s world, and Gaunt relished it. In aristocratic courts women ruled or at least shared rule with civilized and courteous male aristocrats like Gaunt.
One can apply to Gaunt a remark in The Romance of the Horn about an elegant and well-dressed man at table in an aristocratic household: “No lady seeing him was not deeply affected and troubled by the pangs of love … did not want to hold him softly to her under an ermine coverlet.” (Translated by J. Weiss and J. Gillingham.)
In the 1950s Norbert Elias published a famous work of historical sociology in which he attributed to French courts of the early modern era the coming of civilitas, compared to alleged medieval wildness in behavior. We know now that Elias’s dichotomy was wrong. Gaunt was already a civilized person, amenable to feminine ideals of aristocratic behavior.
A monk at St. Alban’s Abbey, writing shortly after Gaunt died, said that Gaunt’s greatest defect was lechery. There was a widespread conviction in clerical circles that lechery and promiscuity were rife in high social circles. A papal inquisitor writing at the end of the fifteenth century observed: “The world is full of adultery and fornication especially in the palaces of princes and wealthy men.” He wrote that it was “the time of women” and “mad love.” (Translated by J. Delumeau and E. Nicolson in Sin and Fear [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991]).
Perhaps 25 percent of the manuals for clerical confessors in the late Middle Ages is taken up with counseling people, especially males, with regard to their guilty avowals of lust and lechery. As might be expected, the advice given in confessors’ manuals runs the gamut from the extremely rigorous—sexual relations between men and women are allowed only for purposes of procreation, and pleasure during intercourse is balefully sinful—to somewhat more liberal opinions. A thirteenth-century English Franciscan moralist, Richard Middleton, defends “moderate pleasure.” Jean Gerson, the leading theologian at the University of Paris in the second decade of the fifteenth century, thought that seeking pleasure within marriage was a venial (pardonable) sin.
There has been a trend in recent writing on late medieval sexuality to take very seriously the admonitions of the anti-sexual rigorists against carnal love within marriage and their absolute horror at fornication outside of marriage. These strictures, however, do not seem to have limited the actual indulgence in sexual relations between men and women.
Sexuality was a normal part of life, along with eating and defecation. Everyone knew that the priests were trained to hear or even elicit accounts of sexual misbehavior in confession. That did not restrict everyday behavior. Intercourse was engaged in freely as it is today, even though contraception of any kind was practiced only by a very small minority of the population.
John of Gaunt was a strong case in point. He seems to have fully satisfied himself sexually, if not with wives then with mistresses. There were things that frustrated him on the battlefield, in politics, or in trying to control rebellious peasants, but all evidence indicates that he lived a quite free and healthy sexual life. Sexual repression was not his problem. Perhaps Gaunt varied from the norm only in being very generous to his bastard children, whereas other male aristocracts often neglected theirs.
It is necessary to stress Gaunt’s free sexual behavior not only to round out our picture of the man, but to countervail recent views of the later Middle Ages as a dark time of sexual repression. Citing medieval confessors’ manuals on sexual relations proves nothing. You could find similar rigorous proscription of sex and incitement of guilt about it in confessors’ manuals today. The moral regimen priests were urged to impose upon the laity was no more significant in Gaunt’s time than today.