Conjugal Rights in Flux in Medieval Poetry Page: 45
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demand better treatment and wages, which laborers' had begun to be able to require after the
Black Death killed off a large amount of them. Women, too, had to learn to navigate the
paradoxical common law, as their rights were disjointed between different legal ideologies and
jurisdictions.
Due to the law's inconsistent nature regarding the rights of the different classes of people
and women, it is not surprising that Chaucer would engage with the subject of common profit in
his work. Statutes and legal documents like this, which reveal tensions between the estates, were
not rare during this time. Indeed, one of the most important legal documents to come out of the
Middle Ages was the Magna Carta, composed in 1215, which for the first time required a king of
England, King John, to acknowledge that freemen had certain rights. This legal document would
resolve many feudal quarrels throughout the centuries and influenced the creation of the
Parliament in the thirteenth century, which undoubtedly changed the face of English law.
Moreover, the agency women arguably had in the fourteenth century finds its roots in another
salient point of the Magna Carta, which was the idea that citizens were protected by the law of
England from the king, since it asserted that the law should be understood as a legal organ that is
separate from the king's will, or, as one thirteenth-century political song puts it, "Dicitur
vulgariter 'ut rex vult, lex vadit;' / veritas vult aliter, name lex stat, rex caidt" [Commonly it is
said, 'as the king wishes, so goes the law;' but the truth is quite otherwise, for the law stands,
though the king falls].109 The Magna Carta continued to be referred to and refined throughout
English history, and a century after its conception, between 1331 and 1369, the Six Statutes were
passed, which sought to broaden the rights of all of the different estates of men. For example,
clause 29 was amended to refer to all "men" instead of just "free men" and introduced the legal
109 The Battle of Lewes, in London, British Library, MS Harley 978, f. 128r, of the middle of the 13th
century in Thomas Wright, The Political Songs of England (London: Printed for the Camden Society,
1839), 116.45
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Ward, Jessica D. Conjugal Rights in Flux in Medieval Poetry, thesis, May 2014; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500176/m1/50/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .