Scholars of the medieval family would generally agree that the lot of the medieval
wife was not an easy one. Medieval husbands held the upper hand in
the power relationship, both legally and socially. Although Lawrence Stone’s
view of niarried life in the Middle Ages as “brutal and often hostile, with little
communication, [and] much wife-beating” has since been called into question,
more recent historians have still painted a somewhat unflattering picture.’ Judith
Bennett writes that “[m]edieval people thought of conjugality as a hierarchy
headed by a husband who not only controlled his wife’s financial assets and
public behavior, but also freely enforced his will through physical violence.”^
Indeed, she argues that wife-beating was “a normal part of marriage.”