Anton The Lord of Hartforth

 

During the Middle Ages and before, there were two types of marriages: one to breed babies, and the other type for love.

 

The type that was designed to breed babies was to create heirs, cement political relationships, and control how property is owned.  In the middle ages and before, females were legally your chattel property, not likely the person you lived with because she was so wonderful. 

 

The second type of marriage was between two men.  Adelphopoiesis, or brother-making, represented an early form of religious same-sex marriage in the Orthodox church.  The rite of Ordo ad fratres faciendum ("Order for the making of brothers") as serving the same purpose in the medieval Roman Catholic Church. In the Balkans, same-sex marriage survived until modern days, in the form of the Albanian rite of vellameria, "brother bond."

 

According to Aristotle, the Celts openly preferred male lovers (Politics II 1269b).  H. D. Rankin in Celts and the Classical World notes that Athenaeus echoes this comment (603a) and so does Ammianus (30.9). It seems to be the general opinion of antiquity.  In book VIII of his Deipnosophists, the Roman Greek rhetorician and grammarian Athenaeus, repeating assertions made by Diodorus Siculus in the 1st century BC, wrote that Celtic women were beautiful, but that the men preferred to sleep together and "the young men will offer themselves to strangers and are insulted if the offer is refused" (Diod 5:32).

 

In late medieval France, the practice of entering a legal contract of affrèrement provided a vehicle for civil unions between unrelated adults who pledged to live together sharing ‘un pain, un vin, et une bourse’ – one bread, one wine, and one purse.

 

AFTER the middle ages, the weather became colder, they couldn't grow as much food, famines were common, people died by the millions, and Europe needed lots of new babies (mostly to grow up and become soliders and fight for the king's ambitions).   Then by the late 1340s, the The Black Death, or the Black Plague hit Europe.  It killed another 30% to 60% of Europe's population, so suddenly there was a STRONG need for new babies.  The church decided to push the type of marriage that breeds new babies, and they frowned upon same-sex marriages. 

 

Now, in Europe, citizens enjoy free hospital, free prescription medicine, guaranteed vacation pay even if you don't work, free university, and paid pregnancy leave up to 5 years if you play your cards right.   When a teen girl pops out a baby every couple of years, and the citizens have to pay for those babies' welfare, the citizens realize cranking out babies isn't necessarily a glorious and holy event.  So they've swung back the other way regarding views toward same-sex marriage.

 

In 2005 the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England) legalized same-sex weddings.  The Civil Partnerships Act is similar to affrèrement of late medieval France.

 

Same-sex unions are now legally recognized again in Europe.