Papal dispensations

[Diana Trenchard]

Many times on this List there has been mention of a papal
dispensation permitting close relatives to marry. To which levels of
society did this apply? I can't imagine mediaeval agricultural
labourers always applying for one, even though marriages at that
level of society would mostly be within a limited circle of people,
and must therefore have been 'forbidden' marriages. Would a local
priest turn a blind eye in these lower levels of society, or did it
depend on how particular he was? What happened at the land-owning
gentry level?

My reason for asking is to try and sort out the TRENCHARD and WISE
families in West Devon, for whom virtually no wives' names are
known. Over a couple of hundred years (12-14C) these land-owning
(and occasionally knighted) families lived side by side in several
adjacent manors/parishes, and sometimes owned properties in, or parts
of, each others' manors. It is a reasonable assumption that they
intermarried, but no evidence of any wives' names has been found by
researchers of either family. Given the length of time, there must
surely have been marriages between cousins within the prohibited
relationships that should have required papal dispensations.

My principal question therefore is, is it possible to research within
the dispensations or are they all still tucked away in the Vatican
Archives? Were copies kept in Catholic records in England, and are
they also accessible?

Diana