The Return of Martin Guerre excerpt pg.

33 Pierre Guerre took over the headship of a household of mostly females on his own land. Bertrandes status was much reduced by all these events. Neither wife nor widow, she was under the same room with her mother again. Neither wife nor widow, she had to face the other village women at the mill, the well, the tileworks, and at the harvest. And there was no easy remedy for her in the law. Since the laxer days of Pope Alexander II in the twelfth century, the doctors had insisted that a wife was not free to remarry in the absence of her husband, no matter how many years had elapsed, unless she had certain proof of his death. Of the alternate traditions in the civil law, it was the harsher one of Justinian that had prevailed.