Accusations of shared wives were used to rank Christians themselves as barbaric beasts

Evidence

Latin writing about peoples who lived on the margins of Christian society, even when those peoples were themselves Christians. Thus, the tribal marriage customs of the Welsh, Irish and lowland Scots, which also apparently involved greater freedom within marriage than was the norm in Latin Christendom, are singled out by Gerald of Wales and Aelred of Rievaulx in the later twelfth century as characteristics of a ‘barbaric’ society that was only Christian on the surface. More particularly, the accusation that men share their wives allows critics to compare them to ‘beasts’, who lack the rational mind necessary to govern their senses, and who are thus incapable of monogamy. Thence it follows, by an association of ideas, that those whose social organisation is at the level of animals are incapable of higher intellect, and are thus unable to conceive of the afterlife of the soul. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 209

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapter’s treatment of how barbarism labels were deployed against insiders, linking closely to the adultery/bestiality repertoire discussed against Jews — same stereotype machinery turned on Christian Celts.
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘On Sacrifice’ piece’s logic that stigmatized outsider labels recur across groups — here the same savagery trope is aimed at co-religionists on the civilizational margin.