Marriage.
The feeling of caste was very strong; a woman must not marry below her station.[[308]] By a law of the Visigoths she who tried to marry her own slave was to be burned alive[[309]]; if she attempted it with another's bondman, she merited one hundred lashes.[[310]] The dowry was a fixed institution as among the Romans; but the bridegroom regularly paid a large sum to the father or guardian of the woman. This wittemon was regarded as the price paid for the parental authority (mundium) and amounted among the Saxons to 300 solidi.[[311]] As a matter of fact this custom practically amounted to the intended husband giving the dowry to his future wife. The husband was also allowed to present his wife with a donation (morgengabe) on the morning after the wedding; the amount was limited by King Liutprand to not more than one fourth of all his goods.[[312]] Breaking an engagement after the solemn betrothal had been entered into was a serious business. The Visigoths refused to allow one party to break an engagement without the consent of the other; and if a woman, being already engaged, went over to another man without her parent's or fiancé's leave, both she and the man who took her were handed over as slaves to the original fiancé.[[313]] The other barbarians were content to inflict a money fine for breach of promise.[[314]]
Power of the husband.
The woman on marrying passed into the power of her husband "according to the Sacred Scriptures," and the husband thereupon acquired the lordship of all her property.[[315]] The law still protected the wife in some ways. The Visigoths gave the father the right of demanding and preserving for his daughter her dowry.[[316]] The Ripuarians ordained that whatever the husband had given his wife by written agreement must remain inviolate.[[317]] King Liutprand made the presence of two or three of the woman's male relatives necessary at any sale involving her goods, to see to it that her consent to the sale had not been forced.[[318]]
Divorce.
On the subject of divorce the regulations of the several peoples are various; but the commands of the New Testament are alike strongly felt in all; and we may expect to find divorce limited by severe restrictions.[[319]] The Burgundians allowed it only for adultery or grave crimes, such as violating tombs. If a wife presumed to dismiss her husband for any other cause, she was put to death (necetur in luto); to a husband who sent his wife a divorce without these specific reasons existing the law was more indulgent, allowing him to preserve his life by paying to his injured wife twice the amount that he had originally given her parents for her, and twelve solidi in addition; and in case he attempted to prove her guilty of one of the charges mentioned above and she was adjudged innocent, he forfeited all his goods to her and was forced to leave his home.[[320]] The Visigoths were equally strict; the husband who dismissed his wife on insufficient legal grounds lost all power over her and must return all her goods; his own must be preserved for the children; if there were none, the wife acquired his property. A woman who married a divorced man while his first wife was living, was condemned for adultery and accordingly handed over to the first wife to be disposed of as the latter wished; exile, stripes, and slavery were the lot of a man who took another wife while his first partner was still alive.[[321]] The Alemanni and the Bavarians, who were more remote from Italy and hence from the Church, were influenced more by their own customs and allowed a pecuniary recompense to take the place of the harsher enactments.[[322]]
Adultery.
Adultery was not only a legal cause for divorce, but also a grave crime. All the barbarian peoples are agreed in so regarding it, but their penalties vary according as they were more or less affected by proximity to Italy, where the power of the Church was naturally strongest. The Ripuarians, the Bavarians, and the Alemanni preferred a money fine ranging from fifty to two hundred solidi.[[323]] Among the Visigoths the guilty party was usually bound over in servitude to the injured person to be disposed of as the latter wished.[[324]] Sometimes the law was harsher to women than to men; thus, according to a decree of Liutprand,[[325]] a husband who told his wife to commit adultery or who did so himself paid a mulct of fifty solidi to the wife's male relatives; but if the wife consented to or hid the deed, she was put to death. The laws all agree that the killing of adulterers taken in the act could not be regarded as murder.
The Church indulgent toward kings.
It is always to be remembered that although the statutes were severe enough, yet during this period, as indeed throughout all history, they were defied with impunity. Charlemagne, for example, the most Christian monarch, had a large number of concubines and divorced a wife who did not please him; yet his biographer Einhard, pious monk as he was, has no word of censure for his monarch's irregularities[[326]]; and policy prevented the Church from thundering at a king who so valiantly crushed the heretics, her enemies. Bishop Gregory of Tours tells us without a hint of being shocked that Clothacharius, King of the Franks, had many concubines.[[327]] Concubinage was, in fact, the regular thing.[[328]] But neither in that age, nor later in the case of Louis XIV, nor in our own day in the case of Leopold of Belgium has the Church had a word of reproach for monarchs who broke with impunity moral laws on which she claims always to have insisted without compromise.