[8] Reeves.—Hist. Eng. Law, p. 337.
[9] Maine says: No society which preserves any tincture of Christian Institutions is likely to restore to married women the personal liberty conferred on them by middle Roman laws.—Ancient Law.
[10] Reeves says, while many great minds, as Lord Chief Justice Hale, Lord John Somers, Henry Spellman, Dr. Brady and Sir Martin Wright think feudalism came in with the conqueror, others, as Coke, Seldon, Bacon and Sir Roger Owen are of opinion that tenures were common among the Saxons. Blackstone, Dalrymple and Sullivan endeavor to compromise the dispute by admitting an imperfect system of feuds to have been instituted before the conquest.—History of English Law, Vol. I., p. 18-19.
[11] A certain bishop, wishing a person to take charge of his castle during his absence, the latter asked how he should support himself. For answer the bishop pointed to a procession of tradesmen with their goods then crossing the valley at their feet.
[12] Wives were bought in England from the fifth to the eleventh century. Herbert Spencer.—Descriptive Sociology of England.
[13] There was another law even more odious than Marquette; the father’s right to the price of mundium, in other words, the price of his daughter. Legouve.—Hist. Morales des Femmes, p. 104.
[14] Murder under the name of war, the ruin of women under the name of gallantry, were the chief occupations of the nobility. Pike.—Hist. of Crime in England. The chief qualification for success at courts was the power of making and appreciating mirth. The infidelities of women were commonly the narrator’s theme, and an exhortation to avoid matrimony was the most common form of advice given by a man to his friend. War and intrigue were regarded as the principal amusements of life; the acquisition of wealth the only object worth serious consideration. A consequence of this creed was that the husband frequently set a price upon his wife’s virtue, and made a profit out of his own dishonor. Fathers were ready to sell their daughters.—Ibid.
[15] Both married and single found their worst foes in their nearest friends. The traffic in women was none the less real in Christian England than it is now in the slave marts of Stamboul or Constantinople.—Ibid. One of the most recent illustrations of the general regard in which woman is held throughout Christendom, is the experience of the young California heiress, Florence Blythe, who although but fifteen years old, was in constant receipt of proposals of marriage both at home and from abroad. Her attorney, General Hunt, said: “I do not think there is a woman living who has had the number of written proposals that Florence has received, but in all the letters woman is regarded as a chattel, a thing to be bought and sold. The constant receipt of letters of this character, and the equally constant attempt of adventurers to gain a personal interview with the child, at last became unendurable, and to escape such insulting persecution, Florence suddenly married a young man of her acquaintance living near her.” These letters, among them, from sixty titled Europeans, lords, counts, dukes, barons, viscounts, marquises and even one prince, confirm the statement of August Bebel, that marriage sales of women are still as common as in the middle ages, and are expected in most Christian countries.
[16] A husband upon his return from the Crusades, finding his wife had been untrue, imprisoned her in a room so small she could neither stand erect nor lie at full length; her only window looking out upon the dead body of her lover swinging in chains.
[17] The Shoshone Indian who hires his wife out as a harlot, inflicts capital punishment on her if she goes with another without his knowledge. Bancroft.—Native Races, I; 436.