[28] Doubtless in all ages marriages were by far oftener determined by pecuniary considerations than by love or affection, but proofs are wanting to show that marriage was formerly made an object of speculation and exchange in the open market with anything like the same effrontery as today. In our time among the propertied classes—the poor have no need of it—marriage barter is frequently carried on with a shamelessness which makes the phrases about the sacredness of marriage, that some people never tire of repeating, the emptiest mockery. August Bebel.—Woman in the Past, Present and Future.
[29] To make women the special objects of this torture, to teach them hardness of heart in the office of executioners, was refinement of atrocity.... It was for slaves and women that the greatest atrocities were reserved.—Hist. of Crime in England.
[30] Women in England had burned women to death in the 10th century; they had been set on the stool of filth to be mocked as brewers of bad ale in the 11th; on the stool of filth they had been jeered as common scolds from time immemorial; they were legally beaten by their husbands down to a comparatively recent period. In the 14th century they were such as circumstances had made them; strong of muscle but hard of heart, more fit to be mothers of brigands than to rear gentle daughters or honest sons.—Ibid.
[31] The elder Disraeli says: “Warton, too, has observed that the style of friendship between males in the reign of Elizabeth would not be tolerated at the present day.” Disraeli himself declares that “a male friend, whose life and fortunes were consecrated to another male, who looks upon him with adoration and talks of him with excessive tenderness, appears to us nothing less than a chimerical and monstrous lover.”—Amenities of Literature, Vol. II., p. 105.
[32] Poisoning or otherwise murdering husbands was a crime visited with peculiar severity in almost all codes. Lea.—Superstition and Force.
[33] Blackstone says it was to be no thicker than a man’s thumb, thus an instrument of ever varying size. According to palmistry the thumb of a self-willed or obstinate man, a cruel man, or of a murderer, is very large at the upper portion or ball.
[34] Petit treason may happen in three ways: By a servant killing his master, a wife her husband, or an ecclesiastical person (either secular or regular) his superior, to whom he owes faith and obedience. The punishment of petit treason in a man is to be drawn and hanged, and in a woman to be drawn and burnt.—Commentaries, Vol. IV., p. 203-4.
[35] But in treason of every kind the punishment of women is the same and different from men. For as the decency due to the sex forbids the exposing and publicly mangling their bodies, their sentence is to be drawn (dragged) to the gallows and there be burnt alive.—Ibid, IV., p. 92.
[36] The daily press, in its minute record of events, all unwittingly furnishes many a little item, whose primal reason only the student of history can read. The Syracuse, N.Y., “Daily Standard,” of February 22, 1884, published from its exchanges the following incident: “An eccentric old man in New Hampshire surprised his neighbors and friends the other day by shouldering his gun and starting for the woods on the morning of his wife’s funeral. On being urged to come back, he refused saying: “She warn’t no blood relation of mine.”
[37] But now by the statute 30, George 3 c. 48, women convicted in all cases of treason shall receive judgment to be drawn to the place of execution, and there to be hanged by the neck till dead. Before this humane statute women were sentenced to be burnt alive for every species of treason.—Commentaries, p. 92.