[68] There was no distinction between offenses against the church on one hand, and offenses against the state or individual on the other. Cases of theft and sorcery, like those of witchcraft, could be tried in the church. From the position of the clergy as law-givers, it follows not only that the secular laws had the sanction of religion, but that religious observance were enforced by the secular arm.
[69] From 499 to 1066. Herbert Spencer.—Descriptive Sociology.
[70] To women were still applied those punishments, which had been instituted by the men whose practice it was to buy their wives and sell their daughters. Pike.—Hist. Crime in England.
[71] Bracton.—De Legibus Anglice I, 479.
[72] “The reformation altered, but did not better the condition of woman. Socially it rescued her from the priest to make her the chattel of the husband, and doctrinally it expunged her altogether. Martin Luther declared that the two sacred books, which especially point to woman as the agent of man’s final redemption—the books of Esther and Revelations—that in ‘so far as I esteem them, it would be no loss if they were thrown into the river’.”
[73] “The forefathers of Benjamin Franklin used a Bible kept fastened under the seat of a four-legged stool, the leaves held in place by pack-threads. When the family assembled to hear it read, one of the number was posted as sentinel some distance from the house to give warning of any stranger’s approach, in which case the stool was hurriedly replaced upon its legs, and some one seated upon it for more effectual concealment of the book.”
[74] Herbert Spencer.—Descriptive Sociology, England.
[75] The English Women’s Suffrage Journal, November, 1886, reported: “Mrs. —— rose to move a resolution. After reading a memorial, she said: ’Now, when I was asked to add a few words of support to the memorial I have just read, my first feeling was that I was very far from the right person to do so, inasmuch as being a married woman—and therefore disqualified—and rightly disqualified,” etc.
[76] The coverture of a woman disables her from making contracts to the prejudice of herself or her husband without his allowance or confirmation.
[77] I have arrived at conclusions which I keep to myself as yet, and only utter as Greek phogagta sunetotsi, the principle of which is, that there will never be a good world for women till the last monk, and therewith the last remnant of the monastic idea of, and legislation for, woman, i.e. the Canon Law is civilized off the face of the earth. Meanwhile all the most pure and high-minded women in England and Europe have been brought up under the shadows of the Canon Law, and have accepted it with their usual divine self-sacrifice, as their destiny by law of God, and nature, and consider their own womanhood outraged when it, their tyrant, is meddled with. Canon Charles Kingsley.—Letter to John Stuart Mill, June 17, 1849, in Life and Letters.