JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS, or Droit du Seigneur, a custom alleged to have existed in medieval Europe, giving the overlord a right to the virginity of his vassals’ daughters on their wedding night. For the existence of the custom in a legalized form there is no trustworthy evidence. That some such abuse of power may have been occasionally exercised by brutal nobles in the lawless days of the early middle ages is only too likely, but the jus, it seems, is a myth, invented no earlier than the 16th or 17th century. There appears to have been an entirely religious custom established by the council of Carthage in 398, whereby the Church required from the faithful continence on the wedding-night, and this may have been, and there is evidence that it was, known as Droit du Seigneur, or “God’s right.” Later the clerical admonition was extended to the first three days of marriage. This religious abstention, added to the undoubted fact that the feudal lord extorted fines on the marriages of his vassals and their children, doubtless gave rise to the belief that the jus was once an established custom.
The whole subject has been exhaustively treated by Louis Veuillot in Le Droit du seigneur au moyen âge (1854).
JUS RELICTAE, in Scots law, the widow’s right in the movable property of her deceased husband. The deceased must have been domiciled in Scotland, but the right accrues from movable property, wherever situated. The widow’s provision amounts to one-third where there are children surviving, and to one-half where there are no surviving children. The widow’s right vests by survivance, and is independent of the husband’s testamentary provisions; it may however be renounced by contract, or be discharged by satisfaction. It is subject to alienation of the husband’s movable estate during his lifetime or by its conversion into heritage. See also [Will].
JUSSERAND, JEAN ADRIEN ANTOINE JULES (1855- ), French author and diplomatist, was born at Lyons on the 18th of February 1855. Entering the diplomatic service in 1876, he became in 1878 consul in London. After an interval spent in Tunis he returned to London in 1887 as a member of the French Embassy. In 1890 he became French minister at Copenhagen, and in 1902 was transferred to Washington. A close student of English literature, he produced some very lucid and vivacious monographs on comparatively little-known subjects: Le Théâtre en Angleterre depuis la conquête jusqu’ aux prédécesseurs immédiats de Shakespeare (1878); Le Roman au temps de Shakespeare (1887; Eng. trans. by Miss E. Lee, 1890); Les Anglais au moyen âge: la vie nomade et les routes d’Angleterre au XIVe siècle (1884; Eng. trans., English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, by L. T. Smith, 1889); and L’Épopée de Langland (1893; Eng. trans., Piers Plowman, by M. C. R., 1894). His Histoire littéraire du peuple anglais, the first volume of which was published in 1895, was completed in three volumes in 1909. In English he wrote A French Ambassador at the Court of Charles II. (1892), from the unpublished papers of the count de Cominges.
JUSSIEU, DE, the name of a French family which came into prominent notice towards the close of the 16th century, and for a century and a half was distinguished for the botanists it produced. The following are its more eminent members:—
1. Antoine de Jussieu (1686-1758), born at Lyons on the 6th of July 1686, was the son of Christophe de Jussieu (or Dejussieu), an apothecary of some repute, who published a Nouveau traité de la thériaque (1708). Antoine studied at the university of Montpellier, and travelled with his brother Bernard through Spain, Portugal and southern France. He went to Paris in 1708, J. P. de Tournefort, whom he succeeded at the Jardin des Plantes, dying in that year. His own original publications are not of marked importance, but he edited an edition of Tournefort’s Institutiones rei herbariae (3 vols., 1719), and also a posthumous work of Jacques Barrelier, Plantae per Galliam, Hispaniam, et Italiam observatae, &c. (1714). He practised medicine, chiefly devoting himself to the very poor. He died at Paris on the 22nd of April 1758.
2. Bernard de Jussieu (1699-1777), a younger brother of the above, was born at Lyons on the 17th of August 1699. He took a medical degree at Montpellier and began practice in 1720, but finding the work uncongenial he gladly accepted his brother’s invitation to Paris in 1722, when he succeeded Sébastien Vaillant as sub-demonstrator of plants in the Jardin du Roi. In 1725 he brought out a new edition of Tournefort’s Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris, 2 vols., which was afterwards translated into English by John Martyn, the original work being incomplete. In the same year he was admitted into the académie des sciences, and communicated several papers to that body. Long before Abraham Trembley (1700-1784) published his Histoire des polypes d’eau douce, Jussieu maintained the doctrine that these organisms were animals, and not the flowers of marine plants, then the current notion; and to confirm his views he made three journeys to the coast of Normandy. Singularly modest and retiring, he published very little, but in 1759 he arranged the plants in the royal garden of the Trianon at Versailles, according to his own scheme of classification. This arrangement is printed in his nephew’s Genera, pp. lxiii.-lxx., and formed the basis of that work. He cared little for the credit of enunciating new discoveries, so long as the facts were made public. On the death of his brother Antoine, he could not be induced to succeed him in his office, but prevailed upon L. G. Lemonnier to assume the higher position. He died at Paris on the 6th of November 1777.