The academy of Pegnitz-shepherds ("Pegnitzshäfer-orden") took its name from the little river Pegnitz which runs through Nuremberg. Herr Sigmond von Birken was elected a member in 1645. He chose Floridan as his pastoral name, and the amaranth as his flower. In 1658 he was admitted to the Palm Academy ("Palmen-orden"), choosing the name Der Erwacsene (the adult?), and the snowdrop. In 1659, a vacancy having occurred in the Pegnitz-Herdsmen ("Pegnitz-Hirten") he was thought worthy to fill it, and in 1679 he received the diploma of the Venetian order of the Recuperati. He died in 1681. This, and what can be hung upon it, is Die Betrübte Pegnitz, a dialogue of 406 pages. It opens with a meeting of shepherds and shepherdesses, who go in and out of their cottages on the banks of the Pegnitz, and tell one another, what all seem equally well acquainted with, the entire life of their deceased friend. It would not be easy to find a work more clumsy in conception and tasteless in execution. Herr von Birken seems to have been a prosperous man, and to have enjoyed a high pastoral reputation. His works are enumerated, but the catalogue looks ephemeral. There is, however, one with a promising title: Die Trockene Trunkenheit, oder die Gebrauch und Missbrauch des Tabacks. His portrait, as "Der Erwachsene," is prefixed. It has not a shepherd-like look. He seems about fifty, with a fat face, laced cravat, and large flowing wig. There are twenty-four emblematical plates, rather below the average of their time.
As so secondary a town as Nuremberg had at least three academies, we may infer that such
institutions were abundant in Germany, in the seventeenth century: that of the Pegnitz shepherds lasted at least till the beginning of the eighteenth. In Der Thörichte Pritschmeister, a comedy printed at Coblenz, 1704, one of the characters is "Phantasirende, ein Pegnitz Schäffer," who talks fustian and is made ridiculous throughout. The comedy is "von Menantes." I have another work by the same author: Galante, Verliebte, und Satyrische Gedichte, Hamburg, 1704. I shall be very glad to be told who he was, as his versification is often very good, and his jokes, though not graceful, and not very laughable, are real.
H. B. C.
U. U. Club.
MARRIAGES EN CHEMISE.—MANTELKINDER.—LEGITIMATION.
(Vol. vi., pp. 485. 561.)
The popular error on the legal effect of marriage en chemise is, I think, noticed among other vulgar errors in law in a little book published some twenty years ago under the name of Westminster Hall, to which a deceased lawyer of eminence, then young at the bar, was a contributor. I believe the opinion to be still extensively prevalent, and to be probably founded, not exactly in total ignorance, but in a misconception, of the law. The text writers inform us that "the husband is liable for the wife's debts, because he acquires an absolute interest in the personal estate of the wife," &c. (Bacon's Abridgment, tit. "Baron and Feme.") Now an unlearned person, who hears this doctrine, might reasonably conclude, that if his bride has no estate at all, he will incur no liability; and the future husband, more prudent than refined, might think it as well to notify to his neighbours, by an unequivocal symbol, that he took no pecuniary benefit with his wife, and therefore expected to be free from her pecuniary burdens. In this, as in most other popular errors, there is found a substratum of reason.
With regard to the other vulgar error, noticed at the foot of Mr. Brooks' communication (p. 561.), that "all children under the girdle at the time of marriage are legitimate," the origin of it is more obvious. Every one knows of the "legitimatio per subsequens matrimonium" of the canonists, and how the barons assembled in parliament at Merton refused to engraft this law of the Church on the jurisprudence of England. But it is not perhaps so well known that, upon such a marriage the premature offspring of the bride and bridegroom sometimes used to perform a part in the ceremony, and received the nuptial benediction under the veil or mantle of the bride or the pallium of the altar. Hence the children so legitimated are said to have been called by the Germans Mantelkinder. The learning on this head is to be found in Hommel's Jurisprudentia Numismatibus Illustrata (Lipsiæ, 1763), pp. 214-218., where the reader will also find a pictorial illustration of the ceremony from a codex of the Novellæ in the library of Christian Schwarz. The practice seems to have been borrowed from the form of adopting children, noticed in the same work and in Ducange, verb. "Pallium, Pallio cooperire;" and in Grimm's Deut. Rechts Alterth., p. 465.