on the face till the blood comes.  The husband had a legal right to beat his wife, not only for adultery, but even for contradicting him.  Women were not, however, entirely without power, and in a thirteenth century collection of Coutumes, it is set down that a husband must only beat his wife reasonably, resnablement. (As regards the husband’s right to chastise his wife, see also Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, vol. i, p. 234.  In England it was not until the reign of Charles II, from which so many modern movements date, that the husband was deprived of this legal right.)

In the eyes of a feudal knight, it may be added, the beauty of a horse competed, often successfully, with the beauty of a woman.  In Girbers de Metz, two knights, Garin and his cousin Girbert, ride by a window at which sits a beautiful girl with the face of a rose and the white flesh of a lily.  “Look, cousin Girbert, look!  By Saint Mary, a beautiful woman!” “Ah,” Girbert replies, “a beautiful beast is my horse!” “I have never seen anything so charming as that young girl with her fresh color and her dark eyes,” says Garin.  “I know no steed to compare with mine,” retorts Girbert.  When the men were thus absorbed in the things that pertain to war, it is not surprising that amorous advances were left to young girls to make.  “In all the chansons de geste,” Gautier remarks, “it is the young girls who make the advances, often with effrontery,” though, he adds, wives are represented as more virtuous (L.  Gautier, La Chevalerie, pp. 236-8, 348-50).

In England Pollock and Maitland (History of English Law, vol. ii, p. 437) do not believe that a life-long tutela of women ever existed as among other Teutonic peoples.  “From the Conquest onwards,” Hobhouse states (op. cit., vol. i, p. 224), “the unmarried English woman, on attaining her majority, becomes fully equipped with all legal and civil rights, as much a legal personality as the Babylonian woman had been three thousand years before.”  But the developed English law more than made up for any privileges thus accorded to the unmarried by the inconsistent manner in which it swathed up the wife in endless folds of irresponsibility, except when she committed the supreme offence of injuring her lord and master.  The English wife, as Hobhouse continues (loc. cit.) was, if not her husband’s slave, at any rate his liege subject; if she killed him it was “petty treason,” the revolt of a subject against a sovereign in a miniature kingdom, and a more serious offence than murder.  Murder she could not commit in his presence, for her personality was merged in him; he was responsible for most of her crimes and offences (it was that fact which gave him the right to chastise her), and he could not even enter into a contract with her, for that would be entering into a contract with himself.  “The very being and legal existence of a woman is suspended during marriage,” said Blackstone, “or