at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of her husband, under whose wing, protection and cover she performs everything.  So great a favorite,” he added, “is the female sex of the laws of England.”  “The strength of woman,” says Hobhouse, interpreting the sense of the English law, “was her weakness.  She conquered by yielding.  Her gentleness had to be guarded from the turmoil of the world, her fragrance to be kept sweet and fresh, away from the dust and the smoke of battle.  Hence her need of a champion and guardian.”

In France the wife of the mediaeval and Renaissance periods occupied much the same position in her husband’s house.  He was her absolute master and lord, the head and soul of “the feminine and feeble creature” who owed to him “perfect love and obedience.”  She was his chief servant, the eldest of his children, his wife and subject; she signed herself “your humble obedient daughter and friend,” when she wrote to him.  The historian, De Maulde la Claviere, who has brought together evidence on this point in his Femmes de la Renaissance, remarks that even though the husband enjoyed this lofty and superior position in marriage, it was still generally he, and not the wife, who complained of the hardships of marriage.

Law and custom assumed that a woman should be more or less under the protection of a man, and even the ideals of fine womanhood which arose in this society, during feudal and later times, were necessarily tinged by the same conception.  It involved the inequality of women as compared with men, but under the social conditions of a feudal society such inequality was to woman’s advantage.  Masculine force was the determining factor in life and it was necessary that every woman should have a portion of this force on her side.  This sound and reasonable idea naturally tended to persist even after the growth of civilization rendered force a much less decisive factor in social life.  In England in Queen Elizabeth’s time no woman must be masterless, although the feminine subjects of Queen Elizabeth had in their sovereign the object lesson of a woman who could play a very brilliant and effective part in life and yet remain absolutely masterless.  Still later, in the eighteenth century, even so fine a moralist as Shaftesbury, in his Characteristics, refers to lovers of married women as invaders of property.  If such conceptions still ruled even in the best minds, it is not surprising that in the same century, even in the following century, they were carried out into practice by less educated people who frankly bought and sold women.

Schrader, in his Reallexicon (art.  “Brautkauf"), points out that, originally, the purchase of a wife was the purchase of her person, and not merely of the right of protecting her.  The original conception probably persisted long in Great Britain on account of its remoteness from the centres of civilization.  In the eleventh century Gregory VII desired Lanfranc