Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/621



Yet still within the fountain pool, The gold fish steer and swim, As when King Charles with jewelled hand Stood paddling at the brim; At Charing-cross he's safe in bronze, No danger more from him!

Yet still in lonely evening hours, When the moon has long gone in, You hear the fountain's ceaseless tears, As for some hopeless sin; And far without the nightingale Of past grief warbling.

woman question has always been one of the legal and social difficulties of Christendom. In times when might was right, and the weakest went to the wall, women were simply the prey of the strongest; and though chivalry was instituted as much to protect them as for the maintenance of knightly exercises, they were nevertheless but poorly championed against the brutality of men and the oppression of laws, and for the most part were treated, as they were regarded, like inferiors and chattels. By degrees more generous counsels prevailed, the woman question came in for a share of the more liberal feeling afloat, the legal rights of women were enlarged on the ground of abstract justice, and not merely because women were the wives and mothers of men.

A curious old black-letter book, professing to be the "woman's lawyer," sets forth their legal condition as well as the state of public feeling regarding them in Queen Elizabeth's time. The statement why the book was written at all, has that strange non-sequitur flavour in it to be found in much old reasoning. "Before the world was seven daies old, masculum et foœminam fecit eos, of which division because the first part that wee say hath least judgement and discretion to be a Lawe unto it selfe (women, onely women), they have nothing to do in constituting Lawes or consenting to them, in interpreting of Lawes, or in hearing them interpreted at Lectures, leets, or charges; and yet they stand strictly tyed to men's establishments, little or nothing excused by ignorance, mee thinks it were pitty and impiety any longer to hold from them such Customes, Lawes, and Statutes as in a manner proper or principally belonging unto them." Speaking of men and women being only one, and of the consequent merging of the woman in the man, the anonymous author says: "A married woman perhaps may either doubt whether she bee either none or no more than half a person. But let her bee of good cheare;" for many affairs in life she will be found a whole person, and to be dealt with accordingly. Again, with a prophetic glance onward at the Miss Beckers and the Revising Barristers of the future, he says: "Women have no voyse in Parliament. They make no Lawes, they consent to none, they abrogate none. All of them are understood either married or to bee married, and their desires are subject to their husband. I know no remedy, though some women can shift it well enough. The Common Law here shaketh hands with Divinitie, but because I am come too soone to the title of Baron and feme, and Adam and Eve were the first and last that were married so young, it is best that I runne back again to consider of the things (which I might seeme to have lost by the way) that are fit to bee known concerning women before they bee fit for marriage." And the first thing to be known is the age at which they may be married.

Now, it appears that a woman has "divers special ages" in the matters of marriage and guardianship, and they are these: the chief thing that strikes us when we read them, being the wonderful precocity of those times. At seven years of age, her father shall have aid of his tenants to marry her; at nine, she is able to deserve and have dower; at twelve, to consent to marriage; at fourteen, to be hors du gard; at sixteen, to be past the Lord's tender of a husband (that is, free to choose for herself, and not obliged to take a husband of his choosing), also free to enter into the enjoyment of her own lands, if the Lord, for covetousness did not marry her at fourteen; at twenty-one, she is able to make a feoffment. But mark well this clause: if she misbehaves herself in any light way, while still a ward, she is to be deprived of her heritage, and her portion is to go to her parceners.

At the age of fourteen a woman was held to be marriageable, because able to "order and dispose, to have the key clog at her girdle, and to be a jolly stay to a man;" which was beginning early enough, in all conscience! But yet another reason for these early marriages was that, if married, "her husband for her shall do knight's service" if he is above age; if he is still under age, she is still in ward. But the black- letter lawyer is very warm on this