Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/484

478 But capture, as we have already seen, was not the only mode of contracting marriage among the Slavs, even in the earliest period. According to the chronicle of Nestor, the Polians never had recourse to it. Instead of carrying off his bride by force, the Polian bridegroom preferred to pay to her father, or her family, a sort of pretium nuptiale, or bride-price. This custom of the Polians gradually became the general usage among all Slavonic tribes. In Servia, according to Wouk Karadjich, the sums of money paid to the bride’s father by the bridegroom’s family were so exorbitant that Georgius the Black issued a proclamation declaring it to be illegal to ask from the bridegroom more than a single ducat. In our days, says Bagisic, wives, as a rule, cannot be bought by their future husbands, but a reminiscence of this old custom is still preserved in the fact that the bride’s father receives from the bridegroom a gift in money, varying from one to six ducats, according to the fortune of the giver.

Wives were also bought and sold among the Slavonic tribes of Austria. According to an old usage of the Loujichan, a Slavonic people inhabiting certain districts of Hungary, the bridegroom, on entering the homestead of his bride, apostrophised the father thus: “Pray do tell me if you have a cow to sell?” A Bohemian wedding-song puts into the mouth of the bridegroom’s best man the following sentence: “Please deliver to me the bride. I will give you a good price for her. The only reason I have for being here is that I may pay you in heavy thalers.” No longer ago than the beginning of the last century, young men wishing to marry were in the habit of going to the fair at Krasni Brod, where unmarried women and widows, surrounded by their relations, awaited their coming. Each chose the woman he liked best, covenanted with her parents as to the amount of money to be paid for her, and proceeded to the ceremony of marriage. Polish wedding-songs also mention the custom of buying wives.

In Posnau the following ceremony is still observed on