Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/209

 The Romance of Mi'/nsine. 193

ill Iceland. The cycle is in fact very widely diflused. Its most strikingly told example is the splendid story of Hasan of Bassorah in the Arabia?i Nights.

A more tragical note is struck where the lady imposes a prohibition. In the first half of the Middle Ages, and in some countries even later, a marriage was far from indissoluble. The Liber Poenitentialis of Theodore, Arch- bishop of Canterbury, is doubtless a compilation of clerical rules in vogue throughout the west of Europe and not peculiar to Anglo-Saxon England, though adopted and possibly adapted for the purposes of his own jurisdiction by the great archbishop. Its use was extended in the eighth century by Ecgberht, Archbishop of York, to the northern province. That the Church was able to enforce all the prohibitions and penances laid down in it is very improbable. Indeed there is abundant evidence on the face of this and other ecclesiastical documents to the contrary, in the alternative and lighter penances provided, and in the methods kindlj^ allowed to powerful men to shift the most uncomfortable parts of their penances to other shoulders. But even in this very document, if a woman leave her husband and will not return, he is per- mitted, after five years, with the bishop's consent, to take another wife. Or if husband or wife be taken away by force into captivity, there is permission to marry again after a like period, and, moreover, a provision that, if in such a case the captive return after a second marriage on the part of the spouse left behind, the new husband or wife shall be dismissed. The husband of an adulterous wife is also specially authorized to repudiate her, the lord's sentence having been first obtained, and to marry another.'- In Wales, at a much later date, the freedom of separation

^ Liber Poenitentialis Theodori etc., xix., 23, 24, 18; cf. Confessionale Ecgberti, 26, 19 ; Excei'ptiones Ecgberti, cxxiv., cxxv. ; in Ancient Laws and Institutes of England (Pub. Rec. Comm., 1840), pp. 285, 355, 351, 336; see also p. 281, n. 4.