Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/210

 1 94 TIic Romance of Melusine.

was even (greater. " Practically," as Sir John Rhys and Sir David Brynmor Jones say, "either husband or wife might separate whenever one or both chose," though the consequences to their property varied with the circum- stances.^ The facility of separation and marriage to others enjoyed by husbands and wives in Scandinavia is obvious to the most superficial student of Norse literature. Among the Germans, Grimm lays it down that separation might take place either at the will of both parties, with or without any other ground, or at the will of one party only, especi- ally the man's, on account of some bodily blemish or crime. The husband could demand divorce for his wife's barren- ness ; she for an equivalent reason on his part, or simply because he neglected her. The solemnities of divorce corresponded to those of marriage. The keys, the symbols of the mistress' authority in the house, were required to be delivered up. Each party held one end of a piece of linen cloth ; and while so held it was cut in two, leaving one end in the hand of each.* It is thus clear that the right of separation of a married pair was undoubtedly re'cognized by the common law of various countries in the west of Europe, and even was to a great extent acquiesced in by the Church, until the more ascetic of its rulers were able, after a secular struggle, more or less to enforce their will. In the light of these facts, a marriage upon conditions im- posed by the bride is not so fantastic in a mediaeval story as it otherwise seems ; still less so is it in the more barbarous societies in which the tale must have originated.

Nor do the conditions themselves appear unduly arbitrary as they are set forth in the romance. Pressine forbade her husband to intrude upon her childbed. The seclusion of a woman at such times from men, including her husband, is a very common and stringent rule in savage

Medieval Law (O.xford, 1909), p. 238. ^J. Grimm, Deutsche Rechtsalterlhui>ic){2n([e.(}i. ,G'6\.\.\ugtx\, 1854), pp. 443, 454.
 * Rhys and Jones, The Welsh People (1900), p. 212; Wade-Evans, Welsh