Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/216

 200 The RoDiaiicc of Mdhisiiie.

The most respectable women among them, by agreement at the time of marriage, limit their conjugal duties to not more than four days of the week, and if possible to fewer. The remaining days are absolutely at the wife's disposition.^^ Such an arrangement is, of course, foreign to European manners. In Europe a wife by marriage came legallyinto the /^/^j-Arj-of her husband. But though he could chastise her, as he might his slaves and children, she was the ruler of his household, — a position that probably, in the case of a noble- man or man of wealth, gave her a considerable measure of personal independence within well-recognized limits. To what extent she availed herself of the opportunities afforded by it must have depended on her character and circum- stances. The Wife of Bath was not the only lady in the Middle Ages, or in the Canterbury Tales themselves, who thoroughly understood how —

" to have sovereyntee As wel over hir housbond as hir love, And for to been in maistrie him above."

Succeeding in this, she could impose conditions beside which that of Melusine would not seem incredible.

It must, however, be remembei-ed that the story of the conditional marriage did not originate in the Middle Ages, but in a state of society much more archaic. It is merely the adaptation of a savage tale to a higher stage of civiliza- tion, the last term of an evolution which perhaps began in totemism, and certainly at a period when marriages were dissolved more freely than the more complex organiza- tion of social institutions has permitted in Europe within historical times.

E. Sidney Hartland.

-' J. Petherick, Egypt, the Soudan and Central Africa (Edinburgh, 1861), pp. 141-4, 151.