tional Witanagemot. Norman rule reduced woman's rights, yet under feudalism women could hold high state office in default of male heirs.

In artisan circles, when the revival of commerce brought a wider market for the products of household industry, the patriarchal head of the family owned the product of all its toil. The standard of living in the home depended solely on his will. But gilds admitted women, and women often engaged in commercial pursuits along with their husbands or as their successors. In fourteenth century England, a married woman was permitted by law to act in business as if single in spite of her being under tutelage. In the craft gilds wife and daughters worked with husband and father at his craft. Journeymen could not marry but the master must have a wife of approved descent. The gild supervised the training of children; they were expected to follow their parents' craft. Some gilds forbade employment of wife and daughters and in the last days of the gilds this prohibition became a general rule. Girls were helped with money to marry or go into a religious house as they chose."

Woman's subordinate position in marriage came down through old Teutonic usage. In the old days of ordeal she was incapable of appearing in the lists in her own defense and had to be represented by a protector who, in case of wives, was of course the husband. Even late in the Middle Ages "ein Weib zu kaufen" was the stock expression for getting married. The idea of sale was gone but its place had been taken by the notion of the transfer of authority. A woman was always under guardianship; the natural warden was the father; at

"On gild privileges for women, see Brentano, History and Development of Gilds, cxxxii; Lipson, Introduction to the Economic History of England, vol. i, 316-318.

marriage the wardship passed to the husband. The common law is voiced thus by a dramatic character: "I will be master of what is mine own. She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house, my household stuff, my field, my barn, my horse, my ox, my ass, my anything." The wife was merged in the husband; legally she did not exist.

Our traditional common law in cases of children and real estate left without a will gave a son, tho younger, inheritance before a daughter. In case of a daughter's seduction, her father's only recourse was on the ground that she was his servant and that the seducer had trespassed on his property and deprived him of the benefit of her labor. In nearly all the Teutonic codes the husband had the right to beat his wife. "Justice Brooke affirmeth plainly that if a man beat an outlaw, a traitor, a pagan, his villein, or his wife it is dispunishable, because by the Law Common, these persons can have no action." "Wives in England," says an Antwerp merchant, 1599, "are entirely in the power of their husbands, their lives only excepted." Even in the eighteenth century, wife trading was an English custom. Until the reign of George IV burning at the stake was the legal penalty for wives that murdered their husbands.10

Doubtless the reality of English life was less barbarous than the law; yet we are describing a man-made world in which economic dependence held woman in general to a servile level. Her training corresponded to her sphere. In medieval Europe peasant girls were taught to work in house and field, accept the conventional piety, barely to read and write, and then marry. 8 Brace. Gesta Christi, 285-290.

9 Earle. Colonial Dames and Goodwives, 26, 29.

10 Yonge. Site of Old "James Towne," 138.

All girls were taught the textile arts. Daughters of wealthy burghers had tutors and after the fourteenth century there were schools for them in most cities. Women in the castles had enjoyed the same education The convents, also, had provided training for women. But the rise of the universities, boisterously masculine, detracted from the education of women and a studied contempt for women developed.

as men.

Many Renaissance writers gave woman a new recognition. At the Renaissance the position of women underwent a marked transformation. Some women became professors in Italian and Spanish universities."1 Erasmus wrote of and for women, though not with entire approval of equal educational opportunities for them. He said the wise man is aware that nothing is of greater advantage to woman's morals than worthy knowledge. Toward the close of feudalism girls were sent from castles or wealthy burgher homes to the castles of high nobles to acquire polish. In the fifteenth century an increasing number of women-often of the prosperous middle class - found opportunities, though limited, for literary and classical education. Sir Thomas More believed that education may agree equally well with both sexes. Agrippa (in a work published in 1530) asserted woman's superiority over man and pointed to man's tyranny as the reason for woman's dearth of achievement.

12

Like women, the younger children of the medieval dignitary were subordinate. Feudal lands were limited in area; hence title, property, rank, and power passed to one child - the oldest male. The family line was of huge social importance: status and worth depended on

11 Position of Woman: Actual and Ideal, 53.

12 Compare Cooke, Woman in the Progress of Civilization, chapter vi.

what one's forebears had done. Exaltation of the family in linear extension rather than expanse was vital to the prosperity of the landed class. In Germany, where the law of primogeniture was too lax, where all of a noble's children were noble and his estates free from entail, the continual multiplication of titles and subdivision of territories reduced most houses to relative poverty. The German noble might provide for younger sons by securing them appointment to some rich benefice but this practice augmented social unrest.

As chivalry sank in decadence the cities flourished and in them the busy, prosaic middle class whose rise burst forth in the Reformation. Bourgeois wives found. complete satisfaction around the domestic hearth. In modest bourgeois circles small attention was given to the mental culture of children. Girls generally grew up under the sole supervision of their mothers, or at best enjoyed convent training directed to piety and domestic accomplishments, in which they became very proficient. Girls married even in their fourteenth year. Fathers attached no small importance to practical advantages in matrimony, and the longing of maidens for rich knights was widespread. It came to be no disgrace for a prince to marry a girl of the middle class, for such a match might serve as a means of reviving fading fortunes. Aeneas Sylvius (afterwards Pope Pius II) said of Germany about the middle of the fifteenth century: "Where is the woman (I do not speak of the nobility, but of the bourgeoisie) who does not glitter with gold? What profusion of gold and pearls, ornaments, reliquaries." By the sixteenth century, the castled knights saw the burghers living in houses that, to the dwellers in uncomfortable castles, seemed the height of luxury. The knights' ladies coveted the princely

silks and velvets and jewels that decked the womenfolk of the bourgeoisie. Even when the medieval sumptuary laws forbidding the burghers to wear pearls and velvet were not disobeyed, the wives and daughters of the middle class could solace themselves with silks and diamonds. And to the noble lady, the exclusive privilege of wearing pearls and velvet was small comfort in default of the means of procuring them. The knights' attempts to rival the burghers brought on ruin. Switzerland saw a similar riot of conspicuous consumption.

Morals were lax. For the satisfaction of vanity and desire for enjoyment, the daughters of citizens often allowed themselves to be drawn aside from the path of womanly honor. In cases of seduction, where the suitor broke his word and tried to back out after betrothal, the practical father exacted rich compensation. The men were continually complaining against the women. fifteenth century Germany children born out of wedlock were frequent, growing up in their father's house along with their half brothers and sisters; and for a long time no disgrace attached. Why should it in bourgeois circles, where there was no noble estate to be conserved? 18

In

In the fifteenth century, with improved hygienic conditions and favorable material conditions, there were, not uncommonly, families of twelve, fifteen, or even more children. A chronicle gives the city of Erfurt an average of eight to ten children per family. Idealism was not wanting. Albrecht von Eyb, in his treatise Whether a man ought to take a wife or not, printed in 1472, seems to speak for the Germany of his day when he says:

Marriage is a useful wholesome thing: by it many a conflict and

18 See Richard, History of German Civilization, 224; Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters, 573-574