another, she should speak to her husband thus: "See, my dear husband, thou hast deceived me and my young body and endangered my honor and salvation; before God there is no honor between us. Suffer that I maintain secret marriage with thy brother or closest friend while thou remainest my husband in name. That thy property may not fall heir to strangers; willingly be deceived by me as you have unwillingly deceived me." The husband should consent. If he refuses, she has a right to leave him, go elsewhere, and remarry. Similarly, if a woman will not perform her conjugal duty, the husband has the right to get another woman, after telling his wife his intention.2

24

Of course the author of such views was in favor of permitting divorcees to remarry. He even sanctioned bigamy. "I confess," he says, "for my part that if a man wishes to marry two or more wives, I cannot forbid him, nor is his conduct repugnant to the Holy Scriptures." Melanchthon advised Henry VIII. to commit bigamy rather than divorce Catherine. He and Luther, as a matter of shrewd politics, connived in the disgraceful bigamy of Philip of Hesse. Luther forgot all honesty in trying to cover the trail of this infamy, which he was unwilling for the "coarse peasants" to imitate. Catholics could well say, "Behold the fruits of the Reformation!" Kolde says, "It is highly probable that the beginning of the decline of Protestantism as a political power coincides with the marriage of the Prince of Hesse." 25

Such laxity as the reformers exhibited correlates with the economic basis of the Protestant Revolution. Unlike feudal landed estates, bourgeois personalty was not especially appropriate to concentrated hereditary trans24 On Luther's radicalism, see idem, 79-80.

25 On Luther and bigamy, see Gage, Woman, Church, and State, 399; Vedder, Reformation in Germany, 350-355.

mission, as its items were transient and indefinitely increasable. Primogeniture, and even a closely restricted progeny, were no longer necessary to the perpetuation of class domination. The economic reason for the irrefragable feudal marriage was gone. Divorce found a lodgment in bourgeois theory and practice. As we have seen, a certain recognition began to be bestowed on illegitimates. As under Roman law, subsequent marriage of parents became a means of legitimizing them.28

It is not to be assumed that sex life in the Reformation period was purer than ordinary. The code of Charles V. was severe against sexual transgression and the sharp penalties denounced upon seduction, adultery, incest, unnatural lust, abortion, infanticide, etc. indicate the prevalence of these practices. Court records of the sixteenth century afford confirmatory evidence. The Protestant clergy declaimed zealously against sexual excess. Prostitutes were harassed and "fallen" women were relentlessly persecuted.

The Reformation was not in all particulars so radical as in its handling of the sex relation. For instance, Luther kept children within the pale of collective religion by accepting the view that faith of sponsors suffices for infants in baptism. It was left for more thorogoing sectaries to apply individualism to this rite also and abolish the baptism of infants.

In so short a space as can be given to this initial chapter it is impossible to harmonize all seeming contradictions in medieval and early modern sex and family life or to give an adequate perspective. It may suffice to remember that out of medieval confusion of thought and practice, out of a feudal society of class privilege

26 Meily. Puritanism, 57-58.

and exploitation, arose by economic process a new social order which stressed the individual and his freedom and revolved around industry and commerce rather than around land ownership. This change of economic base demanded a revolution in thought and morals and new standards evolved to meet the emergency. A survey of England in this period of transition leads to the threshold of American colonization.

II. OLD WORLD ORIGINS-SPECIFIC

SOURCES 27

The Paston Letters introduce us to fifteenth century England. In them marriage seems to be in the main a matter of mercenary calculation and withal the chief business of family life. A girl informs her suitor how much her father will give her; if the amount is unsatisfactory he must cease his suit. When Margaret made a love match with a servant in the family her mother cut her off from inheritance tho she did leave twenty pounds to her grandson by this marriage. John Paston sometimes had two matrimonial projects on hand at once. After seeking his brother's advice in a number of cases he finally made a love match with an ardent young lady whose mother was favorable but whose father's economic sense made him hard to satisfy. One precocious youth begs his brother for help in wooing a young lady. "The age of her is by all likelihood eighteen or nineteen at the furthest. And as for the money and plate, it is ready whensoever she were wedded, and as for her beauty judge you that when you see her, and specially behold her hands."

Kindly feelings were not wanting. Marital relations seem to have been comfortable. There were close relations between brothers and when one Paston married, his mother wrote her husband to buy the new daughter a gown "goodly blue" or "bright sanguine." The rearing of children and their start in life were matters of grave concern. Judge Paston's marriageable daughter 27 Compare Goodsell, History of the Family, chapter ix.

was generally beaten once or twice a week by her mother, sometimes twice in one day, and her head was broken in two or three places. When her brother aged sixteen was in school at London the mother sent instructions for the master as follows, "If he hath nought do well, nor wyll nought amend, pray hym that he wyll trewly belassch hym, tyll he wyll amend; and so did the last master, and the best that ever he had, at Cambridge." Such stringencies shadow the bright episodes of Paston affairs. The ill-treated daughter was anxious for a husband as refuge from maternal tyranny. Doubtless many an English maid felt like eagerness, for brutality seems to have been usual with British matrons in high life. Elizabeth Tanfield (1585-1639), Lady Falkland, while speaking to her mother always knelt before her.

The Tudor age found England busy with foreign enterprises, discovery of new worlds, commerce, tradebuilding up a solid basis of wealth and progress - absorption in economic and intellectual activities that left no time for "chivalry." The man ushered in by the revolution we have already traced was the modern approximation of the "economic man"-a type to whose senses women make a relatively mild appeal. The men of the sixteenth century were somewhat of modern men and regarded woman as a participant in the burdens and pleasures of life, not a being to be worshiped or shunned.

English women enjoyed rather more freedom than some of their continental sisters. A Dutchman of the sixteenth century writes to that effect concerning wives, noting also their fondness for dress and ease. He adds: "England is called the paradise of married women. The girls who are not yet married are kept much more