Part 27 (1/2)
The people are betrothed by the practice of the Lutheran Church a long time before the actual marriage. This is considered as nothing more than a wholesome check upon hasty unions in a general point of view. In Norway, however, this probationary period is extended to a limit beyond the endurance of flesh and blood. The wedding is a prodigious merry-making, and it is absolutely indispensable that the means for an extravagant hospitality should have been acc.u.mulated before the parties dare attempt the public ceremony. The profusion is so great as sometimes to dissipate a whole year's earnings. The obligation to this expense increases the delay required by the Church, and it frequently happens that the affianced cohabit before the nuptial benediction is p.r.o.nounced. As the betrothal is a half-marriage, the arrangement loses part of its offensive character in the eyes of the parties themselves, and also of their neighbors. The children are legitimatized by the subsequent marriage, which takes place in by far the largest number of cases. In those occasional instances where the wedding ceremony is not duly completed, there is a particular legal act by which a child can be acknowledged. Failure of marriage under such circ.u.mstances, or failure of natural duty to offspring, is against the sentiment of the people. While these facts do not alter the actual concubinage or illegitimacy, it is easy to understand that a considerable difference exists between such conduct, however reprehensible, and those habits which may be fairly characterized as licentiousness or profligacy.
Norway is very far from being free of syphilis. Bayard Taylor says, ”Bergen is, as I am informed, terribly scourged by venereal diseases.
Certainly I do not remember a place where there are so few men, tall, strong, and well made as the people generally are, without some visible mark of disease or deformity. A physician of the city has recently endeavored to cure syphilis in its secondary stage by means of inoculation, having first tried the experiment upon himself, and there is now a hospital where this form of treatment is practiced upon two or three hundred patients, with the greatest success, another physician informed me. I intended to have visited it, but the sight of a few cases around the door so sickened me that I had no courage to undertake the task.” We have no means of ascertaining whether the malady exists with the same virulence in the interior as on the coast. The habits of the people would seem adverse to the supposition that it does.
CHAPTER XXIII.
GREAT BRITAIN.--HISTORY TO THE TIME OF THE COMMONWEALTH.
Aboriginal Morals and Laws.--Anglo-Saxon Legislation.--Introduction of Christianity.--St. Augustine.--Prost.i.tution in the Ninth Century.-- Court Example.--Norman Epoch.--Feudal Laws and their Influences.-- Civil and Ecclesiastical Courts.--General Depravity.--Effects of Chivalry.--Fair Rosamond.--Jane Sh.o.r.e.--Henry VIII.--Elizabeth.--James I.
The first references to prost.i.tution which we find in the works of the early British annalists are so vague that it is difficult to derive from them any very definite idea as to its extent and character. Among the crude efforts at legislation there are laws to enforce chast.i.ty among women, but whether the necessity for these enactments was owing to general licentiousness or to the existence of a regular cla.s.s of prost.i.tutes does not appear.
At the period of the Roman invasion, the morals of the Britons were as low as might be expected from their nomadic habits. The population was divided into small communities of men and women, who appear to have lived promiscuously, no woman being attached to any particular man, but all cohabiting according to inclination, the carnal instinct being the feeling which regulated s.e.xual intercourse. A sort of marriage was inst.i.tuted, but with no idea that either of the parties to it should be restricted by its obligations. Its only object seemed to be to provide means for rearing the children, and to fix somewhere the responsibility of their nurture and support. A society const.i.tuted as this was can, of course, be considered scarcely a step removed from barbarism. The regulation to provide for the children was necessary to prevent depopulation; its tendency was to remove from the woman's path every obstacle to l.u.s.t; over the man it exercised but very slight control.
A still farther proof of the demoralized condition of the people is found in the gross ceremonies attending these marriages. The man appeared on his wedding day dressed in all the rude trappings of the time; the woman was entirely naked. A repulsive coa.r.s.eness marked their licentiousness, and the rudeness of manners was nowhere more conspicuous than in the relations existing between the s.e.xes.
It is to be presumed that the Anglo-Saxons imported into England the laws and customs prevailing in their own country. The rules they made against adultery were frightfully severe. When a couple were detected in the commission of the offense, the woman was compelled to commit suicide, to avoid the greater tortures awaiting her if she refused. Her body was then placed on a pile of brushwood and consumed. Nor did her partner in guilt escape punishment; he was usually put to death on the spot where her ashes lay collected. These penalties would appear to be sufficiently severe, but in some instances worse were inflicted. Where the case was one of peculiar aggravation, the adulteress was hunted down by a number of infuriate demireps of her own s.e.x, each armed with a club, a knife, or some other formidable weapon, and stabbed or beaten to death. If one party of her pursuers became weary of the sport, another took their places until the victim expired beneath the blows.
These extremely rigid ideas of the Anglo-Saxons do not seem to have been consistent, for while adultery was punished in the severe manner described, incest was not only permitted, but commonly practiced; and it was even the custom for relations to marry within the closest degrees of consanguinity.
But they were not long located in England before the more savage traits of their character were softened down, and the women soon found amus.e.m.e.nt more suitable to their s.e.x than that of chasing their erring sisters as quarry. The marriage ceremonies also a.s.sumed a more refined and decent character, although the wife continued to be regularly purchased by her husband, and the contract was still considered a mere matter of bargain and sale. By the laws of Ethelbert marriageable women were made commodities of barter, and enactments of this character are to be found in existence long subsequent to his reign.
As the Anglo-Saxons were a hardy, vigorous race, and existed chiefly by hunting, fis.h.i.+ng, and a rude and imperfect system of agriculture, it is not probable that prost.i.tution existed among them to any great extent. The fatigues of the chase and field exhausted the energy of the body, and diminished the desire and capacity for s.e.xual indulgence, and, living in small detached communities as they did, they knew nothing of the stimulating incentives of city life.
Yet that prost.i.tutes existed, and lived by the wages of their profession, is proved by the fact that women (who were ent.i.tled by law to hold and dispose of property) bequeathed their wealth to their daughters, with the occasional stipulation that they should live chaste lives in the event of their remaining single, and not earn money by prost.i.tuting their persons.
In the reign of Canute a law was enacted by which any one found guilty of adultery was to be punished by the loss of the nose and the ears.[288] In the course of time the crime came to be punished by a fine paid to the husband of the woman. This penalty soon fell into disrepute, as it was found that some husbands and wives took advantage of it to extort fines from persons possessing more money than prudence. By a subsequent enactment the male adulterer became the property of the king, who might send him to the wars, or employ him at hard labor as he pleased. By a law of Edgar's time the adulterer of either s.e.x was compelled to live, for three days in each week, on bread and water for seven years. This was treating the evil on physiological principles.
We can not infer any very strict condition of morals as the result of this harsh legislation. When punishment is carried to an extreme entirely disproportioned to the offense, it is as likely to fail in its object as mistaken lenity. Forgery and arson were more frequent in England when punished with death than they are at present; and although we have no statistics of the time from which we can deduce any positive conclusions, we may reasonably imagine that neither the death penalty, nor the other barbarous punishments subst.i.tuted for it, exercised any very powerful influence in the diminution of the crime among our hardy progenitors. It may have taught them greater caution and dissimulation in the prosecution of their evil purposes, but it did not render them the less eager to profit by the opportunities thrown in their way.
It has been already shown that the founders of Christianity treated illicit s.e.xual indulgence as a sin, and resorted to extreme measures for its suppression, but yet, to some extent, tolerated prost.i.tution. Shortly after he had established himself in Britain, Augustine put some curious queries to the Pope touching the manner in which chast.i.ty among converts to the new faith should be enforced. The nature of these interrogatories and replies forbids their appearance here.[289]
That Augustine required to be instructed on such prurient details proves that he was a believer in the Jewish observances of physical ablutions and cleansing of the person being necessary to the removal of moral impurities, and that he carried his scrutiny into the morals of his flock much farther than was consistent with modesty and good sense. However much his religious teachings might have improved the manners of the people, the regulations alluded to would have exercised no very salutary or efficacious influence over them.
The lives of the early kings and rulers of Britain serve to ill.u.s.trate the morals of the nation during their respective reigns, not only by exhibiting individual examples where the condition of the ma.s.ses is hidden from view, but by affording us an index to that condition when it is considered that the manners of the court have, in all ages and all countries, exercised an important influence on those of the people.
Augustine converted Ethelbert, but his son Endbald deserted the Christian Church because it refused its sanction to his mother-in-law becoming his wife. It is true that he afterward divorced her, and returned to Christianity, but in this he was influenced rather by satiety than by the promptings of a reviving faith. Many of the other kings of the Heptarchy were as remarkable for the headstrong ardor of their pa.s.sion as Endbald.
Canulph of Wess.e.x had, in the year 784, an intrigue with one of his female subjects, and frequently quitted his court to enjoy her society in the country. During one of these clandestine excursions he was surprised and surrounded in the night by the followers of Kynchard, a rival pretender to the throne, and murdered in the arms of his mistress.
In the ninth century prost.i.tution seems to have been a prevailing vice throughout the country, and frequent references are made to it in the discussions of the period. In the arguments used in favor of t.i.thes, in the time of Athelstan, it was held by some canonists that the clergy had a right to demand one tenth of the profits earned by prost.i.tutes in the exercise of their calling. It is but right to add that the Church did not persist in enforcing this extraordinary claim.[290]
Edwy, who ascended the throne at the early age of seventeen, became involved in a controversy with the monks on the question, then first started, of the celibacy of the clergy. The celebrated Dunstan favored the new doctrine, but Edwy opposed it. The youthful and inexperienced prince was no match for his sagacious antagonist, as he soon after discovered. On the day of his coronation, which took place soon after his marriage with his cousin Elgiva, whom he loved and resolved to wed, though she was within the degrees of consanguinity prohibited by the Church, his n.o.bles were indulging in the pleasures of the banquet, when it was discovered that Edwy had stolen away. Dunstan and Odo, Archbishop of Canterbury, conjecturing the cause of his absence, proceeded to the private apartments of the queen, and found him in her company. They tore him from her, and dragged him back to the party. Elgiva's face was seared with a red-hot iron to destroy her beauty, and she was transported to Ireland. Her wounds being soon healed, and all trace of the injuries removed, she returned to her own country, but was met by a party the archbishop had sent to intercept her, and put to death. Thus, professedly to preserve the morals of the king, these high ecclesiastics committed crimes of far greater gravity than a marriage even between persons more nearly related than Edwy and Elgiva.
Edgar, who succeeded Edwy, was of a still more pa.s.sionate and licentious disposition. He broke into a convent, and carried off one of the nuns, named Editha, who was remarkable for her beauty. In the heat of pa.s.sion, he violated her person; and for the double offense of abduction and rape, the Church, according to the peculiar morality of the times, punished him by compelling him to resign his crown for the period of seven years. By a curious inconsistency, he was permitted to retain possession of Editha, who lived with him as a concubine.
Another of his mistresses he obtained by a less violent process. In pa.s.sing through Andover, he accidentally met the daughter of a neighboring n.o.ble, who fascinated him by her remarkable beauty. Listening only to the suggestion of his pa.s.sion, he proceeded immediately to the residence of the maiden's mother, and, informing her of the violent love with which she had inspired him, demanded that she should be permitted to share his bed that night. The mother, fearing to excite the king's anger by a refusal, resorted to a stratagem, by which she hoped to evade his wrath, and, at the same time, preserve the chast.i.ty of her daughter. She directed a handsome waiting-maid to introduce herself into the young lady's chamber, and the king was admitted after dark. When Edgar discovered the trick which had been played on him, he manifested no resentment, and the accidental partner of his bed became afterward his favorite mistress.
These were not his only amours. Elfrida, daughter of the Earl of Devons.h.i.+re, was distinguished by extraordinary beauty, and the fame of her charms reached the court, although she resided in the country in strict retirement, and had never been a mile from home. Edgar, hearing of her beauty, and doubting whether her appearance justified the extravagant praise lavished on it, sent one of his trusted favorites, Earl Athelwold, to her father's residence to make a report to him on the subject.