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Note that this entry is a product of its time, and should be read in that context. Footnotes have been omitted to make the text easier to follow. Also note that scanning and editing may have introduced a few errors into the transcription. Because of these errors, if you need to use this information in an academic paper, please consult the original, available at many libraries.

This continues the entry under "Women" in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

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The early law of the northern parts of Europe is interesting from the different ways in which it treated women. In the words of Sir H. Maine ? " The position of women in these barbarous systems of inheritance varies very greatly. Sometimes they inherit, either as individuals or as classes, only when males of the same generation have failed. Sometimes they do not inherit, but transmit a right of inheritance to their male issue. Sometimes they succeed to one kind of property, for the most part movable property, which they probably took a great share in producing by their household labour; for example, in the real Salic law (not in the imaginary code) there is a set of rules of succession which, in my opinion, clearly admit women and their descendants to a share in. the inheritance of movable property, but confine land exclusively to males and the descendants of males. . . . The idea is that the proper mode of providing for a woman is by giving her a marriage portion; but, when she is once married into a separate community consisting of strangers in blood, neither she nor her children are deemed to have any further claim on the parent group." Among the Scandinavian races women were under perpetual tutelage, whether married or unmarried. The first to obtain freedom were the widows. As late as the code of Christian V., at the end of the 17th century, it was enacted that if a woman married without the consent of her tutor he might have, if he wished, administration and usufruct of her goods during her life. The provision made by the Scandinavian laws under the name of morning-gift was perhaps the parent of the modern settled property. The Brehon law of Ireland excepted women from the ordinary course of the law. They could distrain or contract only in certain named cases, and distress upon their property was regulated by special rules. In the pre-Conquest codes in England severe laws were denounced against unchastity, and by a law of Canute a woman was to lose nose and ears for adultery. The laws of Athelstan contained the peculiarly brutal provision for the punishment of a female slave convicted of theft by her being burned alive by eighty other female slaves. Other laws were directed against the practice of witchcraft (q.v.) by women. Monogamy was enforced both by the civil and ecclesiastical law; and second and third marriages involved penance. A glimpse of cruelty in the household is afforded by the provision, occurring no less than three times in the ecclesiastical legislation, that if a woman scourged her female slave to death she must do penance. Traces of wife-purchase are seen in the law of Ethelbert, enacting that if a man carry off a freeman's wife he must at his own expense procure the husband another wife. The codes contain few provisions as to the property of married women, but those few appear to prove that she was in a better position than at a later period, the laws of ire gave her a third of her husband's property; the laws of Edmund as to betrothal allowed this to be increased to half by antenuptial contract, to the whole if she had children and did not re-marry after her husband's death. No doubt the dower ad ostium ecclesiae favoured by the church generally superseded the legal rights where the property was large (in fact this is specially provided by Magna Carta, c. 7). "Provisio hominis tollit provisionem legis." The legal rights of a married woman apart from contract were gradually limited, until by the time of Glanvill her person and property had become during her husband's lifetime entirely at his disposal, and after his death limited to her dower and her pars rationabilis.

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More of this article: General | Mosaic Law, Ancient India | Roman Law | Christian Law  | Northern Europe Law | English Law | Husband and Wife | Criminal Law | Education | Professions | Nursing and Medicine | Government and Politics | Women Practicing Law | Women as Clergy | Women's Rights Agitation | Woman Suffrage | Woman Suffrage 1865-1906 | Woman Suffrage 1906-1910 | Woman Suffrage Societies | Woman Suffrage New Zealand and Australia | Woman Suffrage America | Woman Suffrage Europe | Woman Suffrage International | Sources

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Part of a collection of etexts on women's history produced by Jone Johnson Lewis. Editing and formatting © 1999-2003 Jone Johnson Lewis.