Woman, Church & State

392

By statute 33 of Henry VIII., C. 8, all witchcraft and sorcery was to be felony without benefit of clergy. This act continued in force till lately to the terror of all ancient females in the kingdom. —Commentaries. As bad as the Georges are depicted, thanks are due to two of them from women. By statute of George II., C. 5, no future prosecution was to be carried on against any person for conjuration, witchcraft, sorcery or enchantment.

393

Towards the end of 1593 there was trouble in the family of the Earl of Orkney. His brother laid a plot to murder him, and was said to have sought the help of a notorious witch called “Allison Balfour.” No evidence could be found connecting her with this particular offense or with witchcraft in general, but it was enough in these matters to be a woman and to be accused. She swore she was innocent, but she was looked upon as a pagan who thus aggravated her guilt. She was tortured again and again, but being innocent she constantly declared her innocence. Her legs were put into the Casctulars – an iron which was gradually heated until it burned into the flesh, but no confession could be wrung from her. The Casctulars having utterly failed to make her tell a lie, “the powers that be,” whom Paul tells us “are of God,” tortured her husband, her son and her daughter, a little child of only seven years. The “powers” knew the tenderness and love of a wife and mother, so they first brought her husband into court and placed him by her side. He was placed in the “long irons,” some accursed instrument. She did not yield. Then her son was tortured; the poor boy’s legs were set in “the boot,” the iron boot, and wedges were driven in, which forced home crushed the very bone and marrow. Fifty-seven mallet strokes were delivered upon the wedges, yet this failed. This innocent tortured heroic woman would not confess to a lie. So last of all her baby daughter was brought in, the fair child of seven short years. There was a machine called the pinniwinkies, a kind of thumb screw which brought blood from under the finger nails with a pain terribly severe. These tortures were applied to the baby hands, and the mother’s fortitude broke down and she would admit any thing they wished. She confessed the witchcraft. So tired she would have confessed the seven deadly sins, but this suffering did not save her to her family. She was burned alive, with her last suffering breath protesting her innocence. This account is perfectly well authenticated and taken from the official report of the proceedings. Froude. —Short Stories on Great Subjects.

394

The same dark superstition shared the civil councils of Scotland as late as the beginning of the 18th century, and the convictions which then took place are chiefly to be ascribed to the ignorance and fanaticism of the clergy.

395

Excommunication was both of temporal and spiritual effect, the person under ban not only being deprived of absolution, extreme unction, consecrated burial, etc., but all persons were forbidden to deal with the recalcitrant. Under the strictest protestantism in Scotland, the clergy held almost entire control. When a woman fell under suspicion of being a witch, the minister denounced her from the pulpit, forbade anyone harboring or sheltering her, and exhorted his parishoners to give evidence against her. To the clergy and Kirk Sessions were the first complaints made. It is scarcely more than 150 years since the last witch was burned in Scotland, having been accused of raising a thunder storm by pulling off her stockings. —Witchcraft Under Protestantism.

396

Many witches lost their lives in every part of England, without being brought to trial at all, from injuries received at the hands of the populace. Mackay. —Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions.

397

One of the most powerful incentives to confession was to systematically deprive the suspected witch of her natural sleep. It was said who but witches can be present and so witness of the doings of witches, since all their meetings and conspiracies are the habits of darkness. “The voluntarie confession of a witch doth exceede all other evidence. How long she has been a witch the devil and she knows best.”

398

Among the Lancashire witches was Old Demedike, four score years old, who had been a witch fifty years, and confessed to possessing a demon which appeared to her in the form of a brown dog. —Summer’s Trials.

399

Ibid.

400

Which examination, although she was but very young, yet it was wonderful to the Court in so great a presence and audience. —Ibid. Ties of the tenderest nature did not restrain the inquisitors. Young girls were regarded as the best witnesses against their mothers, and the oaths of children of irresponsible age were received as evidence against a parent. —Superstition and Force, p. 93.

401

When a reward was publicly offered there seemed to be no end of finding witches, and many kept with great care their note book of “Examination of Witches,” and were discovering “hellish kinds of them.”

402

Salem Witchcraft I, 393-4; 2, 373.

403

I seemed to have stepped back to Puritan time, when an old gentleman said to me. “I am descended from that line of witches; my grandmother and 120 others were under condemnation of death at New Bedford, when an order came from the king prohibiting farther executions.”

404

Salem, Mass., July 30, 1892. – The 200th anniversary of the hanging of Rebecca Nurse of Salem village for witchcraft, was commemorated in Danvers Centre, old Salem village, by the Nurse Monument Association. The distinct feature of the occasion was the dedication of a granite tablet to commemorate the courage of forty men and women, who at the risk of their lives gave written testimony in favor of Rebecca Nurse in 1692.

405

Howes. —Historical Collection of Virginia, p. 438.

406

Collection Massachusetts Historical Society for the year 1800, p. 241.

407

No prosecution, suit or proceedings shall be commenced or carried on in any court of this state against any person for conjuration or witchcraft, sorcery or enchantment or for charging another with such offense.

408

Under the church theory that all members of the witch’s family are tainted, the husband of this unfortunate woman hid himself, fearing the same fate. —Telegram.

409

He bought his bride of her parents according to the custom of antiquity, and she followed the coemption by purchasing with three pieces of copper a just introduction to his treasury and household duties. Gibbon. —Rome, 4; 395.

410

By the law of the Twelve Tables woman possessed the right of repudiation in marriage. These tables were a compilation of still older laws or customs, a species of common law incorporated into statutes by Lachis of Athens, daughter of one Majestes; and were so wise and of such benefit to the people of Attica that the Romans received them as natural laws in which there was more of patriotism and purity than in all the volumes of Popinanus. H.S. Maine. —Ancient Law.

411

After the Punic triumphs the matrons of Rome aspired to the common benefits of a free and opulent republic… They declined the solemnities of the old nuptials; defeated the annual prescription by an absence of three days, and without losing their name or independence subscribed the liberal and definite terms of a marriage contract. Of their private fortunes they commuted the use and secured the property; the estate of a wife could neither be alienated or mortgaged by a prodigal husband. Religious and civil rites were no longer essential, and between persons of similar rank, the apparent community of life was allowed as sufficient evidence of their nuptials… When the Roman matrons became the equal and voluntary companions of their lords, their marriage like other partnerships might be dissolved. Gibbon. —Rome, 4; 347.

412

Uses or Usucapion, was a form of civil marriage securing the wife more freedom than the form which held her “under his thumb” as his daughter. It was as old or even older than the Twelve Tables, and although for many centuries not considered quite as respectable a form of marriage as that in which the wife became the husband’s slave with divorce impossible, it eventually grew to be the customary form of Roman marriage. Maine. —Early History of Ancient Institutions, p. 517.

413

It was with the state of conjugal relations thus produced that the growing Christianity of the Roman world waged a war ever increasing in fierceness, yet it remained to the last the basis of the Roman legal conception of marriage. —Ibid.

414

When the Chremes of Terence reproaches his wife for not obeying his orders and exposing their infant, he speaks like a father and master, and silences the scruples of a foolish woman. Milman. —Note to Gibbons Rome.

415

“‘Usus’ had the very important consequence that the woman so married remained in the eye of the law in the family of her father, and was under his guardianship and not that of her husband. A complete revolution had thus passed over the constitution of the family. This must have been the period when a jurisconsult of the empire defined marriage as a life-long fellowship of all divine and human rights.”

416

Reeves. —Hist. Eng. Law, p. 337.

417

Maine says: No society which preserves any tincture of Christian Institutions is likely to restore to married women the personal liberty conferred on them by middle Roman laws. —Ancient Law.

418

Reeves says, while many great minds, as Lord Chief Justice Hale, Lord John Somers, Henry Spellman, Dr. Brady and Sir Martin Wright think feudalism came in with the conqueror, others, as Coke, Seldon, Bacon and Sir Roger Owen are of opinion that tenures were common among the Saxons. Blackstone, Dalrymple and Sullivan endeavor to compromise the dispute by admitting an imperfect system of feuds to have been instituted before the conquest. —History of English Law, Vol. I., p. 18-19.

419

A certain bishop, wishing a person to take charge of his castle during his absence, the latter asked how he should support himself. For answer the bishop pointed to a procession of tradesmen with their goods then crossing the valley at their feet.

420

Wives were bought in England from the fifth to the eleventh century. Herbert Spencer. —Descriptive Sociology of England.

421

There was another law even more odious than Marquette; the father’s right to the price of mundium, in other words, the price of his daughter. Legouve. —Hist. Morales des Femmes, p. 104.

422

Murder under the name of war, the ruin of women under the name of gallantry, were the chief occupations of the nobility. Pike. —Hist. of Crime in England. The chief qualification for success at courts was the power of making and appreciating mirth. The infidelities of women were commonly the narrator’s theme, and an exhortation to avoid matrimony was the most common form of advice given by a man to his friend. War and intrigue were regarded as the principal amusements of life; the acquisition of wealth the only object worth serious consideration. A consequence of this creed was that the husband frequently set a price upon his wife’s virtue, and made a profit out of his own dishonor. Fathers were ready to sell their daughters. —Ibid.

423

Both married and single found their worst foes in their nearest friends. The traffic in women was none the less real in Christian England than it is now in the slave marts of Stamboul or Constantinople. —Ibid. One of the most recent illustrations of the general regard in which woman is held throughout Christendom, is the experience of the young California heiress, Florence Blythe, who although but fifteen years old, was in constant receipt of proposals of marriage both at home and from abroad. Her attorney, General Hunt, said: “I do not think there is a woman living who has had the number of written proposals that Florence has received, but in all the letters woman is regarded as a chattel, a thing to be bought and sold. The constant receipt of letters of this character, and the equally constant attempt of adventurers to gain a personal interview with the child, at last became unendurable, and to escape such insulting persecution, Florence suddenly married a young man of her acquaintance living near her.” These letters, among them, from sixty titled Europeans, lords, counts, dukes, barons, viscounts, marquises and even one prince, confirm the statement of August Bebel, that marriage sales of women are still as common as in the middle ages, and are expected in most Christian countries.

424

A husband upon his return from the Crusades, finding his wife had been untrue, imprisoned her in a room so small she could neither stand erect nor lie at full length; her only window looking out upon the dead body of her lover swinging in chains.

425

The Shoshone Indian who hires his wife out as a harlot, inflicts capital punishment on her if she goes with another without his knowledge. Bancroft. —Native Races, I; 436.

426

Therefore a single woman for whom no bid was offered, an “old maid” was looked upon with contempt as being of no value in the eyes of men.

427

Hist. of Crime in England, Vol. I, p. 90.

428

By the laws of the king of Wessex, who lived at the end of the VIII century, the purchase of wives is deliberately sanctioned; in the preface it is stated that the compilation was drawn up with the assistance of the Bishop of Winchester and a large assemblage of God’s servants. —Ibid.

429

Nothing, says Pike, was considered but the market value of the woman, and the adulterer was compelled to expend the equivalent of her original price on the purchase of a new bride, whom he formally delivered to the injured husband. Nor were these laws merely secular, they were enacted and enforced by all the dread power of the church. —Ibid.

430

In the 14th century either the female character was utterly dissolute, or the tyranny of husbands utterly reckless, when we find that it was no uncommon circumstance that women were strangled by masked assassins, or walking by the river side were plunged into it. This drowning of women gave rise to a popular proverb: “It is nothing, only a woman being drowned.” And this condition constituted the domestic life of England from the 12th century to the first civil war, when the taste of men for bloodshed found wider scope, and from the murder of women they advanced to the practice of cutting one another’s throats. Disraeli. —Amenities of Literature, Vol. I., p. 95.

431

“And they were so covetous that for a little silver they sellen ’ein daughters, ’ein sisters and ’ein own wives, to putten ’ein to lechery.”

432

The Church from the earliest period furnished its full portion to the codes of our simple forefathers, that of the first Christian king being that for the property of God and the Church (if stolen) twelvefold compensation was to be made. Thorpe. —Ancient Laws and Institutions of England.

433

Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol. XVI., Edinburg, 1872.

434

Until the maiden was wedded she was kept strictly under control, and the kind of discipline which was enforced is well illustrated by a letter written late in the reign of Henry VI. The writer was the widow of a landholder, and she was corresponding with the brother of the young lady whose case she describes and whom she is anxious to serve by finding a husband. This young lady was under the care of her mother and the following was her condition: She might not speak with any man, not even her mother’s servants; and she had since Easter the most part been beaten once in the week, or twice, and sometimes thrice in a day, and her hand was broken in two or three places. Pike. —History of Crime in England.

435

Britton. —Introduction, p. 39. Glanville. —De Legibius Anglica, p. 158.

436

Doubtless in all ages marriages were by far oftener determined by pecuniary considerations than by love or affection, but proofs are wanting to show that marriage was formerly made an object of speculation and exchange in the open market with anything like the same effrontery as today. In our time among the propertied classes – the poor have no need of it – marriage barter is frequently carried on with a shamelessness which makes the phrases about the sacredness of marriage, that some people never tire of repeating, the emptiest mockery. August Bebel. —Woman in the Past, Present and Future.

437

To make women the special objects of this torture, to teach them hardness of heart in the office of executioners, was refinement of atrocity… It was for slaves and women that the greatest atrocities were reserved. —Hist. of Crime in England.

438

Women in England had burned women to death in the 10th century; they had been set on the stool of filth to be mocked as brewers of bad ale in the 11th; on the stool of filth they had been jeered as common scolds from time immemorial; they were legally beaten by their husbands down to a comparatively recent period. In the 14th century they were such as circumstances had made them; strong of muscle but hard of heart, more fit to be mothers of brigands than to rear gentle daughters or honest sons. —Ibid.

439

The elder Disraeli says: “Warton, too, has observed that the style of friendship between males in the reign of Elizabeth would not be tolerated at the present day.” Disraeli himself declares that “a male friend, whose life and fortunes were consecrated to another male, who looks upon him with adoration and talks of him with excessive tenderness, appears to us nothing less than a chimerical and monstrous lover.” —Amenities of Literature, Vol. II., p. 105.

440

Poisoning or otherwise murdering husbands was a crime visited with peculiar severity in almost all codes. Lea. —Superstition and Force.

441

Blackstone says it was to be no thicker than a man’s thumb, thus an instrument of ever varying size. According to palmistry the thumb of a self-willed or obstinate man, a cruel man, or of a murderer, is very large at the upper portion or ball.

442

Petit treason may happen in three ways: By a servant killing his master, a wife her husband, or an ecclesiastical person (either secular or regular) his superior, to whom he owes faith and obedience. The punishment of petit treason in a man is to be drawn and hanged, and in a woman to be drawn and burnt. —Commentaries, Vol. IV., p. 203-4.

443

But in treason of every kind the punishment of women is the same and different from men. For as the decency due to the sex forbids the exposing and publicly mangling their bodies, their sentence is to be drawn (dragged) to the gallows and there be burnt alive. —Ibid, IV., p. 92.

444

The daily press, in its minute record of events, all unwittingly furnishes many a little item, whose primal reason only the student of history can read. The Syracuse, N.Y., “Daily Standard,” of February 22, 1884, published from its exchanges the following incident: “An eccentric old man in New Hampshire surprised his neighbors and friends the other day by shouldering his gun and starting for the woods on the morning of his wife’s funeral. On being urged to come back, he refused saying: “She warn’t no blood relation of mine.”

445

But now by the statute 30, George 3 c. 48, women convicted in all cases of treason shall receive judgment to be drawn to the place of execution, and there to be hanged by the neck till dead. Before this humane statute women were sentenced to be burnt alive for every species of treason. —Commentaries, p. 92.

446

See decision New York Court of Appeals, January, 1892.

ST. PETERSBURG, September 22 – In April last Mrs. Aina Sainio, wife of a professor in the State College at Travasteheuse, Finland, was found guilty of poisoning her husband, and in accordance with the mediaeval law, which is still in force there, she was sentenced to be beheaded, and her body to be affixed to a beacon and burned. It was charged that Mrs. Sainio had been unfaithful to her husband, carrying on a liaison with one of the students at the college. She strenuously denied this, and said her motive in killing her husband was to get the insurance of $2,500 on his life as she was deeply in debt. The case was carried to the Court of Appeals and today a decision was handed down affirming the judgment of the trial court and adding to the punishment. It transpired during the trial that Mrs. Sainio had forged her husband’s name to checks for small sums some time before his death, and for this offense the Court of Appeals ordered that her right hand be cut off. Then she will be decapitated, her body fastened to a stake covered with inflammable material and set on fire.

447

Reported in the London Telegraph.

448

Telegraphic Report from Providence, R.I., September 24, 1892.

449

Mrs. Judge Seney’s trouble. – A deserted wife suing the woman who enticed her husband away from her. TIFFIN, O., February 14 – Judge Dodge gave his decision yesterday in the novel case of the former Mrs. George E. Seney against the present Mrs. George E. Seney. Judge Seney is one of the well known lawyers of Ohio, and author of a “Civil Code” that bears his name. He married his first wife, Mrs. Anna Seney, in 1858, and for fourteen years they lived happily together. At about that time Mrs. Seney and Miss Walker became very intimate friends, and continued to be so until, as is alleged, Mrs. Seney ascertained that Miss Walker was undermining the affections of her husband. A separation between Mr. and Mrs. Seney soon followed, and subsequently the Judge married Miss Walker. Mrs. Seney, therefore, instituted a suit against her successor, claiming damages to the amount of a0,000 for the seduction of her husband. —New York Sun.

450

James Howard, thirty-five years old, was taken from jail at Texarkana, Ark., on Wednesday night by a mob and lynched. He was under arrest for horrible cruelty to his fourteen-year-old wife. The woman says that he frequently tied her feet together while she was in a state of nudity, and hanging her up by the feet beat her unmercifully and threatened to kill her if she told anyone of his cruelties. On the first of November, Howard took a common branding iron, used to brand live stock, and heating it red hot branded a large letter “H” on his wife’s person in two places while she was tied to a bed.