MARRIAGE FALLACIES

Hokitika Guardian, 5 August 1926, Page 4

MARRIAGE FALLACIES

j (By Arthur S. May). < Let us laugh at our ancestors-! | A husband was formerly liable for i his wife’s debts because ho acquired 1 an absolute interest in her personal property. But if the ground for the rule disappeared..would not the rule go with it? So they married poor women in their shifts, to make it. clear they married them for love alone, taking nothing by the bargain. In 1774 tho ceremony nearly finished a- Yorkshire widow of seventy. ' “The weather being very severe threw her into such a violent fit of shaking as induced the compassionate minister to cover her with his coat, while the marriage was solemnised.”

A marriage of this kind was recorded as late as 1844. There cannot he any now since the Married "Women’s Property Acts.

Divorce used to be unknown. It was not required when a man* might sell his wife, provided he delivered her with a halter found her neck. The cattlemarket was the proper place for her, and in 1859 «■ wife fetched Cel at Dud-

] t was easy enough to .yet hanged, but in New England there was a way of cheating the hangman, if a man cared to take it. He had only to get a woman to marry him under the gal-lows-tree.

To hang or to wed both hath one ! houro, And whether it be, I am well sure, Hangynge is better of the twyne, Sooner done, and shorter payne! It was good law in New Zealand in 1781. We read how a malefactor was to be executed on the gallows in New York, but with the condition that if any woman, having nothing on but her shift, would marry him there, his life should he saved. She agreed, and the marriage took place forthwith. First cousins may marry, so the superstition ran, but second cousins may not. You may find it is Selden’s Table Talk. Wheatly in 1858 notes it

as a vulgar mistake, and Burns’ Ecclesiastical Law sits upon it weightily. , A Roman Emperor forbade the marriage of first cousins, arid the Church was equally severe to second cousins; the Reformation put an end to the canonical rule, lmt the tradition of the civil law is not dead yet. Just seven years ago a man came to Doctors’ Commons to know whether he could marry his second cousin.

"Well, well! Do any of us really understand the Kent Restriction Acts, eleven Lord Birkenhead’s new Law of Property ?