in former days among the Lapps, Finns, and Esthonians. The same practice prevailed among the peoples of the Aryan race. "The forcible abduction of a maiden from her home, while she cries out and weeps, after her kinsmen have been slain or wounded, and their houses broken open," was, according to the laws of Manu,* one of the eight legal forms of marriage.

According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, marriage by capture was at the time customary throughout ancient Greece. The ancient Teutons frequently captured women for wives. The Slavs, in early times, according to Nestor, practised marriage by capture; and in the marriage ceremonies of the Russians and other Slavonian nations, reminiscences of this custom still survive. Indeed, among the South Slavonians, capture de facto was in full force no longer ago than the beginning of the present century. Among the Welsh, on the morning of the wedding day, the bridegroom, accompanied by his friends on horseback, carried off the bride.

It will probably be new to many people that there are traces of marriage by capture yet remaining in country districts in England. It was only in the spring of 1896 that at a wedding in the University Church at Cambridge, none of the bride's people entered the church, and as the wedding party left the * The Laws of Manu, book iii., vv. 33, 26.

building they were met by the bride's friends, who banged inflated paper bags. The absence of the bride's relations from the church is the remnant of a fiction of enmity which is also emphasized by the popping of paper bags. These replaced the firing of guns of an older period, and these, again, replaced the weapons of war which in the dim past of prehistoric times were called into active requisition.

We read in the Folk-lore Journal:* "At Bocking, in Essex, the parents of the bride keep studiously out of the way at the time of the marriage ceremony. I remember the surprise, not to say horror, of an old gardener who was asked why he did not attend his daughter's wedding. Such a thing was never heered of in this here parish,' said he."

The next stage in wife-getting is the giving of compensation to the father, or the group, for the loss of the woman's services. This is very widely distributed even at the present day. The earlier phase which we have just considered may, however, persist to a greater or less extent. I found this transition phase amongst my friends of the Torres Straits. In all of the islands a wife could be obtained by an exchange of girls; a lad would give his sister in exchange for a wife, or an uncle might oblige a nephew and give him a cousin to exchange. In all other cases a

wife had to be paid for according to arrangement,

* Vol. ii., p. 246.

but there was usually a recognized rate of exchange. In some islands there was also a fight, which I was assured was "half-play." In some islands also the young man lived part of the year with his wife's people.

Westermarck has collected numerous analogous cases among the uncivilized races of America, Africa, and Asia, and the Indian Archipelago. The custom of obtaining a wife by services rendered to her father has been familiarized to us by Hebrew tradition.

The most common compensation for a wife is property paid to her owner. Her price varies indefinitely. My friend Maino, the chief of Tud (Warrior Island), told me he paid for his wife a camphor-wood chest from Singapore, a dozen jerseys, some fathoms of calico, a dozen fish-hooks, a pound of tobacco, and he finished off the enumeration with the exclamation of, By golly, she too dear!"

or

There is no need to traverse the globe for examples; a few cases from nearer home will suffice. Westermarck says in all branches of the Semitic race men had to buy or serve for their wives, the "Mohar "Mahr" being originally the same as a purchase sum. In the Books of Rutht and Hosea, ‡ the bridegroom actually says he has bought his bride; and modern Jews, according to Michaelis, have a sham purchase

*

* W. ROBERTSON SMITH, Marriage and Kinship in Early Arabia, 1885, p. 78 el seq. + Hosea iii. 2,

+ Ruth iv. 10.

among their marriage ceremonies, which is called 'Marrying by the penny."*

Among the Finns marriage by purchase exists now, or did so till quite lately. Among the Aryan nations, too, marriage was based on the purchase of the wife. Westermarck gives numerous examples, amongst which we may note that the ancient Scandinavians believed that even the gods had bought their wives. In Germany the expression, "to purchase a wife,” was in use till the end of the Middle Ages. As late as the middle of the sixteenth century the English preserved in their marriage ritual traces of this ancient legal procedure.t

This phase also is illustrated in the common singing game usually called "Knights," or "Lords from Spain." A version from the village of Bocking, in Essex, runs as follows:

""I am a gentleman come from Spain.

I've come to court your daughter Jane.'
"My daughter Jane is yet too young

To understand your flattering tongue.'
"Let her be young, or let her be old,
She must be sold for Spanish gold.

So fare thee well, my lady gay;

I'll call upon you another day.'

* J. D. MICHAELIS, Commentaries on the Laws of Moses (Trans.) 1814, i., p. 451.

+ E. FRIEDBERG, Das Recht der Eheschliessung in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung, Leipzig, 1865, pp. 33, 38.

Folk-lore Record, iii., p. 171.

[To face page 402.