southern and northern, have combined to mould the underlying bony
structure of our family system in such a way that, however it may appear
softened and disguised on the surface, the husband is the head and the
wife subject to him. We must not be supposed hereby to deny that the wife
has had much authority, many privileges, considerable freedom, and in
individual cases much opportunity to domineer, whatever superiority custom
or brute strength may have given the husband. There are henpecked
husbands, it has been remarked, even in aboriginal Australia. It is
necessary to avoid the error of those enthusiasts for the emancipation of
women who, out of their eager faith in the future of women, used to
describe her past as one of scarcely mitigated servitude and hardship. If
women had not constantly succeeded in overcoming or eluding the
difficulties that beset them in the past, it would be foolish to cherish
any faith in their future. It must, moreover, be remembered that the very
constitution of that ecclesiastico-feudal hierarchy which made the husband
supreme over the wife, also made the wife jointly with her husband supreme
over their children and over their servants. The Middle Ages, alike in
England and in France, as doubtless in Christendom generally, accepted the
rule laid down in Gratian's _Decretum_, the great mediæval text-book of
Canon Law, that "the husband may chastise his wife temperately, for she is
of his household," but the wife might chastise her daughters and her
servants, and she sometimes exercised that right in ways that we should
nowadays think scarcely temperate.

If we seek to observe how the system worked some five hundred years ago
when it had not yet become, as it is to-day, both weakened and disguised,
we cannot do better than turn to the _Paston Letters_, the most
instructive documents we possess concerning the domestic life of excellent
yet fairly average people of the upper middle class in England in the
fifteenth century. Marriage was still frankly and fundamentally (as it was