divorce, and both men and women were allowed to profit by the laxity of
the laws on this subject. Seneca said, in one instance: "That Roman
woman counts her years, not by the number of consuls, but by the number
of her husbands." Juvenal reports a Roman freedman as saying to his
wife: "Leave the house at once and forever! You blow your nose too
frequently. I desire a wife with a dry nose." When Christianity
appeared, then, the marriage tie was held in slight consideration, and
it was only after many centuries and by slow degrees that its sanctity
was recognized, and its rights respected. While, under the Roman law,
both men and women had been able to get a divorce with the same ease,
the feudal idea, which gave all power into the hands of the men, made
divorce an easy thing for the men alone, but this was hardly an
improvement, as the marriage relation still lacked stability.

It must not be supposed that all the mediæval ideas respecting marriage
and divorce and the condition of women in general, which have just been
explained, had to do with any except those who belonged in some way to
the privileged classes, for such was not the case. At that time, the
great mass of the people in Europe--men and women--were ignorant to the
last degree, possessing little if any sense of delicacy or refinement,
and were utterly uncouth. For the most part, they lived in miserable
hovels, were clothed in a most meagre and scanty way, and were little
better than those beasts of burden which are compelled to do their
master's bidding. Among these people, rights depended quite largely upon
physical strength, and women were generally misused. To the lord of the
manor it was a matter of little importance whether or not the serfs upon
his domain were married in due form or not; marriage as a sacrament had
little to do with these hewers of wood and drawers of water, and they
were allowed to follow their own impulses quite generally, so far as
their relations with each other were concerned. The loose moral