the Roman jurisprudence is so far triumphant that
unmarried females are generally (though there are local exceptions to
the rule) relieved from the bondage of the family; but the archaic
principle of the barbarians has fixed the position of married women,
and the husband has drawn to himself in his marital character the
powers which had once belonged to his wife's male kindred, the only
difference being that he no longer purchases his privileges. At this
point therefore the modern law of Western and Southern Europe begins
to be distinguished by one of its chief characteristics, the
comparative freedom it allows to unmarried women and widows, the heavy
disabilities it imposes on wives. It was very long before the
subordination entailed on the other sex by marriage was sensibly
diminished. The principal and most powerful solvent of the revived
barbarism of Europe was always the codified jurisprudence of
Justinian, wherever it was studied with that passionate enthusiasm
which it seldom failed to awaken. It covertly but most efficaciously
undermined the customs which it pretended merely to interpret. But the
Chapter of law relating to married women was for the most part read by
the light, not of Roman, but of Canon Law, which in no one particular
departs so widely from the spirit of the secular jurisprudence as in
the view it takes of the relations created by marriage. This was in
part inevitable, since no society which preserves any tincture of
Christian institution is likely to restore to married women the
personal liberty conferred on them by the middle Roman law, but the
proprietary disabilities of married females stand on quite a different
basis from their personal incapacities, and it is by keeping alive and
consolidating the former that the expositors of the Canon Law have
deeply injured civilisation. There are many vestiges of a struggle
between the secular and ecclesiastical principles, but the Canon Law
nearly everywhere prevailed. In some of the French provinces married
women, of a rank below nobility, obtained all the powers of dealing
with property which Roman jurisprudence had allowed, and this local
law has been largely followed by the Code Napoleon; but the state of
the Scottish law shows that scrupulous deference to the doctrines of
the Roman jurisconsults did not always extend to mitigating the
disabilities of wives. The systems however which are least indulgent
to married women are invariably those which h