it safe to live outside the
gates. Even the houses of the great were dark, airless, cramped, with
tiny windows and dim, opaque glass; such as one may still see at
Compton Castle in Devonshire or the Chateau des Comtes at Ghent.
Communications moved slowly along unmetalled roads or up and down
rivers. Carriages with two or four horses were occasionally used; but
the ordinary traveller rode on horseback, and needy students coming to
a university walked, clubbing together for a packhorse to carry their
modest baggage. These are features which may still be matched in many
parts of India.

The ravages of plague, the absence of sanitation, the recurrence of
famine and war, all combined in sixteenth-century Europe to produce an
uncertainty in the tenure of life, which modern India knows only too
well from all the causes except the last; but India does not follow
Europe in the resulting practice of frequent remarriage on both sides.
In Erasmus' day a marriage in which neither side had previously or
did subsequently contract a similar relation must have been quite
exceptional. A certain German lady, after one ordinary husband, became
the wife of three leading Reformers in succession, Oecolampadius,
Capito, and Bucer--almost an official position, it would seem. She
survived them all, and when Bucer died at Cambridge in 1551, was able
to return to Basle, to be buried beside Oecolampadius in the
Cathedral. Katherine Parr married four times. To her first husband,
who left her a widow at fifteen, she was a second wife; to her second,
a third wife; to her third, who was Henry VIII, a sixth; and only her
fourth was a bachelor.

The custom of the year's 'doole' after the death of husband or wife
was just at this period breaking down. In 1488 Edward IV declined a
new marriage for his sister, Margaret of York, the new-made widow of
Charles the Bold, on the ground that 'after the usage of our realms no
estate or person honourable communeth of marriage within the year of
their dool'. But Tudor practice was very different. For Mary, Queen of
France, who married her Duke of Suffolk as soon as her six weeks of
white mourning were out, there was some excuse of urgency; Henry, too,
in his rapid marriage with Jane Seymour had special reasons. But
Katherine Parr, when her turn to marry him came, was but a few months
a widow; and later, in being on with her old love, Thomas Seymour,
when her grim master was only just dead, she had no motive beyo