wife, not only for adultery, but even for contradicting
him. Women were not, however, entirely without power, and in a
thirteenth century collection of _Coutumes_, it is set down that
a husband must only beat his wife reasonably, _resnablement_. (As
regards the husband's right to chastise his wife, see also
Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_, vol. i, p. 234. In England it
was not until the reign of Charles II, from which so many modern
movements date, that the husband was deprived of this legal
right.)

In the eyes of a feudal knight, it may be added, the beauty of a
horse competed, often successfully, with the beauty of a woman.
In _Girbers de Metz_, two knights, Garin and his cousin Girbert,
ride by a window at which sits a beautiful girl with the face of
a rose and the white flesh of a lily. "Look, cousin Girbert,
look! By Saint Mary, a beautiful woman!" "Ah," Girbert replies,
"a beautiful beast is my horse!" "I have never seen anything so
charming as that young girl with her fresh color and her dark
eyes," says Garin. "I know no steed to compare with mine,"
retorts Girbert. When the men were thus absorbed in the things
that pertain to war, it is not surprising that amorous advances
were left to young girls to make. "In all the _chansons de
geste_," Gautier remarks, "it is the young girls who make the
advances, often with effrontery," though, he adds, wives are
represented as more virtuous (L. Gautier, _La Chevalerie_, pp.
236-8, 348-50).

In England Pollock and Maitland (_History of English Law_, vol.
ii, p. 437) do not believe that a life-long tutela of women ever
existed as among other Teutonic peoples. "From the Conquest
onwards," Hobhouse states (op. cit., vol. i, p. 224), "the
unmarried English woman, on attaining her majority, becomes
fully equipped with all legal and civil rights, as much a legal
personality as the Babylonian woman had been three thousand years
before." But the developed English law more than made up for any
privileges thus accorded to the unmarried by the inconsistent
manner in which it swathed up the wife in endless folds of
irresponsibility, except when she committed the supreme offence
of injuring her lord and master. The English wife, as Hobhouse
continues (loc. cit.) was, if not her husband's slave, at any
rate his liege subject; if she