stem of wife-purchase
prevailed among the Germans, and, whenever that system is influential,
even when the wife is honored her privileges are diminished.[320] Among
the Teutonic peoples generally, as among the early English, marriage was
indeed a private transaction but it took the form of a sale of the bride
by the father, or other legal guardian, to the bridegroom. The _beweddung_
was a real contract of sale.[321] "Sale-marriage" was the most usual form
of marriage. The ring, indeed, probably was not in origin, as some have
supposed, a mark of servitude, but rather a form of bride-price, or
_arrha_, that is to say, earnest money on the contract of marriage and so
the symbol of it.[322] At first a sign of the bride's purchase, it was not
till later that the ring acquired the significance of subjection to the
bridegroom, and that significance, later in the Middle Ages, was further
emphasized by other ceremonies. Thus in England the York and Sarum manuals
in some of their forms direct the bride, after the delivery of the ring,
to fall at her husband's feet, and sometimes to kiss his right foot. In
Russia, also, the bride kissed her husband's feet. At a later period, in
France, this custom was attenuated, and it became customary for the bride
to let the ring fall in front of the altar and then stoop at her husband's
feet to pick it up.[323] Feudalism carried on, and by its military
character exaggerated, these Teutonic influences. A fief was land held on
condition of military service, and the nature of its influence on marriage
is implied in that fact. The woman was given with the fief and her own
will counted for nothing.[324]

The Christian Church in the beginning accepted the forms of marriage
already existing in those countries in which it found itself, the Roman
forms in the lands of Latin tradition and the German forms in Teutonic
lands. It merely demanded (as it also demanded for other civil contracts,
such as an ordinary sale) that they should be hallowed by priestly
benediction. But the marriage was recognized by the Church even in the
absence of such benediction. There was no special religious marriage
service, either in the East or the West, earlier than the sixth century.
It was simply the custom for the married couple, after the secular
ceremonies were completed, to attend the church, listen to the ordinary
service and take the sacrament. A special marriage service was developed
slowly, and it was no part of t