control of her own property and a
half-interest in the things which had been common property. Once
married, divorce was forbidden except in the case of adultery on the
woman's part; and though it is clear to see that this was not equal
justice for both man and wife, yet such was the fact. When infidelity
was proved, the law provided that the wife and her paramour should be
delivered up to the tender mercies of the injured husband, who had the
right to punish them according to his own inclination. He was given the
power of life and death even, under these circumstances, and too often
it is to be feared that the punishment became a bloody revenge
sanctioned by law. Marriage between Jews and Christians had long been
forbidden, as it had been discovered by experience that such a union was
bound to lead to proselyting in one form or another; and the death
penalty was inflicted upon all who were not content to abide by the
statute. Marriage between Goths and Romans had been legalized in 652,
but for many years before that time the two races had been kept apart;
for the Goths, as the ruling race, considered it prejudicial to their
interests to ally themselves in this way with their subjects.

Woman's place in the criminal procedure of the time was unique. It
appears that the punishment inflicted for any given crime depended not
so much upon the importance of the offence as upon the importance of the
criminal, and that almost every injury might be atoned for by the
payment of a certain sum of money, the amount depending upon the rank of
the person making the payment. Such money payments, wherever a woman was
involved, were regulated according to the following scale of values:
from her birth to the age of fifteen, she was valued at only one-half
the price of a man of her own class; from fifteen to twenty, she was
considered of equal value; from twenty to forty, she was rated as worth
one-sixth less than a man; and after forty, at even less than half.
Inasmuch as both men and women were amenable to the same laws with but
this difference in the amount of the penalty in any given case, it would
appear that women were recognized to possess a smaller money-earning
power than the men; and such was undoubtedly the case, in spite of the
fact that both men and women seemed to share alike the various daily
tasks in the earlier and simpler days of Gothic rule in Spain. Such
participation on the part of the women was by no means common amon