rally, accepted the
rule laid down in Gratian's _Decretum_, the great mediaeval text-book of
Canon Law, that "the husband may chastise his wife temperately, for she is
of his household," but the wife might chastise her daughters and her
servants, and she sometimes exercised that right in ways that we should
nowadays think scarcely temperate.

If we seek to observe how the system worked some five hundred years ago
when it had not yet become, as it is to-day, both weakened and disguised,
we cannot do better than turn to the _Paston Letters_, the most
instructive documents we possess concerning the domestic life of excellent
yet fairly average people of the upper middle class in England in the
fifteenth century. Marriage was still frankly and fundamentally (as it was
in the following century and less frankly later) a commercial transaction.
The wooer, when he had a wife in view, stated as a matter of course that
he proposed to "deal" in the matter; it was quite recognised on both sides
that love and courtship must depend on whether the "deal" came off
satisfactorily. John Paston approached Sir Thomas Brews, through a third
person, with a view to negotiate a marriage with his daughter Margery. She
was willing, even eager, and while the matter was still uncertain she
wrote him a letter on Valentine's Day, addressing him as "Right reverent
and worshipful and my right well-beloved Valentine," to tell him that it
was impossible for her father to offer a larger dowry than he had already
promised. "If that you could be content with that good, and my poor
person, I would be the merriest maiden on ground." In his first
letter--boldly written, he says, without her knowledge or license--he
addresses her simply as "Mistress," and assures her that "I am and will be
yours and at your commandment in every wise during my life." A few weeks
later, addressing him as "Right worshipful master," she calls him "mine
own sweetheart," and ends up, as she frequently does, "your servant and
bedeswoman." Some months later, a few weeks after marriage, she addresses
her husband in the correct manner of the time as "Right reverent and
worshipful husband," asking him to buy her a gown as she is weary of
wearing her present one, it is so cumbrous. Five years later she refers to
"all" the babies, and writes in haste: "Right reverent and worshipful Sir,
in my most humble wise I recommend me unto you as lowly as I can," etc.,
though she adds in a postscript: