Caste and Race in India c10.114

c10.114

The laws of the Anglo-Saxons laid it down that none was to seek in marriage a mate outside one's class, so that if a person of lower status married a woman of a higher class he was to perish.² By the fifteenth century in England this rule of endogamy had almost vanished, so much so that one of the usual methods by which the needy nobles replenished their empty purses was by marrying the daughters or widows of rich merchants. Such marriages went a long way in fusing the upper and the middle classes.³ In France, in the later period of the Roman Empire, the workmen, employed in the manufactures of the State like that of arms, were not allowed to marry their daughters outside their group.⁴ In the eyes of the tribal law the only legal marriage that could take place was between free-born people of equal status. The free woman who married her own slave lost her freedom, and had her property confiscated, and the slave was killed on the wheel. Where a free man married either his slave or a freed woman, neither the wife nor the issue of the union attained the rank of the man.⁵ During the feudal age, however, legitimate children took the status of their father, the principle that gentility came from the father being gradually recognized. If a free woman married a nobleman she attained his status but not so a servile woman.⁶ In Germany "the consequences of equality of birth in private law made themselves felt in the law of family and inheritance. Only an equal born member of the estate had the right of exercising guardianship over minors and women. And only between those equal in birth was there a right of inheritance". Originally members of different status-groups could not contract a legal marriage. A free woman's marriage with a slave meant loss of freedom to the woman or of life to the slave. Under the influence of Christianity the rigour of laws against unequal marriages was much lessened, such unions being regarded as only inferior marriages and the issue as quite legitimate. But the higher status of one of the parties could not be conferred on the other, the issue being naturally relegated to the status of the lower-born. Exceptionally the children of a union, where the wife was a free woman and the husband half-free or unfree, were allowed to inherit the natural freedom of their mother. In the newer grouping of society on the occupational basis "the principle of equal birth was less and less heeded". Only the higher nobility has still clung to it.¹