ABSTRACT
Since my earliest youth I have tried to understand the meaning of things and the import of words and propositions. On my coming from Scotland, many things in English life struck me sharply as worthy of note, to which my English sisters’ senses had become dulled through custom and authority. One such appears in the marriage service of the English Church. The man says to the woman, “with all my worldly goods I thee endow.” What does he mean? What do his words mean? Taken singly as parts of speech, the words themselves are clear, incapable even of a double or secondary meaning. In their full verbal sense they ought to mean that everything on marriage becomes the wife’s, and that the husband intends to throw himself on her grace in his own estate. Allowing for exaggeration natural to men in states of high exaltation, in regard to the extent of the word “all,” we might take it as having the natural meaning, “I give thee all I have to use and choose, but you and I being now one, are equally possessors, spenders and inheritors of the estate, heretofore mine only, now devised for the use of us two, whilst the life of either lasts.” Does it mean this? or anything like this? Did it ever mean this? From a careful perusal of old laws, charters and wills, I am inclined to think that in the old marriage service men did endow their wives with their property in this second sense in which I have translated their oath. The husband and wife stood before their property, equal sharers in its rights and enjoyments, half being for the one and half for the other, until a third party appeared, and the children’s share was obtained equally from the share of either parent. One natural distinction came in when death broke the bond. The wife had no power to will away her half or third, because her husband’s grant to her was a personal grant. She had no need to will her share back to him, for at her death it returned to the donor. At his death, however, he might will his half to her 158estate, she retaining her own half, unless there were children, when the division was in thirds. For she held her own at his death, as through his life. This presupposes that all the property originally belonged to the husband. If the wife had the property, she also endowed her husband with it to share when she was alive. If there were children, her husband retained her property at her death, “by the courtesy of England,” that, recognising in him the guardian of his children, and their supporter, left him their inheritance as well as his share for his life only. If there were no children, the devolution on the husband could only work on different lines. He had no power to will away his wife’s inheritance from its rightful heirs. He was no freeholder, but “tenant in courtesy.” In Kent and other places where the old Saxon laws lingered, the half only came to the husband till he married again; as the half of her husband’s property fell to the woman till she married again.
