-TRANS.

The peasant being fondest of his own family was driven to despair. It
was a monstrous thing for him to marry a cousin, even in the sixth
degree. It was impossible for him to get married in his own village
where the question of kinship stood so much in his way. He had to look
for a wife elsewhere, afar off. But in those days there was not much
intercourse or acquaintance between different places, and each hated
its own neighbours. On feast days one village would fight another
without knowing the reason why, as may sometimes still be seen in
countries never so thinly peopled. No one durst go seek a wife in the
very spot where men had been fighting together, where he himself would
have been in great danger.

There was another difficulty. The lord of the young serf forbade his
marrying in the next lordship. Becoming the serf of his wife's lord he
would have been wholly lost to his own. Thus he was debarred by the
priest from his cousin, by the lord from a stranger; and so it
happened that many did not marry at all.

The result was just what they pretended to avoid. In the Sabbath the
natural sympathies sprang forth again. There the youth found again her
whom he had known and loved at first, her whose "little husband" he
had been called at ten years old. Preferring her as he certainly did,
he paid but little heed to canonical hindrances.

When we come to know the Mediaeval Family better, we give up believing
the declamatory assumptions of a general mingling together of the
people forming so great a crowd. On the contrary, we feel that each
small group is so closely joined together, as to be utterly barred to
the entrance of a stranger.

The serf was not jealous towards his own kin, but his poverty and
wretchedness made him exceedingly afraid of worsening his lot by
multiplying children whom he could not support. The priest and the
lord on their part wished to increase the number of their
serfs--wanted the woman to be always bearing; and the strangest
sermons were often delivered on this head,[61] varied sometimes with
threats and cruel reproaches. All the more resolute was the prudence
of the man. The woman, poor creature, unable to bear children fit to
live on such conditions, bearing them only to her sorrow, had a horror
of being made big. She never would have ventured to one of these night
festivals without being first assured, again and again, that no woman
ever came away pregnant.[62]

[61] The inge