rious degradation of woman, the custom of Borough-English arose,
in which the youngest son became the heir. The original signification
of the word borough being to make secure, the peasant through
Borough-English made secure the right of his own son to what
inheritance he might leave, thus cutting off the claim of the possible
son of his hated lord. France, Germany, Prussia, England, Scotland,
and all Christian countries where feudalism existed, held to the
enforcement of Marquette. The lord deemed this right as fully his as
he did the claim to half the crops of the land, or to the half of the
wool sheared from the sheep. More than one reign of terror arose in
France from the enforcement of this law, and the uprisings of the
peasantry over Europe during the twelfth century, and the fierce
Jacquerie, or Peasant War, of the fourteenth century in France owed
their origin, among other causes, to the enforcement of these claims
by the lords upon the newly-married wife. The Edicts of Marly securing
the Seigneural Tenure in Lower Canada, transplanted that claim to
America when Canada was under the control of France.

To persons not conversant with the history of feudalism, and of the
Church for the first fifteen hundred years of its existence, it will
seem impossible that such foulness could ever have been part of
Christian civilization. That the crimes they have been trained to
consider the worst forms of heathendom could have existed in Christian
Europe, upheld by both Church and State for more than a thousand five
hundred years, will strike most people with incredulity. Such,
however, is the truth; we can but admit well-attested facts of history
how severe a blow soever they strike our preconceived beliefs.

Marquette was claimed by the Lords Spiritual[189] as well as by the
Lords Temporal. The Church, indeed, was the bulwark of this base
feudal claim. With the power of penance and excommunication in its
grasp, this feudal demand could neither have originated nor been
sustained unless sanctioned by the Church.

In Scotland, Margaret, wife of Malcolm Conmore, generally known, from
her goodness, as St. Margaret,[190] exerted her royal influence in
1057, against this degradation of her sex, but despite the royal
prohibition and the substitution of the payment of a merk in money
instead, the custom had such a foothold and appealed so strongly to
man's licentious appetite it still continued, remaining in existence
nearly seve