till
alive.[321] The Alemanni and the Bavarians, who were more remote from
Italy and hence from the Church, were influenced more by their own
customs and allowed a pecuniary recompense to take the place of the
harsher enactments.[322]

[Sidenote: Adultery.]

Adultery was not only a legal cause for divorce, but also a grave crime.
All the barbarian peoples are agreed in so regarding it, but their
penalties vary according as they were more or less affected by proximity
to Italy, where the power of the Church was naturally strongest. The
Ripuarians, the Bavarians, and the Alemanni preferred a money fine
ranging from fifty to two hundred _solidi_.[323] Among the Visigoths
the guilty party was usually bound over in servitude to the injured
person to be disposed of as the latter wished.[324] Sometimes the law
was harsher to women than to men; thus, according to a decree of
Liutprand,[325] a husband who told his wife to commit adultery or who
did so himself paid a mulct of fifty _solidi_ to the wife's male
relatives; but if the wife consented to or hid the deed, she was put to
death. The laws all agree that the killing of adulterers taken in the
act could not be regarded as murder.

[Sidenote: The Church indulgent toward kings.]

It is always to be remembered that although the statutes were severe
enough, yet during this period, as indeed throughout all history, they
were defied with impunity. Charlemagne, for example, the most Christian
monarch, had a large number of concubines and divorced a wife who did
not please him; yet his biographer Einhard, pious monk as he was, has no
word of censure for his monarch's irregularities[326]; and policy
prevented the Church from thundering at a king who so valiantly crushed
the heretics, her enemies. Bishop Gregory of Tours tells us without a
hint of being shocked that Clothacharius, King of the Franks, had many
concubines.[327] Concubinage was, in fact, the regular thing.[328] But
neither in that age, nor later in the case of Louis XIV, nor in our own
day in the case of Leopold of Belgium has the Church had a word of
reproach for monarchs who broke with impunity moral laws on which she
claims always to have insisted without compromise.

[Sidenote: Remarriage.]

In accordance with the commands of Scripture neither the divorced man
nor the divorced woman could marry again during the lifetime of the
other party. To do so was to commit adultery, for which the usual
penalties went in