ustine, and Ambrose,
could see no reason why the moral law should not be the same for
the husband as for the wife, but as late Roman feeling both on
the legal and popular side was already approximating to that
view, the influence of Christianity was scarcely required to
attain it. It ultimately received formal sanction in the Roman
Canon Law, which decreed that adultery is equally committed by
either conjugal party in two degrees: (1) _simplex_, of the
married with the unmarried, and (2) _duplex_, of the married with
the married.

It can scarcely be said, however, that Christianity succeeded in
attaining the inclusion of this view of the moral equality of the
sexes into actual practical morality. It was accepted in theory;
it was not followed in practice. W.G. Sumner, discussing this
question (_Folkways_, pp. 359-361), concludes: "Why are these
views not in the _mores?_ Undoubtedly it is because they are
dogmatic in form, invented or imposed by theological authority or
philosophical speculation. They do not grow out of the experience
of life, and cannot be verified by it. The reasons are in
ultimate physiological facts, by virtue of which one is a woman
and the other is a man." There is, however, more to be said on
this point later.

It was probably, however, not so much the Church as Teutonic customs and
the development of the feudal system, with the masculine and military
ideals it fostered, that was chiefly decisive in fixing the inferior
position of women in the mediaeval world. Even the ideas of chivalry, which
have often been supposed to be peculiarly favorable to women, so far as
they affected women seem to have been of little practical significance.

In his great work on chivalry Gautier brings forward much
evidence to show that the feudal spirit, like the military spirit
always and everywhere, on the whole involved at bottom a disdain
for women, even though it occasionally idealized them. "Go into
your painted and gilded rooms," we read in _Renaus de Montauban_,
"sit in the shade, make yourselves comfortable, drink, eat, work
tapestry, dye silk, but remember that you must not occupy
yourselves with our affairs. Our business is to strike with the
steel sword. Silence!" And if the woman insists she is struck on
the face till the blood comes. The husband had a legal right to
beat his