Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VI. The Gens and the State in Rome, continued ...
Or assume that the woman married a man from another gens, but herself remained in the gens into which she had been born.
Then, according to the above passage, the man would have had the right to allow his wife to marry outside her own gens.
That is, he would have had the right to make dispositions in the affairs of a gens to which he did not even belong.
The thing is so patently absurd that we need waste no more words on it.
Hence there only remains the assumption that in her first marriage the woman married a man from another gens, and thereby immediately entered the gens of her husband, which Mommsen himself actually admits to have been the practice when the woman married outside her gens.
Then everything at once becomes clear.
Severed from her old gens by her marriage and accepted into the gentile group of her husband, the woman occupies a peculiar position in her new gens.
She is, indeed, a member of the gens, but not related by blood.
By the mere manner of her acceptance as a gentile member, she is entirely excluded from the prohibition against marrying within the gens, for she has just married into it; further, she is accepted as one of the married members of the gens, and on her husband’s death inherits from his property, the property of a gentile member.
What is more natural than that this property should remain within the gens and that she should therefore be obliged to marry a member of her husband’s gens and nobody else?
And if an exception is to be made, who is so competent to give her the necessary authorization as the man who has bequeathed her this property, her first husband?
At the moment when he bequeaths to her a part of his property and at the same time allows her to transfer it into another gens through marriage or in consequence of marriage, this property still belongs to him and he is therefore literally disposing of his own property.
As regards the woman herself and her relation to her husband's gens, it was he who brought her into the gens by a free act of will - the marriage; hence it also seems natural that he should be the proper person to authorize her to leave this gens by a second marriage.
In a word, the matter appears simple and natural as soon as we abandon the extraordinary conception of the endogamous Roman gens and regard it, with Morgan, as originally exogamous.
There still remains one last assumption which has also found adherents, and probably the most numerous.
On this view, the passage only means that “freed servants (liberty) could not without special permission e gente enubere (marry out of the gens) or perform any of the acts, which, involving loss of rights (capitis deminutio minima), would have resulted in the liberta leaving the gens.” (Lange, Römische Altertumer, Berlin 1856, I, 195, where Huschke is cited in connection with our passage from Livy.)
If this supposition is correct, the passage then proves nothing at all about the position of free Roman women, and there can be even less question of any obligation resting on them to marry within the gens.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VI. The Gens and the State in Rome, continued ...
The expression enuptio gentis only occurs in this one passage and nowhere else in the whole of Latin literature; the word enubere, to marry outside, only occurs three times, also in Livy, and then not in reference to the gens.
The fantastic notion that Roman women were only allowed to marry within their gens owes its existence solely to this one passage.
But it cannot possibly be maintained.
For either the passage refers to special restrictions for freedwomen, in which case it proves nothing about free women (ingenue,); or it applies also to free women; and then it proves, on the contrary, that the woman married as a rule outside her gens, but on her marriage entered into the gens of her husband; which contradicts Mommsen and supports Morgan.
Almost three centuries after the foundation of Rome, the gentile groups were still so strong that a patrician gens, that of the Fabii, was able to undertake an independent campaign, with the permission of the senate, against the neighboring town of Veii; three hundred and six Fabii are said to have set out and to have been killed to a man, in an ambush; according to the story, only one boy who had remained behind survived to propagate the gens.
As we have said, ten gentes formed a phratry, which among the Romans was called a curia and had more important public functions than the Greek phratry.
Every curia had its own religious rites, shrines and priests; the latter, as a body, formed one of the Roman priestly colleges.
Ten curiae formed a tribe, which probably, like the rest of the Latin tribes, originally had an elected president-military leader and high priest.
The three tribes together formed the Roman people, the Populus Romanus.
Thus no one could belong to the Roman people unless he was a member of a gens and through it of a curia and a tribe.
The first constitution of the Roman people was as follows: Public affairs were managed in the first instance by the senate, which, as Niebuhr first rightly saw, was composed of the presidents of the three hundred gentes; it was because they were the elders of the gens that they were called fathers, patres, and their body, the senate (council of the elders, from senex, old).
Here again the custom of electing always from the same family in the gens brought into being the first hereditary nobility; these families called themselves “patricians,” and claimed for themselves exclusive right of entry into the senate and tenure of all other offices.
The acquiescence of the people in this claim, in course of time, and its transformation into an actual right, appear in legend as the story that Romulus conferred the patriciate and its privileges on the first senators and their descendants.
The senate, like the Athenian boule, made final decisions in many matters and held preparatory discussions on those of greater importance, particularly new laws.
With regard to these, the decision rested with the assembly of the people, called the comitia curiata (assembly of the curiae).
The people assembled together, grouped in curiae, each curia probably grouped in gentes; each of the thirty curiae, had one vote in the final decision.
The assembly of the curiae accepted or rejected all laws, elected all higher officials, including the rex (so-called king), declared war (the senate, however, concluded peace), and, as supreme court, decided, on the appeal of the parties concerned, all cases involving death sentence on a Roman citizen.
Lastly, besides the senate and the assembly of the people, there was the rex, who corresponded exactly to the Greek basileus and was not at all the almost absolute king which Mommsen made him out to be. [2]
He also was military leader, high priest, and president of certain courts.
He had no civil authority whatever, nor any power over the life, liberty, or property of citizens, except such as derived from his disciplinary powers as military leader or his executive powers as president of a court.
The office of rex was not hereditary; on the contrary, he was first elected by the assembly of the curiae, probably on the nomination of his predecessor, and then at a second meeting solemnly installed in office.
That he could also be deposed is shown by the fate of Tarquinius Superbus.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VI. The Gens and the State in Rome, continued ...
The expression enuptio gentis only occurs in this one passage and nowhere else in the whole of Latin literature; the word enubere, to marry outside, only occurs three times, also in Livy, and then not in reference to the gens.
The fantastic notion that Roman women were only allowed to marry within their gens owes its existence solely to this one passage.
But it cannot possibly be maintained.
For either the passage refers to special restrictions for freedwomen, in which case it proves nothing about free women (ingenue,); or it applies also to free women; and then it proves, on the contrary, that the woman married as a rule outside her gens, but on her marriage entered into the gens of her husband; which contradicts Mommsen and supports Morgan.
Almost three centuries after the foundation of Rome, the gentile groups were still so strong that a patrician gens, that of the Fabii, was able to undertake an independent campaign, with the permission of the senate, against the neighboring town of Veii; three hundred and six Fabii are said to have set out and to have been killed to a man, in an ambush; according to the story, only one boy who had remained behind survived to propagate the gens.
As we have said, ten gentes formed a phratry, which among the Romans was called a curia and had more important public functions than the Greek phratry.
Every curia had its own religious rites, shrines and priests; the latter, as a body, formed one of the Roman priestly colleges.
Ten curiae formed a tribe, which probably, like the rest of the Latin tribes, originally had an elected president-military leader and high priest.
The three tribes together formed the Roman people, the Populus Romanus.
Thus no one could belong to the Roman people unless he was a member of a gens and through it of a curia and a tribe.
The first constitution of the Roman people was as follows: Public affairs were managed in the first instance by the senate, which, as Niebuhr first rightly saw, was composed of the presidents of the three hundred gentes; it was because they were the elders of the gens that they were called fathers, patres, and their body, the senate (council of the elders, from senex, old).
Here again the custom of electing always from the same family in the gens brought into being the first hereditary nobility; these families called themselves “patricians,” and claimed for themselves exclusive right of entry into the senate and tenure of all other offices.
The acquiescence of the people in this claim, in course of time, and its transformation into an actual right, appear in legend as the story that Romulus conferred the patriciate and its privileges on the first senators and their descendants.
The senate, like the Athenian boule, made final decisions in many matters and held preparatory discussions on those of greater importance, particularly new laws.
With regard to these, the decision rested with the assembly of the people, called the comitia curiata (assembly of the curiae).
The people assembled together, grouped in curiae, each curia probably grouped in gentes; each of the thirty curiae, had one vote in the final decision.
The assembly of the curiae accepted or rejected all laws, elected all higher officials, including the rex (so-called king), declared war (the senate, however, concluded peace), and, as supreme court, decided, on the appeal of the parties concerned, all cases involving death sentence on a Roman citizen.
Lastly, besides the senate and the assembly of the people, there was the rex, who corresponded exactly to the Greek basileus and was not at all the almost absolute king which Mommsen made him out to be. [2]
He also was military leader, high priest, and president of certain courts.
He had no civil authority whatever, nor any power over the life, liberty, or property of citizens, except such as derived from his disciplinary powers as military leader or his executive powers as president of a court.
The office of rex was not hereditary; on the contrary, he was first elected by the assembly of the curiae, probably on the nomination of his predecessor, and then at a second meeting solemnly installed in office.
That he could also be deposed is shown by the fate of Tarquinius Superbus.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VI. The Gens and the State in Rome, continued ...
Like the Greeks of the heroic age, the Romans in the age of the so-called kings lived in a military democracy founded on gentes, phratries, and tribes and developed out of them.
Even if the curiae and tribes were to a certain extent artificial groups, they were formed after the genuine, primitive models of the society out of which they had arisen and by which they were still surrounded on all sides.
Even if the primitive patrician nobility had already gained ground, even if the reges were endeavoring gradually to extend their power, it does not change the original, fundamental character of the constitution, and that alone matters.
Meanwhile, Rome and the Roman territory, which had been enlarged by conquest, increased in population, partly through immigration, partly through the addition of inhabitants of the subjugated, chiefly Latin, districts.
All these new citizens of the state (we leave aside the question of the clients) stood outside the old gentes, curiae, and tribes, and therefore formed no part of the populus Romanus, the real Roman people.
They were personally free, could own property in land, and had to pay taxes and do military service.
But they could not hold any office, nor take part in the assembly of the curiae, nor share in the allotment of conquered state lands.
They formed the class that was excluded from all public rights, the plebs.
Owing to their continually increasing numbers, their military training and their possession of arms, they became a powerful threat to the old populus, which now rigidly barred any addition to its own ranks from outside.
Further, landed property seems to have been fairly equally divided between populus and plebs, while the commercial and industrial wealth, though not as yet much developed, was probably for the most part in the hands of the plebs.
The great obscurity which envelops the completely legendary primitive history of Rome - an obscurity considerably deepened by the rationalistically pragmatical interpretations and accounts given of the subject by later authors with legalistic minds - makes it impossible to say anything definite about the time, course, or occasion of the revolution which made an end of the old gentile constitution.
All that is certain is that its cause lay in the struggles between plebs and populus.
The new constitution, which was attributed to the rex Servius Tullius and followed the Greek model, particularly that of Solon, created a new assembly of the people, in which populus and plebeian without distinction were included or excluded according to whether they performed military service or not.
The whole male population liable to bear arms was divided on a property basis into six classes.
The lower limit in each of the five classes was: (1) 100,000 asses; (2) 75,000 asses; (3) 50,000 asses; (4) 25,000 asses; (5) 11,000 asses; according to Dureau de la Malle, the equivalent to about 14,000; 10,500; 7,000; 3,600; and 1,570 marks respectively.
The sixth class, the proletarians, consisted of those with less property than the lower class and those exempt from military service and taxes.
In the new popular assembly of the centuries (comitia centuriata) the citizens appeared in military formation, arranged by companies in their centuries of a hundred men, each century having one vote.
Now the first class put eighty centuries in the field, the second twenty-two, the third twenty, the fourth twenty-two, the fifth thirty, and the sixth also on century for the sake of appearances.
In addition, there was the cavalry, drawn from the wealthiest men, with eighteen centuries; total, 193; ninety-seven votes were thus required for a clear majority.
But the cavalry and the first class alone had together ninety-eight votes, and therefore the majority; if they were agreed, they did not ask the others; they made their decision, and it stood.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VI. The Gens and the State in Rome, continued ...
Like the Greeks of the heroic age, the Romans in the age of the so-called kings lived in a military democracy founded on gentes, phratries, and tribes and developed out of them.
Even if the curiae and tribes were to a certain extent artificial groups, they were formed after the genuine, primitive models of the society out of which they had arisen and by which they were still surrounded on all sides.
Even if the primitive patrician nobility had already gained ground, even if the reges were endeavoring gradually to extend their power, it does not change the original, fundamental character of the constitution, and that alone matters.
Meanwhile, Rome and the Roman territory, which had been enlarged by conquest, increased in population, partly through immigration, partly through the addition of inhabitants of the subjugated, chiefly Latin, districts.
All these new citizens of the state (we leave aside the question of the clients) stood outside the old gentes, curiae, and tribes, and therefore formed no part of the populus Romanus, the real Roman people.
They were personally free, could own property in land, and had to pay taxes and do military service.
But they could not hold any office, nor take part in the assembly of the curiae, nor share in the allotment of conquered state lands.
They formed the class that was excluded from all public rights, the plebs.
Owing to their continually increasing numbers, their military training and their possession of arms, they became a powerful threat to the old populus, which now rigidly barred any addition to its own ranks from outside.
Further, landed property seems to have been fairly equally divided between populus and plebs, while the commercial and industrial wealth, though not as yet much developed, was probably for the most part in the hands of the plebs.
The great obscurity which envelops the completely legendary primitive history of Rome - an obscurity considerably deepened by the rationalistically pragmatical interpretations and accounts given of the subject by later authors with legalistic minds - makes it impossible to say anything definite about the time, course, or occasion of the revolution which made an end of the old gentile constitution.
All that is certain is that its cause lay in the struggles between plebs and populus.
The new constitution, which was attributed to the rex Servius Tullius and followed the Greek model, particularly that of Solon, created a new assembly of the people, in which populus and plebeian without distinction were included or excluded according to whether they performed military service or not.
The whole male population liable to bear arms was divided on a property basis into six classes.
The lower limit in each of the five classes was: (1) 100,000 asses; (2) 75,000 asses; (3) 50,000 asses; (4) 25,000 asses; (5) 11,000 asses; according to Dureau de la Malle, the equivalent to about 14,000; 10,500; 7,000; 3,600; and 1,570 marks respectively.
The sixth class, the proletarians, consisted of those with less property than the lower class and those exempt from military service and taxes.
In the new popular assembly of the centuries (comitia centuriata) the citizens appeared in military formation, arranged by companies in their centuries of a hundred men, each century having one vote.
Now the first class put eighty centuries in the field, the second twenty-two, the third twenty, the fourth twenty-two, the fifth thirty, and the sixth also on century for the sake of appearances.
In addition, there was the cavalry, drawn from the wealthiest men, with eighteen centuries; total, 193; ninety-seven votes were thus required for a clear majority.
But the cavalry and the first class alone had together ninety-eight votes, and therefore the majority; if they were agreed, they did not ask the others; they made their decision, and it stood.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VI. The Gens and the State in Rome, concluded ...
This new assembly of the centuries now took over all political rights of the former assembly of the curiae, with the exception of a few nominal privileges.
The curiae and the gentes of which they were composed were thus degraded, as in Athens, to mere private and religious associations and continued to vegetate as such for a long period while the assembly of the curiae soon became completely dormant.
In order that the three old tribes of kinship should also be excluded from the state, four local tribes were instituted, each of which inhabited one quarter of the city and possessed a number of political rights.
Thus in Rome also, even before the abolition of the so-called monarchy, the old order of society based on personal ties of blood was destroyed and in its place was set up a new and complete state constitution based on territorial division and difference of wealth.
Here the public power consisted of the body of citizens liable to military service, in opposition not only to the slaves, but also to those excluded from service in the army and from possession of arms, the so-called proletarians.
The banishment of the last rex, Tarquinius Superbus, who usurped real monarchic power, and the replacement of the office of rex by two military leaders (consuls) with equal powers (as among the Iroquois) was simply a further development of this new constitution.
Within this new constitution, the whole history of the Roman Republic runs its course, with all the struggles between patricians and plebeians for admission to office and share in the state lands, and the final merging of the patrician nobility in the new class of the great land and money owners, who, gradually swallowing up all the land of the peasants ruined by military service, employed slave labor to cultivate the enormous estates thus formed, depopulated Italy and so threw open the door, not only to the emperors, but also to their successors, the German barbarians.
Footnotes
[1] As gentes is here the Latin word used by the Romans, it is printed in italics to distinguish it from the general term "gens" used throughout the book - Ed.
[2] The Latin rex is the same as the Celtic-Irish righ (tribal chief) and the Gothic reiks; that reiks signified head of the gens or tribe, as did also originally the German word Furst (meaning "first" – cf. English first and Danish forste), is shown by the fact that already in the fourth century the Goths had a special word for the later "king," the military leader of the whole people: thiudans. In Ulfilas’ translation of the Bible, Artaxerxes and Herod are never called reiks, but thiudans, and the empire of the Emperor Tiberius is not called reiki, but thiudinassus. In the name of the Gothic thiodans or, as we inaccurately translate, "king," Thiudareik (Theodorich, i.e. Dietrich), both titles coalesce.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VI. The Gens and the State in Rome, concluded ...
This new assembly of the centuries now took over all political rights of the former assembly of the curiae, with the exception of a few nominal privileges.
The curiae and the gentes of which they were composed were thus degraded, as in Athens, to mere private and religious associations and continued to vegetate as such for a long period while the assembly of the curiae soon became completely dormant.
In order that the three old tribes of kinship should also be excluded from the state, four local tribes were instituted, each of which inhabited one quarter of the city and possessed a number of political rights.
Thus in Rome also, even before the abolition of the so-called monarchy, the old order of society based on personal ties of blood was destroyed and in its place was set up a new and complete state constitution based on territorial division and difference of wealth.
Here the public power consisted of the body of citizens liable to military service, in opposition not only to the slaves, but also to those excluded from service in the army and from possession of arms, the so-called proletarians.
The banishment of the last rex, Tarquinius Superbus, who usurped real monarchic power, and the replacement of the office of rex by two military leaders (consuls) with equal powers (as among the Iroquois) was simply a further development of this new constitution.
Within this new constitution, the whole history of the Roman Republic runs its course, with all the struggles between patricians and plebeians for admission to office and share in the state lands, and the final merging of the patrician nobility in the new class of the great land and money owners, who, gradually swallowing up all the land of the peasants ruined by military service, employed slave labor to cultivate the enormous estates thus formed, depopulated Italy and so threw open the door, not only to the emperors, but also to their successors, the German barbarians.
Footnotes
[1] As gentes is here the Latin word used by the Romans, it is printed in italics to distinguish it from the general term "gens" used throughout the book - Ed.
[2] The Latin rex is the same as the Celtic-Irish righ (tribal chief) and the Gothic reiks; that reiks signified head of the gens or tribe, as did also originally the German word Furst (meaning "first" – cf. English first and Danish forste), is shown by the fact that already in the fourth century the Goths had a special word for the later "king," the military leader of the whole people: thiudans. In Ulfilas’ translation of the Bible, Artaxerxes and Herod are never called reiks, but thiudans, and the empire of the Emperor Tiberius is not called reiki, but thiudinassus. In the name of the Gothic thiodans or, as we inaccurately translate, "king," Thiudareik (Theodorich, i.e. Dietrich), both titles coalesce.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans
Space does not allow us to consider the gentile institutions still existing in greater or lesser degree of purity among the most various savage and barbarian peoples, nor the traces of these institutions in the ancient history of the civilized peoples of Asia.
The institutions or their traces are found everywhere.
A few examples will be enough.
Before the gens had been recognized, the man who took the greatest pains to misunderstand it, McLennan himself, proved its existence, and in the main accurately described it, among the Kalmucks, Circassians, Samoyeds and three Indian peoples: the Warali, Magars and Munniporees.
Recently it has been discovered and described by M. Kovalevsky among the Pshavs, Shevsurs, Svanets and other Caucasian tribes.
Here we will only give some short notes on the occurrence of the gens among Celts and Germans.
The oldest Celtic laws which have been preserved show the gens still fully alive: in Ireland, after being forcibly broken up by the English, it still lives today in the consciousness of the people, as an instinct at any rate; in Scotland it was still in full strength in the middle of the eighteenth century, and here again it succumbed only to the weapons, laws, and courts of the English.
The old Welsh laws, which were recorded in writing several centuries before the English conquest, at the latest in the eleventh century, still show common tillage of the soil by whole villages, even if only as an exceptional relic of a once general custom; each family had five acres for its own cultivation; a piece of land was cultivated collectively as well and the yield shared.
In view of the analogy of Ireland and Scotland, it cannot be doubted that these village communities represent gentes or subdivisions of gentes, even though further examination of the Welsh laws, which I cannot undertake for lack of time (my notes date from 1869), should not provide direct proof.
But what is directly proved by the Welsh sources and by the Irish is that among the Celts in the eleventh century pairing marriage had not by any means been displaced by monogamy.
In Wales a marriage only became indissoluble, or rather it only ceased to be terminable by notification, after seven years had elapsed.
If the time was short of seven years by only three nights, husband and wife could separate.
They then shared out their property between them; the woman divided and the man chose.
The furniture was divided according to fixed and very humorous rules.
If it was the man who dissolved the marriage, he had to give the woman back her dowry and some other things; if it was the woman, she received less.
Of the children the man took two and the woman one, the middle child.
If after the separation the woman took another husband and the first husband came to fetch her back again, she had to follow him even if she had already one foot in her new marriage bed.
If, on the other hand, the man and woman had been together for seven years, they were husband and wife, even without any previous formal marriage.
Chastity of girls before marriage was not at all strictly observed, nor was it demanded; the provisions in this respect are of an extremely frivolous character and not at all in keeping with bourgeois morality.
If a woman committed adultery, the husband had the right to beat her (this was one of the three occasions when he was allowed to do so; otherwise he was punished), but not then to demand any other satisfaction, since “for the one offense there shall be either atonement or vengeance, but not both.”
The grounds on which the wife could demand divorce without losing any of her claims in the subsequent settlement were very comprehensive; if the husband had bad breath, it was enough.
The money which had to be paid to the chief of the tribe or king to buy off his right of the first night (gobr merch, whence the medieval name, marcheta; French Marquette), plays a large part in the code of laws.
The women had the right to vote in the assemblies of the people.
When we add that the evidence shows similar conditions in Ireland; that there, also, temporary marriages were quite usual and that at the separation very favorable and exactly defined conditions were assured to the woman, including even compensation for her domestic services; that in Ireland there was a “first wife” as well as other wives, and that in the division of an inheritance no distinction was made between children born in wedlock or outside it -- we then have a picture of pairing marriage in comparison with which the form of marriage observed in North America appears strict.
This is not surprising in the eleventh century among a people who even so late as Caesar’s time were still living in group marriage.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans
Space does not allow us to consider the gentile institutions still existing in greater or lesser degree of purity among the most various savage and barbarian peoples, nor the traces of these institutions in the ancient history of the civilized peoples of Asia.
The institutions or their traces are found everywhere.
A few examples will be enough.
Before the gens had been recognized, the man who took the greatest pains to misunderstand it, McLennan himself, proved its existence, and in the main accurately described it, among the Kalmucks, Circassians, Samoyeds and three Indian peoples: the Warali, Magars and Munniporees.
Recently it has been discovered and described by M. Kovalevsky among the Pshavs, Shevsurs, Svanets and other Caucasian tribes.
Here we will only give some short notes on the occurrence of the gens among Celts and Germans.
The oldest Celtic laws which have been preserved show the gens still fully alive: in Ireland, after being forcibly broken up by the English, it still lives today in the consciousness of the people, as an instinct at any rate; in Scotland it was still in full strength in the middle of the eighteenth century, and here again it succumbed only to the weapons, laws, and courts of the English.
The old Welsh laws, which were recorded in writing several centuries before the English conquest, at the latest in the eleventh century, still show common tillage of the soil by whole villages, even if only as an exceptional relic of a once general custom; each family had five acres for its own cultivation; a piece of land was cultivated collectively as well and the yield shared.
In view of the analogy of Ireland and Scotland, it cannot be doubted that these village communities represent gentes or subdivisions of gentes, even though further examination of the Welsh laws, which I cannot undertake for lack of time (my notes date from 1869), should not provide direct proof.
But what is directly proved by the Welsh sources and by the Irish is that among the Celts in the eleventh century pairing marriage had not by any means been displaced by monogamy.
In Wales a marriage only became indissoluble, or rather it only ceased to be terminable by notification, after seven years had elapsed.
If the time was short of seven years by only three nights, husband and wife could separate.
They then shared out their property between them; the woman divided and the man chose.
The furniture was divided according to fixed and very humorous rules.
If it was the man who dissolved the marriage, he had to give the woman back her dowry and some other things; if it was the woman, she received less.
Of the children the man took two and the woman one, the middle child.
If after the separation the woman took another husband and the first husband came to fetch her back again, she had to follow him even if she had already one foot in her new marriage bed.
If, on the other hand, the man and woman had been together for seven years, they were husband and wife, even without any previous formal marriage.
Chastity of girls before marriage was not at all strictly observed, nor was it demanded; the provisions in this respect are of an extremely frivolous character and not at all in keeping with bourgeois morality.
If a woman committed adultery, the husband had the right to beat her (this was one of the three occasions when he was allowed to do so; otherwise he was punished), but not then to demand any other satisfaction, since “for the one offense there shall be either atonement or vengeance, but not both.”
The grounds on which the wife could demand divorce without losing any of her claims in the subsequent settlement were very comprehensive; if the husband had bad breath, it was enough.
The money which had to be paid to the chief of the tribe or king to buy off his right of the first night (gobr merch, whence the medieval name, marcheta; French Marquette), plays a large part in the code of laws.
The women had the right to vote in the assemblies of the people.
When we add that the evidence shows similar conditions in Ireland; that there, also, temporary marriages were quite usual and that at the separation very favorable and exactly defined conditions were assured to the woman, including even compensation for her domestic services; that in Ireland there was a “first wife” as well as other wives, and that in the division of an inheritance no distinction was made between children born in wedlock or outside it -- we then have a picture of pairing marriage in comparison with which the form of marriage observed in North America appears strict.
This is not surprising in the eleventh century among a people who even so late as Caesar’s time were still living in group marriage.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans, continued ...
The existence of the Irish gens (sept; the tribe was called clann, clan) is confirmed and described not only by the old legal codes, but also by the English jurists of the seventeenth century who were sent over to transform the clan lands into domains of the English crown.
Until then, the land had been the common property of the clan or gens, in so far as the chieftains had not already converted it into their private domains.
When a member of the gens died and a household consequently came to an end, the gentile chief (the English jurists called him caput cognationis) made a new division of the whole territory among the remaining households.
This must have been done, broadly speaking, according to the rules in force in Germany.
Forty or fifty years ago village fields were very numerous, and even today a few of these rundales, as they are called, may still be found.
The peasants of a rundale, now individual tenants on the soil that had been the common property of the gens till it was seized by the English conquerors, pay rent for their respective piece of land, but put all their shares in arable and meadowland together, which they then divide according to position and quality into Gewanne, as they are called on the Moselle, each receiving a share in each Gewann; moorland and pasture-land are used in common.
Only fifty years ago new divisions were still made from time to time, sometimes annually.
The field-map of such a village looks exactly like that of a German Gehöferschaft [peasant community] on the Moselle or in the Mittelwald.
The gens also lives on in the “factions.”
The Irish peasants often divide themselves into parties based apparently on perfectly absurd or meaningless distinctions; to the English they are quite incomprehensible and seem to have no other purpose than the favorite ceremony of two factions hammering one another.
They are artificial revivals, modern substitutes for the dispersed gentes, manifesting in their own peculiar manner the persistence of the inherited gentile instinct.
In some districts the members of the gens still live pretty much together on the old territory; in the ’thirties the great majority of the inhabitants of County Monaghan still had only four family names, that is, they were descended from four gentes or clans. [1]
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans, continued ...
The existence of the Irish gens (sept; the tribe was called clann, clan) is confirmed and described not only by the old legal codes, but also by the English jurists of the seventeenth century who were sent over to transform the clan lands into domains of the English crown.
Until then, the land had been the common property of the clan or gens, in so far as the chieftains had not already converted it into their private domains.
When a member of the gens died and a household consequently came to an end, the gentile chief (the English jurists called him caput cognationis) made a new division of the whole territory among the remaining households.
This must have been done, broadly speaking, according to the rules in force in Germany.
Forty or fifty years ago village fields were very numerous, and even today a few of these rundales, as they are called, may still be found.
The peasants of a rundale, now individual tenants on the soil that had been the common property of the gens till it was seized by the English conquerors, pay rent for their respective piece of land, but put all their shares in arable and meadowland together, which they then divide according to position and quality into Gewanne, as they are called on the Moselle, each receiving a share in each Gewann; moorland and pasture-land are used in common.
Only fifty years ago new divisions were still made from time to time, sometimes annually.
The field-map of such a village looks exactly like that of a German Gehöferschaft [peasant community] on the Moselle or in the Mittelwald.
The gens also lives on in the “factions.”
The Irish peasants often divide themselves into parties based apparently on perfectly absurd or meaningless distinctions; to the English they are quite incomprehensible and seem to have no other purpose than the favorite ceremony of two factions hammering one another.
They are artificial revivals, modern substitutes for the dispersed gentes, manifesting in their own peculiar manner the persistence of the inherited gentile instinct.
In some districts the members of the gens still live pretty much together on the old territory; in the ’thirties the great majority of the inhabitants of County Monaghan still had only four family names, that is, they were descended from four gentes or clans. [1]
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans, continued ...
In Scotland the decay of the gentile organization dates from the suppression of the rising of 1745.
The precise function of the Scottish clan in this organization still awaits investigation; but that the clan is a gentile body is beyond doubt.
In Walter Scott's novels the Highland clan lives before our eyes.
It is, says Morgan:
"... an excellent type of the gens in organization and in spirit, and an extraordinary illustration of the power of the gentile life over its members.... We find in their feuds and blood revenge, in their localization by gentes, in their use of lands in common, in the fidelity of the clansman to his chief and of the members of the clan to each other, the usual and persistent features of gentile society.... Descent was in the male line, the children of the males remaining members of the clan, while the children of its female members belonged to the clans of their respective fathers."
[Morgan, op. cit., pp. 368-369. -- Ed.]
But that formerly mother-right prevailed in Scotland is proved by the fact that, according to Bede, in the royal family of the Picts succession was in the female line.
Among the Scots, as among the Welsh, a relic even of the punaluan family persisted into the Middle Ages in the form of the right of the first night, which the head of the clan or the king, as last representative of the former community of husbands, had the right to exercise with every bride, unless it was compounded for money.
That the Germans were organized in gentes until the time of the migrations is beyond all doubt.
They can have occupied the territory between the Danube, Rhine, Vistula, and the northern seas only a few centuries before our era; the Cimbri and Teutons were then still in full migration, and the Suevi did not find any permanent habitation until Caesar's time.
Caesar expressly states of them that they had settled in gentes and kindreds (gentibus cognationtbusque), and in the mouth of a Roman of the Julian gens the word gentibus has a definite meaning which cannot be argued away.
The same was true of all the Germans; they seem still to have settled by gentes even in the provinces they conquered from the Romans.
The code of laws of the Alemanni confirms that the people settled by kindreds (genealogiae) in the conquered territory south of the Danube; genealogia is used in exactly the same sense as Markgenossenschaft or Dorfgenossenschaft [Mark or village community – Ed.] later.
Kovalevsky has recently put forward the view that these genealogia are the large household communities among which the land was divided, and from which the village community only developed later.
This would then probably also apply to the fara, with which expression the Burgundians and the Lombards – that is, a Gothic and a Herminonian or High German tribe – designated nearly, if not exactly, the same thing as the genealogiae in the Alemannian code of laws.
Whether it is really a gens or a household community must be settled by further research.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans, continued ...
In Scotland the decay of the gentile organization dates from the suppression of the rising of 1745.
The precise function of the Scottish clan in this organization still awaits investigation; but that the clan is a gentile body is beyond doubt.
In Walter Scott's novels the Highland clan lives before our eyes.
It is, says Morgan:
"... an excellent type of the gens in organization and in spirit, and an extraordinary illustration of the power of the gentile life over its members.... We find in their feuds and blood revenge, in their localization by gentes, in their use of lands in common, in the fidelity of the clansman to his chief and of the members of the clan to each other, the usual and persistent features of gentile society.... Descent was in the male line, the children of the males remaining members of the clan, while the children of its female members belonged to the clans of their respective fathers."
[Morgan, op. cit., pp. 368-369. -- Ed.]
But that formerly mother-right prevailed in Scotland is proved by the fact that, according to Bede, in the royal family of the Picts succession was in the female line.
Among the Scots, as among the Welsh, a relic even of the punaluan family persisted into the Middle Ages in the form of the right of the first night, which the head of the clan or the king, as last representative of the former community of husbands, had the right to exercise with every bride, unless it was compounded for money.
That the Germans were organized in gentes until the time of the migrations is beyond all doubt.
They can have occupied the territory between the Danube, Rhine, Vistula, and the northern seas only a few centuries before our era; the Cimbri and Teutons were then still in full migration, and the Suevi did not find any permanent habitation until Caesar's time.
Caesar expressly states of them that they had settled in gentes and kindreds (gentibus cognationtbusque), and in the mouth of a Roman of the Julian gens the word gentibus has a definite meaning which cannot be argued away.
The same was true of all the Germans; they seem still to have settled by gentes even in the provinces they conquered from the Romans.
The code of laws of the Alemanni confirms that the people settled by kindreds (genealogiae) in the conquered territory south of the Danube; genealogia is used in exactly the same sense as Markgenossenschaft or Dorfgenossenschaft [Mark or village community – Ed.] later.
Kovalevsky has recently put forward the view that these genealogia are the large household communities among which the land was divided, and from which the village community only developed later.
This would then probably also apply to the fara, with which expression the Burgundians and the Lombards – that is, a Gothic and a Herminonian or High German tribe – designated nearly, if not exactly, the same thing as the genealogiae in the Alemannian code of laws.
Whether it is really a gens or a household community must be settled by further research.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans, continued ...
The records of language leave us in doubt whether all the Germans had a common expression for gens, and what that expression was.
Etymologically, the Gothic kuni, Middle High German kunne, corresponds to the Greek genos and the Latin gens, and is used in the same sense.
The fact that the term for woman comes from the same root – Greek gyne, Slav zena, Gothic qvino, Old Norse kona, kuna – points back to the time of mother-right.
Among the Lombards and Burgundians we find, as already mentioned, the term fara, which Grimm derives from an imaginary root fisan, to beget.
I should prefer to go back to the more obvious derivation from faran (fahren), to travel or wander; fara would then denote a section of the migrating people which remained permanently together and almost as a matter of course would be composed of relatives.
In the several centuries of migration, first to the east and then to the west, the expression came to be transferred to the kinship group itself.
There are, further, the Gothic sibia, Anglo-Saxon sib, Old High German sippia, sima, kindred.
Old Norse only has the plural sifiar, relatives; the singular only occurs as the name of a goddess, Sif.
Lastly, still another expression occurs in the Hildebrandslied, where Hildebrand asks Hadubrand: “Who is thy father among the men of the people... or of what kin art thou?“ (eddo huêlihhes cnuosles du sîs).
In as far as there was a common German name for the gens, it was probably the Gothic huni that was used; this is rendered probable, not only by its identity with the corresponding expression in the related languages, but also by the fact that from it is derived the word kuning, König (king), which originally denotes the head of a gens or of a tribe.
Sibia, kindred, does not seem to call for consideration; at any rate, sifiar in Old Norse denotes not only blood relations, but also relations by marriage; thus it includes the members of at least two gentes, and hence sif itself cannot have been the term for the gens.
As among the Mexicans and Greeks, so also among the Germans, the order of battle, both the cavalry squadrons and the wedge formations of the infantry, was drawn up by gentes.
Tacitus’ use of the vague expression “by families and kindreds” is to be explained through the fact that in his time the gens in Rome had long ceased to be a living body.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans, continued ...
The records of language leave us in doubt whether all the Germans had a common expression for gens, and what that expression was.
Etymologically, the Gothic kuni, Middle High German kunne, corresponds to the Greek genos and the Latin gens, and is used in the same sense.
The fact that the term for woman comes from the same root – Greek gyne, Slav zena, Gothic qvino, Old Norse kona, kuna – points back to the time of mother-right.
Among the Lombards and Burgundians we find, as already mentioned, the term fara, which Grimm derives from an imaginary root fisan, to beget.
I should prefer to go back to the more obvious derivation from faran (fahren), to travel or wander; fara would then denote a section of the migrating people which remained permanently together and almost as a matter of course would be composed of relatives.
In the several centuries of migration, first to the east and then to the west, the expression came to be transferred to the kinship group itself.
There are, further, the Gothic sibia, Anglo-Saxon sib, Old High German sippia, sima, kindred.
Old Norse only has the plural sifiar, relatives; the singular only occurs as the name of a goddess, Sif.
Lastly, still another expression occurs in the Hildebrandslied, where Hildebrand asks Hadubrand: “Who is thy father among the men of the people... or of what kin art thou?“ (eddo huêlihhes cnuosles du sîs).
In as far as there was a common German name for the gens, it was probably the Gothic huni that was used; this is rendered probable, not only by its identity with the corresponding expression in the related languages, but also by the fact that from it is derived the word kuning, König (king), which originally denotes the head of a gens or of a tribe.
Sibia, kindred, does not seem to call for consideration; at any rate, sifiar in Old Norse denotes not only blood relations, but also relations by marriage; thus it includes the members of at least two gentes, and hence sif itself cannot have been the term for the gens.
As among the Mexicans and Greeks, so also among the Germans, the order of battle, both the cavalry squadrons and the wedge formations of the infantry, was drawn up by gentes.
Tacitus’ use of the vague expression “by families and kindreds” is to be explained through the fact that in his time the gens in Rome had long ceased to be a living body.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans, continued ...
A further passage in Tacitus is decisive.
It states that the maternal uncle looks upon his nephew as his own son, and that some even regard the bond of blood between the maternal uncle and the nephew as more sacred and close than that between father and son, so that when hostages are demanded the sister's son is considered a better security than the natural son of the man whom it is desired to bind.
Here we have living evidence, described as particularly characteristic of the Germans, of the matriarchal, and therefore primitive, gens. [2]
If a member of such a gens gave his own son as a pledge of his oath and the son then paid the penalty of death for his father's breach of faith, the father had to answer for that to himself.
But if it was a sister's son who was sacrificed, then the most sacred law of the gens was violated.
The member of the gens who was nearest of kin to the boy or youth, and more than all others was bound to protect him, was guilty of his death; either he should not have pledged him or he should have kept the agreement.
Even if we had no other trace of gentile organization among the Germans, this one passage would suffice.
Still more decisive, because it comes about eight hundred years later, is a passage from the Old Norse poem of the twilight of the gods and the end of the world, the Voluspa.
In this "vision of the seeress," into which Christian elements are also interwoven, as Bang and Bugge have now proved, the description of the period of universal degeneration and corruption leading up to the great catastrophe contains the following passage:
Broedhr munu berjask ok at bonum verdask,
munu systrungar sifjum spilla.
“Brothers will make war upon one another and become one another’s murderers, the children of sisters will break kinship.”
Systrungar means the son of the mother’s sister, and that these sisters’ sons should betray the blood-bond between them is regarded by the poet as an even greater crime than that of fratricide.
The force of the climax is in the word systrungar, which emphasizes the kinship on the mother“s side; if the word had been syskina-born, brothers' or sisters' children, or syskinasynir, brothers' or sisters' sons, the second line would not have been a climax to the first, but would merely have weakened the effect.
Hence even in the time of the Vikings, when the Voluspa was composed, the memory of mother-right had not yet been obliterated in Scandinavia.
In the time of Tacitus, however, mother-right had already given way to father-right, at least among the Germans with whose customs he was more familiar.
The children inherited from the father; if there were no children, the brothers, and the uncles on the father's and the mother's side.
The fact that the mother’s brother was allowed to inherit is connected with the survivals of mother-right already mentioned, and again proves how new father-right still was among the Germans at that time.
Traces of mother-right are also found until late in the Middle Ages.
Apparently even at that time people still did not have any great trust in fatherhood, especially in the case of serfs.
When, therefore, a feudal lord demanded from a town the return of a fugitive serf, it was required – for example, in Augsburg, Basle and Kaiserslautern – that the accused person's status as serf should be sworn to by six of his nearest blood relations, and that they should all be relations on the mother’s side. (Maurer, Städteverfassung, I, p. 381.)
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans, continued ...
A further passage in Tacitus is decisive.
It states that the maternal uncle looks upon his nephew as his own son, and that some even regard the bond of blood between the maternal uncle and the nephew as more sacred and close than that between father and son, so that when hostages are demanded the sister's son is considered a better security than the natural son of the man whom it is desired to bind.
Here we have living evidence, described as particularly characteristic of the Germans, of the matriarchal, and therefore primitive, gens. [2]
If a member of such a gens gave his own son as a pledge of his oath and the son then paid the penalty of death for his father's breach of faith, the father had to answer for that to himself.
But if it was a sister's son who was sacrificed, then the most sacred law of the gens was violated.
The member of the gens who was nearest of kin to the boy or youth, and more than all others was bound to protect him, was guilty of his death; either he should not have pledged him or he should have kept the agreement.
Even if we had no other trace of gentile organization among the Germans, this one passage would suffice.
Still more decisive, because it comes about eight hundred years later, is a passage from the Old Norse poem of the twilight of the gods and the end of the world, the Voluspa.
In this "vision of the seeress," into which Christian elements are also interwoven, as Bang and Bugge have now proved, the description of the period of universal degeneration and corruption leading up to the great catastrophe contains the following passage:
Broedhr munu berjask ok at bonum verdask,
munu systrungar sifjum spilla.
“Brothers will make war upon one another and become one another’s murderers, the children of sisters will break kinship.”
Systrungar means the son of the mother’s sister, and that these sisters’ sons should betray the blood-bond between them is regarded by the poet as an even greater crime than that of fratricide.
The force of the climax is in the word systrungar, which emphasizes the kinship on the mother“s side; if the word had been syskina-born, brothers' or sisters' children, or syskinasynir, brothers' or sisters' sons, the second line would not have been a climax to the first, but would merely have weakened the effect.
Hence even in the time of the Vikings, when the Voluspa was composed, the memory of mother-right had not yet been obliterated in Scandinavia.
In the time of Tacitus, however, mother-right had already given way to father-right, at least among the Germans with whose customs he was more familiar.
The children inherited from the father; if there were no children, the brothers, and the uncles on the father's and the mother's side.
The fact that the mother’s brother was allowed to inherit is connected with the survivals of mother-right already mentioned, and again proves how new father-right still was among the Germans at that time.
Traces of mother-right are also found until late in the Middle Ages.
Apparently even at that time people still did not have any great trust in fatherhood, especially in the case of serfs.
When, therefore, a feudal lord demanded from a town the return of a fugitive serf, it was required – for example, in Augsburg, Basle and Kaiserslautern – that the accused person's status as serf should be sworn to by six of his nearest blood relations, and that they should all be relations on the mother’s side. (Maurer, Städteverfassung, I, p. 381.)
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans, continued ...
Another relic of mother-right, which was still only in process of dying out, was the respect of the Germans for the female sex, which to the Romans was almost incomprehensible.
Young girls of noble family were considered the most binding hostages in treaties with the Germans.
The thought that their wives and daughters might be taken captive and carried into slavery was terrible to them and more than anything else fired their courage in battle; they saw in a woman something holy and prophetic, and listened to her advice even in the most important matters.
Veleda, the priestess of the Bructerians on the River Lippe, was the very soul of the whole Batavian rising in which Civilis, at the head of the Germans and Belgae, shook the foundations of Roman rule in Gaul.
In the home, the woman seems to have held undisputed sway, though, together with the old people and the children, she also had to do all the work, while the man hunted, drank, or idled about.
That, at least, is what Tacitus says; but as he does not say who tilled the fields, and definitely declares that the serfs only paid tribute, but did not have to render labor dues, the bulk of the adult men must have had to do what little work the cultivation of the land required.
The form of marriage, as already said, was a pairing marriage which was gradually approaching monogamy.
It was not yet strict monogamy, as polygamy was permitted for the leading members of the tribe.
In general, strict chastity was required of the girls (in contrast to the Celts), and Tacitus also speaks with special warmth of the sacredness of the marriage tie among the Germans.
Adultery by the woman is the only ground for divorce mentioned by him.
But there are many gaps here in his report, and it is also only too apparent that he is holding up a mirror of virtue before the dissipated Romans.
One thing is certain: if the Germans were such paragons of virtue in their forests, it only required slight contact with the outside world to bring them down to the level of the average man in the rest of Europe.
Amidst the Roman world, the last trace of moral austerity disappeared far more rapidly even than the German language.
For proof, it is enough to read Gregory of Tours.
That in the German primeval forests there could be no such voluptuous abandonment to all the refinements of sensuality as in Rome is obvious; the superiority of the Germans to the Roman world in this respect also is sufficiently great, and there is no need to endow them with an ideal continence in things of the flesh, such as has never yet been practiced by an entire nation.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans, continued ...
Another relic of mother-right, which was still only in process of dying out, was the respect of the Germans for the female sex, which to the Romans was almost incomprehensible.
Young girls of noble family were considered the most binding hostages in treaties with the Germans.
The thought that their wives and daughters might be taken captive and carried into slavery was terrible to them and more than anything else fired their courage in battle; they saw in a woman something holy and prophetic, and listened to her advice even in the most important matters.
Veleda, the priestess of the Bructerians on the River Lippe, was the very soul of the whole Batavian rising in which Civilis, at the head of the Germans and Belgae, shook the foundations of Roman rule in Gaul.
In the home, the woman seems to have held undisputed sway, though, together with the old people and the children, she also had to do all the work, while the man hunted, drank, or idled about.
That, at least, is what Tacitus says; but as he does not say who tilled the fields, and definitely declares that the serfs only paid tribute, but did not have to render labor dues, the bulk of the adult men must have had to do what little work the cultivation of the land required.
The form of marriage, as already said, was a pairing marriage which was gradually approaching monogamy.
It was not yet strict monogamy, as polygamy was permitted for the leading members of the tribe.
In general, strict chastity was required of the girls (in contrast to the Celts), and Tacitus also speaks with special warmth of the sacredness of the marriage tie among the Germans.
Adultery by the woman is the only ground for divorce mentioned by him.
But there are many gaps here in his report, and it is also only too apparent that he is holding up a mirror of virtue before the dissipated Romans.
One thing is certain: if the Germans were such paragons of virtue in their forests, it only required slight contact with the outside world to bring them down to the level of the average man in the rest of Europe.
Amidst the Roman world, the last trace of moral austerity disappeared far more rapidly even than the German language.
For proof, it is enough to read Gregory of Tours.
That in the German primeval forests there could be no such voluptuous abandonment to all the refinements of sensuality as in Rome is obvious; the superiority of the Germans to the Roman world in this respect also is sufficiently great, and there is no need to endow them with an ideal continence in things of the flesh, such as has never yet been practiced by an entire nation.
TO BE CONTINUED ...