According to Dr. Zimmermann, it is a dogma among many Malays that the rajah has the entire disposal of the wives and children of his subjects.[420] In New Zealand, when a chief desires to take to himself a wife, he fixes his attention upon one and takes her, if need be by force, without consulting her feelings and wishes, or those of any one else.[421] In Tonga, the women of the lower people were at the disposal of the chiefs, who even used to shoot the husbands, if they made resistance;[422] whilst in Congo, as we are told by Mr. Reade, when the king takes a fresh concubine, her husband and all her lovers are put to death.[423]
In the interesting ‘Notes of a Country Clergyman’ in _Russkaja Stariná_ (‘Russian Antiquity’), much light is thrown on the life of Russian landlords before the emancipation of the serfs. Here is what is said of one of them:—“Often N. I—tsch would stroll late in the evening about his village to admire the prosperous condition of his peasants; he would stop at some cottage, look in at the window, and tap on the pane with his finger. This tapping was well known to everybody, and in a moment the best-looking woman of the family went out to him.... Another landlord, whenever he visited his estate, demanded from the manager, immediately after his arrival, a list of all the grown-up girls. Then,” the author continues, “the master took to his service each of the girls for three or four days, and as soon as the list was finished, he went off to another village. This occurred regularly every year.”[424]
Here we have a collection of facts, belonging, as I think, to the same group as the _jus primae noctis_ is of a chief or a priest. And it is obvious that they have nothing to do with “communal marriage.” The privilege accorded to the priest, however, seems, in some cases, to have a purely religious origin. Thus, Egede informs us that the native women of Greenland thought themselves fortunate if an Angekokk, or prophet, honoured them with his caresses; and some husbands even paid him, because they believed that the child of such a holy man could not but be happier and better than others.[425] Von Martius thinks that the right granted to the medicine-man among the Brazilian aborigines is owing to savage ideas of woman’s impurity.[426] And on the coast of Malabar, Hamilton says, the bride was given to the chief priest, “because the first fruits of her nuptials must be a holy oblation to the god she worships.”[427]