Blackstone says: "In times of popery a great _variety_ of impediments to marriage were made, which impediments might, however, be _bought off with money_."
You could, for instance, buy a more distant relationship to your future wife for so much cash down to the Church. If your inamorata were your first cousin, you could remove her several degrees with five hundred dollars, and make her no relation at all for a little more. Such little sleight-of-hand performances are as nothing to a well-trained clergyman. Slip a check into one hand, and a request to marry your aunt into the other, let a clergyman shake them up in the coffers of the Church, and when one comes out gold, the other will appear as a blushing bride not even related to her own father, and not more than third cousin to herself.
Of the claim made by the early Christian Fathers, that it was because of the mental inferiority and incapacity of women that the more unjust and binding laws were enacted for them, thus doing all they could to create and intensify by law the incapacity which they asserted was imposed by God, Maine says: "But the proprietary disabilities of married females _stand on quite a different basis from personal incapacity_, and it is by the tendency of their doctrines to keep alive and consolidate the former, that the expositors of the _Canon Law have deeply injured civilization_."
He adds that there are many evidences of a struggle between _secular principles in favor of justice for wives_, and _ecclesiastical principles against it_, "but the Canon Law nearly everywhere prevailed. The systems which are _least indulgent_ to married women are invariably those which have followed the _Canon Law exclusively_.... It enforced the complete legal subjection of wives."
Lecky says: "Fierce invectives against the sex form a conspicuous and grotesque portion of the writings of the Fathers. Woman was represented as the door of hell, as the mother of all human ills. She should be ashamed at the very thought that she is a woman.... Women were even forbidden, in the sixth century, on account of their impurity, to receive the Eucharist into their naked hands. Their essentially subordinate position was continually maintained. This teaching in part determined the principles of legislation concerning the sex.* The Pagan laws during the empire had been continually _repealing the old disabilities_ of women, and the legislative movement in their favor continued with unabated force from Constantine to Justinian, and appeared also in some of the early laws of the barbarians. _But in the whole feudal [Christian] legislation women were placed in a much lower legal position than in the Pagan empire_."