The Customs of Old England | Page 6

which was neither conventual nor lay, but partook of both conditions in equal measure, decides its position in the economy of the work. We must deal with it here.
Before discussing the custom in its historical and social relations, it will be well to advert to the soil of thought out of which it sprang, and from which it drew strength and sustenance. Already we have spoken of the heritage of human sentiment. Now there is ample evidence that the indifference to the marriage of widows which marks our time did not obtain always and everywhere. On the contrary, among widely separated races such arrangements evoked deep repugnance, as subversive of the perfect union of man and wife, and clearly also of the civil inferiority of females. The notion that a woman is the property of her husband, joined to a belief in the immortality of the soul, appears to lie at the root of the dislike to second marriages--which, according to this view, imply a degree of freedom approximating to immorality. The culmination of duty and fidelity in life and death is seen in the immolation of Hindu widows. The Manu prescribes no such fiery ordeal, but it states the principles leading to this display of futile heroism: "Let her consecrate her body by living entirely on flowers, roots, and fruits. Let her not, when her lord is deceased, ever pronounce the name of another man. A widow who slights her deceased lord by marrying again brings disgrace on herself here below, and shall be excluded from the seat of her lord."
A similar feeling permeated the early Church. "The argument used against the unions," says Professor Donaldson, "was that God made husband and wife one flesh, and one flesh they remained even after the death of one of them. If they were one flesh, how could a second woman be added to them?" He alludes, of course, to the re-marriage of the husband, but the argument, whatever it may be worth, applies equally to both parties. An ancient example of renunciation is afforded by Judith, of whom it is recorded: "She was a widow now three years and six months, and she made herself a private chamber in the upper part of the house, in which she abode shut up with her maids and she wore hair-cloth upon her loins, and fasted all the days of her life, except the Sabbaths and new moons, and the feasts of the house of Israel; and on festival days she came forth in great glory, and she abode in her husband's house a hundred and five years."
An order of widows is said to have been founded or confirmed by St. Paul, who fixed the age of admission at sixty. This assertion, one suspects, grew out of a passage in the First Epistle to Timothy, in which the apostle employs language that would, at least, be consonant with such a proceeding: "Honour widows that are widows indeed.... Now she that is a widow indeed and desolate trusteth in God and continueth in supplications and prayers night and day." Simple but very striking is the epitaph inscribed on the wall of the Vatican:
OCTAVI? MATRON? VIDV? DEI.
The order of deaconesses appears to have been mainly composed of pious widows, and only those were eligible who had had but one husband. This order came to an end in the eleventh or twelfth century, but the vowesses, as a class, continued to subsist in England until the convulsions of the sixteenth century, and in the Roman Church survive as a class with some modifications in the order of Oblates, who, says Alban Butler in his life of St. Francis, "make no solemn vows, only a promise of obedience to the mother-president, enjoy pensions, inherit estates, and go abroad with leave." Their abbey in Rome is filled with ladies of the first rank.
The chief distinction between deaconesses and widows was the obligation imposed on the former to accomplish certain outward works, whereas widows vowed to remain till death in a single life, in which, like nuns, they were regarded as mystically espoused to Christ. Unlike nuns, however, vowesses usually supported the burdens entailed by their previous marriage--superintending the affairs of the household and interesting themselves in the welfare of their descendants. St. Elizabeth of Hungary, though she bound herself to follow the injunctions of her confessor and received from him a coarse habit of undyed wool, did not become a nun, but, on his advice, retained her secular estate and ministered to the needs of the poor. But instances occur in which vowesses retired from the world and its cares. Elfleda, niece of King Athelstan, having resolved to pass the remainder of her days in widowhood, fixed her abode in Glastonbury Abbey; and as late as July 23, 1527,