Notes and Queries, Number 47, September 21, 1850
TekstA NOTE ON MORGANATIC MARRIAGES
Grimm (Deutsche Rechts Alterthumer, vol. ii., p. 417.), after a long dissertation, in which it appears that the money paid by the bridegroom to the wife's relations (I believe subsequently also to the wife herself) had every form of a purchase, possibly derived also from some symbolic customs common to all northern tribes, offers the following as the origin of this word "morganatic:"—
"Es gab aber im Alterthum noch einen erlaubten Ausweg für die Verbindung vorneluner Männer mit geringen (freien und selbst unfreien) Frauen, den Concubinat, der ohne feierliches Verlöbniss, ohne Brautgabe und Mitgift eingegangen wurde, mithin keine wahre und volle Ehe, dennoch ein rechtmässiges Verhältniss war.
"Da jedoch die Kirche ein solches Verhältniss missbilligte durch keine Einsegnung weihte, so wurde es allmählich unerlaubt und verboten als Ausnahme aber bis auf die neueste Zeit für Fürsten zugelassen—ja durch Trauung an die linke Hand gefeiert. Die Benennung Morganatische Ehe,—Matrimonium ad Morganaticam (11. Feud. 29.), rührt daher, dass den Concubinen eine Morgangabe (woraus im Mittelalter die Lombarden 'Morganatica' machten)—bewilligt zu werden pflegte—es waren Ehen auf blosse Morgengabe. Den Beweis liefern Urkunden, die Morganatica für Morgengabe auch in Fallen gebrauchen wo von wahrer Ehe die Rede ist." (See Heinecius, Antiq. 3. 157, 158.)
The case now stands thus:
It was the custom to give money to the wife's relations on the marriage-day.
It was not the custom with respect to unequal marriage (Misheirath): this took place "ohne Brautgabe und Mitgift," which was also of later origin.
The exception made by the Church for princes, restored the woman so far, that the marriage was legally and morally recognised by the Lombard law and the Church, with exceptions as regards issue, and that the left hand was given for the right.
With regard to this latter, it would be desirable to trace whether giving of the land had any symbolic meaning. I think the astrologists consider the right as the nobler part of the body; if so, giving of the left in this case is not without symbolic significance. It must be remembered how much symbolism prevailed among the tribes which swept Europe on the fall of the Roman empire, and their Eastern origin.
The Morgengabe, according to Cancianus (Leges Barbarorum, tom. iv. p. 24.), was at first a free gift made by the husband after the first marriage night. This was carried to such excess, that Liutprand ordained
"Tamen ipsum Morgengabe volumus, ut non sit amplius nisi quarta pars ejus substantia, qui ipsum Morgengabe dedit."
This became subsequently converted into a right termed justitia.
Upon this extract from a charter,—
"Manifesta causa est mihi, quoniam die ilio quando te sposavi, promiseram tibi dare justitiam tuam secundum legem meam [qr. my Lombard law in opposition to the Roman, which he had a right to choose,] in Morgencap, id est, quartam portionem omnium rerum mobilium et immobilium," &c.
Cancianus thus comments:—
"Animadverte, quam recte charta hæc cum supra alligatis formulis conveniat. Sponsus promiserat Morgencap, quando feminam desponsaverat, inde vero ante conjugium chartam conscribit: et quod et Liutprandi lege, et ex antiquis moribus Donum fuit mere gratuitum, hic appellatur Justitia secundum legem Langobardorum."
The Morgencap here assumes, I apprehend, somewhat the form of dower. That it was so, is very doubtful. (Grimm, vol. ii. p. 441. "Morgengabe.")
"An demselben Morgen empfängt die JungFrau von ihrem Gemahl ein ansehnliches Geschenk, welches Morgengabe heisst. Schon in der Pactio Guntherammi et Childeberti, werden Dos und Morganagiba unterschieden, ebenso Leg. Rip. 37. 2. Alaman. 56. 1, 2. Dos und Morgangeba; Lex Burgend. 42. 2. Morgangeba und das 'pretium nuptiale;' bei den Langobarden, 'Meta und Morgengab.'"
I do not say this answers the question of your correspondent G., which is, what is the derivation of the word?
Its actual signification, I think, means left-handed; but to think is not to resolve, and the question is open to the charitable contributions of your learned and able supporters.
As regards the Fairy Morgana, who was married to a mortal, I confess, with your kind permission, I had rather not accept her as a satisfactory reply. It is as though you would accept "once upon a time" as a chronological date! She was married to a mortal—true; but morganatically, I doubt it. If morganatic came from this, it should appear the Fairy Morgana was the first lady who so underwent the ceremony. Do not forget Lurline, who married also a mortal, of whom the poet so prettily sings:
"Lurline hung her head,
Turned pale, and then red;
And declared his abruptness in popping the question
So soon after dinner had spoilt her digestion."
This lady's marriage resembled the other in all respects, and I leave you to decide, and no man is more competent, from your extensive knowledge of the mythology of Medieval Europe, whether Morgana, beyond the mere accident of her name, was more likely than Lurline to have added a word with a puzzling etymology to the languages of Europe. The word will, I think, be found of Eastern origin, clothed in a Teutonic form.
After all, Jacob Grimm and Cancianus may interest your readers, and so I send the Note.
S.H.
Athenæum, Sept. 6. 1850
MINOR NOTES
Alderman Beckford.—Gifford (Ben Jonson, vol. vi. p. 481.) has the following note:—
"The giants of Guildhall, thank heaven, yet defend their charge: it only remains to wish that the citizens may take example by the fate of Holmeby, and not expose them to an attack to which they will assuredly be found unequal. It is not altogether owing to their wisdom that this has not already taken place. For twenty years they were chained to the car of a profligate buffoon, who dragged them through every species of ignominy to the verge of rebellion; and their hall is even yet disgraced with the statue of a worthless negro-monger, in the act of insulting their sovereign with a speech of which (factious and brutal as he was) he never uttered one syllable." … "By my troth, captain, these are very bitter words."
But Gifford was generally correct in his assertions; and twenty-two years after his note, I made the following one:—
"It is a curious fact, but a true one, that Beckford did not utter one syllable of this speech. It was penned by Horne Tooke, and by his art put on the records of the city and on Beckford's statue, as he told me, Mr. Braithwaite, Mr. Seyers, &c., at the Athenian Club.
"ISAAC REED.
"See the Times Of July 23. 1838, p. 6."
The worshipful Company of Ironmongers have relegated their statue from their hall to a lower position: but it still disgraces the Guildhall, and will continue to do so, as long as any factious demagogue is permitted to have a place among its members.
L.S.
The Frozen Horn.—Perhaps it is not generally known that the writer of Munchausen's Travels borrowed this amusing incident from Heylin's Mikrokosmos. In the section treating of Muscovy, he says:—
"This excesse of cold in the ayre, gave occasion to Castilian, in his Aulicus, wittily and not incongruously to faine that if two men being smewhat distant, talke together in the winter, their words will be so frozen that they cannot be heard: but if the parties in the spring returne to the same place, their words will melt in the same order that they were frozen and spoken, and be plainly understood."
J.S.
Salisbury.
Inscription from Roma Subterranea.—If you deem the translation of this inscription, quoted in Lord Lindsay's fanciful but admirable Sketches of the History of Christian Art, worth a place among your Notes, it is very heartily at your service.
"Sisto viator
Tot ibi trophæa, quot ossa
Quot martyres, tot triumphi.
Antra quæ subis, multa quæ cernis marmora,
Vel dum silent,
Palam Romæ gloriam loquuntur.
Audi quid Echo resonet
Subterraneæ Romæ!
Obscura licet Urbis Coemetria
Totius patens Orbis Theatrium!
Supplex Loci Sanetitatem venerare,
Et post hac sub luto aurum
Coelum sub coeno
Sub Româ Romam quærito!"
Roma Subterranea, 1651, tom. i. p. 625.
(Inscription abridged.)
Stay, wayfarer—behold
In ev'ry mould'ring bone a trophy here.
In all these hosts of martyrs,
So many triumphs.
These vaults—these countless tombs,
E'en in their very silence
Proclaim aloud Rome's glory:
The echo'd fame
Of subterranean Rome
Rings on the ear.
The city's sepulchres, albeit hidden,
Present a spectacle
To the wide world patent.
In lowly rev'rence hail this hallow'd spot,
And henceforth learn
Gold beneath dross
Heav'n below earth,
Rome under Rome to find!
F.T.J.B.
Brookthorpe.
Parallel Passages.—
"There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change from rich to naked, from cieled roofs to arched coffins, from living like gods to die like men."—Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying, chap. i. sect. 1. p. 272. ed. Edin.
"Here's an acre sown indeed
With the richest royalest seeds,
That the earth did e'er suck in,
Since the first man dyed for sin:
Here the bones of birth have cried,
Though gods they were, as men they died."
F. BEAUMONT
M.W. Oxon.
A Note on George Herbert's Poems.—In the notes by Coleridge attached to Pickering's edition of George Herbert's Poems, on the line—
"My flesh begun unto my soul in pain,"
Coleridge says—
"Either a misprint, or noticeable idiom of the word began: Yes! and a very beautiful idiom it is: the first colloquy or address of the flesh."
The idiom is still in use in Scotland. "You had better not begin to me," is the first address or colloquy of the school-boy half-angry half-frightened at the bullying of a companion. The idiom was once English, though now obsolete. Several instances of it are given in the last edition of Foxe's Martyrs, vol. vi. p. 627. It has not been noticed, however, that the same idiom occurs in one of the best known passages of Shakspeare; in Clarence's dream, Richard III., Act i. Sc. 4.:
"O, then began the tempest to my soul."
Herbert's Poems will afford another illustration to Shakspeare, Hamlet, Act iv. Sc. 7.:—
"And then this should is like a spendthrift sigh,
That hurts by easing."
Coleridge, in the Literary Remains, vol. i. p. 233., says—
"In a stitch in the side, every one must have heaved
a sigh that hurts by easing."
Dr. Johnson saw its true meaning:
"It is," he says, "a notion very prevalent, that sighs impair the strength, and wear out the animal powers."
In allusion to this popular notion, by no means yet extinct, Herbert says, p. 71.:
"Or if some years with it (a sigh) escape
The sigh then only is
A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss."
D.S.
"Crede quod habes," &c.—The celebrated answer to a Protestant about the real presence, by the borrower of his horse, is supposed to be made since the Reformation, by whom I forget:—
"Quod nuper dixisti
De corpore Christi
Crede quod edis et edis;
Sic tibi rescribo
De tuo palfrido
Crede quod habes et habes."
But in Wright and Halliwell's Reliquiæ Antiquæ, p. 287., from a manuscript of the time of Henry VII., is given—
"Tu dixisti de corpore Christi, crede et habes
De palefrido sic tibi scribo, crede et habes."
M.
Grant to the Earl of Sussex of Leave to be covered in the Royal Presence.—In editing Heylyn's History of the Reformation, I had to remark of the grant made by Queen Mary to the Earl of Sussex, that it was the only one of Heylyn's documents which I had been unable to trace elsewhere (ii. 90.). Allow me to state in your columns, that I have since found it in Weever's Funeral Monuments (pp. 635, 636).
J.C. ROBERTSON.
Bekesbourne.
The first Woman formed from a Rib (Vol. ii., p. 213.).—As you have given insertion to an extract of a sermon on the subject of the creation of Eve, I trust you will allow me to refer your correspondent BALLIOLENSIS to Matthew Henry's commentary on the second chapter of Genesis, from which I extract the following beautiful explanation of the reason why the rib was selected as the material whereof the woman should be created:—
"Fourthly, that the woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to top him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him; but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved."
IOTA.
Beau Brummel's Ancestry.—Mr. Jesse some years back did ample justice to the history of a "London celebrity," George Brummell; but, from what he there stated, the following "Note" will, I feel assured, be a novelty to him. At the time that Brummell was considered in everything the arbiter elegantiarum, the writer of this has frequently heard Lady Monson (the widow of the second lord, and an old lady who, living to the age of ninety-seven, had a wonderful fund of interesting recollections) say, that this ruler of fashion was the descendant of a very excellent servant in the family. Not long ago, some old papers of the family being turned over, proofs corroborative of this came to light. William Brummell, from the year 1734 to 1764, was the faithful and confidential servant of Charles Monson, brother of the first lord: the period would identify him with the grandfather of the Beau; the only doubt was, that as Mr. Jesse has ascertained that William Brummell, the grandfather, was, in the interval above given, married, had a son William, and owned a house in Bury Street, how far these facts were compatible with his remaining as a servant living with Charles Monson, both in town and country. Now, in 1757, Professor Henry Monson of Cambridge being dangerously ill, his brother Charles sent William Brummell down, as a trustworthy person, to attend to him; and in a letter from Brummell to his master, he, with many other requisitions, wishes that there may be sent down to him a certain glass vessel, very useful for invalids to drink out of, and which, if not in Spring Gardens, "may be found in Bury Street. It was used when Billy was ill." From the familiarity of the word "Billy," he must be speaking of his son. These facts are certainly corroborative of the old dowager's statement.
M(2).