434 THE FISH OF TOBIAS—DEMONIC POSSESSION 
But alas! ‘‘ this sad old romance, this unchivalrous story ”’ 
(to vary Lucille) must go to the wall. The jus, as thus con- 
ceived and described, never in fact existed anywhere in civilised 
Europe. The figment of its ruthless exercise as a legal right 
by licentious lordlings owes its existence to a vivid imagination 
uninfected by one germ of truth, as Lord Hailes, M. L. Veuillot, 
and others clearly demonstrate.! 
It must come as a severe shock to preconceived ideas to run 
up against the dull facts of history, and thence discover that 
the jus prime noctis, so far from being the barbarous privilege 
of deflowering an unwilling bride, was merely a right accorded 
by the Church to the husband on the payment of a varying 
fee to the bishops, etc., for the privilege of disregarding the 
ecclesiastical ordinance, which required that his bride should 
remain in a state of virginity for one, two, or three days ! ? 
Continence for one night was first enjoined in the decree 
passed by the Fourth Council of Carthage in 398 4.p.? This, 
extended to “two or three days,’’ figured not only in the 
Capitularies of Charlemagne,* but was received into the Canon 
Law, and was twice repeated in the decretals of the Catholic 
Church. 
But what, it may be fairly asked, has the jus prime noctis 
got to do with our Tobias and Sara? The history of the con- 
nection deserves tracing, not only to clear away its obscurity, 
but also to show how a custom—important in result but based 
simply on a variant version of Tobit—was by the Church early 
adopted and widely inculcated. The days, during which the 
1 Annals of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1797), III. Appendix 1, pp. 1-21; Le Droit 
du Seigneur (Paris 1864), 191 ff., 232-243, and 276 ff. As to the supposed 
exception owing to the mythical law by that mythical king, Evenus or Eugenius, 
by the provisions of which according to Boece (who in his History of Scotland, 
published in 1527, seems to have been the first to resurrect or create the law, 
and the monarch) landlords were permitted to ‘‘ deflower the virgin brides 
of their tenantry,” see Cosmo Innes’s Lectures on Legal Antiquities, 1872, 
‘in Scotland there is nothing to ground a suspicion of such a right,” and 
J. G. Frazer, op. cit., vol. I. pp. 485-493. 
2 See the judgment delivered in 1409 in the case brought to the Bishop of 
Amiens against the Mayor, etc., of Abbeville to establish his right to receive 
such fees, which were ‘‘ sometimes ten, sometimes twelve, sometimes twenty 
Parisian sous.” 
3 See Martine, de Antiq. Eccles. Ritibus, I. ix. 4. 
4 J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina (Paris, 1862), tom. I., p. 859, par. 463. 
5 Lord Hailes, op. cit., ili. 15. 
