Long before this, in the days of Edward II., a satirist describes the "prodigious traffic" in divorces. Any husband having "selver among the clerkes to send" could rid himself of his wife by "bringing her to the constery" or consistory court, with two false witnesses to support his declarations.[164] A case is mentioned by Coke "in which a marriage was pronounced null because the husband had stood god-father to the cousin of his wife."[165] Before the Reformation the voidance of alleged false wedlock on the ground of pre-contract or forbidden degrees of affinity, spiritual relationship, consanguinity, or on some other canonical pretext, had become an intolerable scandal. "Marriages have been brought into such an uncertainty thereby," complains a statute of Henry VIII., "that no marriage could be so surely knit or bounden but it should lie in either of the parties' power ... to prove a pre-contract, a kindred and alliance, or a carnal knowledge to defeat the same."[166] [Footnote 164: JEAFFRESON, _Brides and Bridals_, II, 310, who quotes the following verses entitled "A Poem on the Times of Edward II." from the _Percy Society Publication_: "If a man have a wyf, And he love her nowt, Bring her to the constery, There trewth schuld be wrowt. Bring twei fals wytnes with hym, And hymself the thrydde, And he shall be deperted, As fair as he wold bydde, From his wyf; He schal be maynteyned fulle well To lede a sory lyf. "When he is deperted From hys trew spowse, Take hys neyghboures wyf And bryng her to howse, Yif he have selver Among the clerkes to send, He may have hir to hys wyf To hys life's end, With onskylle, Thei that so fair with falseness dele Godde's corse on her bille." ] [Footnote 165: LECKY, _Democracy and Liberty_, II, 194. For other examples see HUTH, _Marriage of Near Kin_, 118-20.] [Footnote 166: 32 H. VIII., c. 38: _Statutes at Large_ (London, 1763), II, 298.