Concubinage was a “permitted connection,” under the Roman law, from the earliest times, down to the period of the philosopher Emperor, Leo, A. D. 887 when it was prohibited by law.[23] The Justinian Code recognized the legality of the relation and fixed the legal and property status of the concubine and her progeny and various Christian Emperors, in the early days of the Empire passed laws regulating the relation known as _Concubinatus_.[24] The woman was left in the same relation as the law found her; she was not raised to the level of the husband and while her children were entitled to support from the father, they were not legitimate, but could inherit from the mother.[25] Under the Roman law, however, children born in concubinage, could be legitimated by the subsequent marriage of their parents,[26] and this early Roman law was the foundation for the custom obtaining in England, France, Germany, Normandy and Scotland, prior to the Norman Conquest, of legitimating the children born out of lawful wedlock, by the subsequent marriage of their parents. At the wedding of a couple having children prior to their marriage, it was the general custom, in the countries named, to place the children under a cloak, or mantle, which was also spread over the parents, and the children of such a union were thereafter known in the law, as “mantle children,” to distinguish them from children regularly born in lawful wedlock.[27] According to Selden, this ceremony was observed, in England, when the children of John of Gaunt and Catherine Swinford were legitimated by Parliament,[28] and in Normandy, Duke Richard espoused Gunnora, “in Christian fashion,” and “the children were covered with the mantle.”[29] Neither the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, Mohammedans or Romans, regarded marriage as a religious ordinance, but the relation could be established, according to the laws and customs of all these ancient people, by the interchange of consent.[30] In Cnut’s time, in England, we find that he made laws to prevent the sale of a woman to a man whom she disliked,[31] but even at this stage of English society, the church approved these sale marriages and condoned the old betrothals of the Anglo-Saxons, and preserved the forms of ceremonies which still constitute the curious cabinet of antiquities of the English church.[32] The early Christian church, however, did not treat marriage as a sacrament; the doctrine that marriage was a sacrament was evolved from the Fifth Chapter of the Epistle of St. Paul, to the Ephesians and it was not until the Council of Trent, in the year 1563 that the Roman Catholic Church required the celebration of marriage to be accompanied by a religious ceremony.[33] In England, as early as the seventh century, the concern of the church about all sins pertaining to the flesh, caused it to raise its voice upon questions concerning marriage and divorce.[34]