This strange belief in gallows matches, that a condemned felon could be thus rescued, by marriage to any woman who would take him from the gallows, is placed by Barrington in the list of legal vulgar errors. But, as suggested by a writer in Chambers Journal, under the subject “Matrimonial Curiosities,” it seems doubtful if such a queer idea could have taken possession of the popular mind, unless there was some foundation for it, in the law.[99] It is perhaps but one of many such customs, arising from some isolated case, wherein the Court recognized it, which gave it currency and caused it to be followed in other instances. We are told that in 1725 a woman petitioned King George I., for the pardon of a convicted felon, in order that she might wed him, under Tyburn Tree.[100] Manningham states that this was the custom, not the law, in olden times, in France, and Italy, and that if any notorious strumpet would beg a convicted felon, about to be hanged for her husband, her plea would be granted, in order that their joint lives might be bettered by so holy an action.[101] Sterill reports a case that he had seen wherein a woman, clad only in her smock, or under-garment, begged a condemned person for her husband, with a white wand in her hand.[102] Whatever recognition the law gave this custom, that it actually existed in England, and France is evidenced by the many references to the practice, in story and rhyme, published during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Montaigne tells a story of a Picardian, who, seeing a lame dame advancing toward him, cried out: “She limps, she limps, despatch me quickly.”[103] The ballads of Roxburghe also tell, in rhyme, how a merchant of Chichester, who had killed a German, after his sentence and last speech upon the gallows, was wooed by no less than ten goodly maidens, who thus addressed him: “This is our law,” quoth they; “We may your death remove, If you, in lieu of our good-will, Will grant to us your love.”[104] But having left the fixed doctrines of the law governing the relation between the opposite sexes, known as marriage, to enter into a study and analysis of the vulgar errors in connection with this subject-matter, it is high time to bring the chapter to a close. Of course it was only attempted in this chapter to take a most cursory view of the great subject selected and to present but a few of the many laws and customs that have sprung up among the various peoples of the earth, governing the relation whereby the opposite sexes, in accordance with the law of natural selection, appropriate themselves to one another.