(_d_) _Marriage_ as a feudal incident belonging to the lord is difficult to define generally, since its meaning changed. Originally it seems to have implied little more than the right of a lord to forbid an heiress, holding a fief under him, to marry a personal enemy, or some one otherwise unsuitable. Such veto was only reasonable, since the husband of the heiress would become the owner of the fee and the tenant of the lord. This negative right had almost necessarily a positive side; the claim to concur in the choice of a husband gradually expanded into an absolute right of the lord to dispose by sale or otherwise of the lands and person of his female ward. The prize might go as a bribe to any unscrupulous gentleman of fortune who placed his sword at the King’s disposal, or it might be made the subject of auction to the highest bidder. The lady passed as a mere adjunct to her own estates, and ceased, strictly speaking, to have any voice in choosing a partner for life. She might protect herself indeed against an obnoxious husband by out-bidding her various suitors. Large sums were frequently paid for leave to marry a specified individual or to remain single. This right seems, at some uncertain date, to have been extended from females to males, and instances of sums thus paid occur in the _Pipe Rolls_. It is difficult at first sight to imagine how the Crown found a market for such wares as male wards; but probably wealthy fathers were ready to purchase desirable husbands for their daughters. Thus in 1206 a certain Henry of Redeman paid forty marks for the hand and lands of the heir of Roger of Hedon, “_ad opus filiae suae_,”[99] while Thomas Basset secured a prize in the person of the young heir of Walerand, Earl of Warwick, to the use of any one of his daughters.[100] This extension to male heirs is usually explained to have been founded on a strained construction of chapter 6 of Magna Carta, but the beginnings of the practice can be traced much earlier than 1215.[101] The lords’ right to sell their wards was recognized and defined by the Statute of Merton, chapter 6. The attempts made to remedy some of the most serious abuses of the practice may be read in Magna Carta.[102] ----- Footnote 99: _Rotuli de oblatis et finibus_, p. 354. Footnote 100: _Rot. Claus._, pp. 37, 55. Footnote 101: Pollock and Maitland, I. 305. Footnote 102: See _infra_, under chapters 6, 7, and 8. ----- Mr. Hallam[103] considers that “the rights, or feudal incidents, of wardship and marriage were nearly peculiar to England and Normandy,” and that the French kings[104] never “turned this attribute of sovereignty into a means of revenue.” ----- Footnote 103: _Middle Ages_, II. 429. Footnote 104: p. 437. -----