[Sidenote: Marriage of Canute with the widow of his predecessor.] When Canute the Dane had been acknowledged King of England, he married Emma, the widow of his predecessor Ethelred, whose throne he had overturned and whose children he had driven into exile. The marriage has not unnaturally puzzled the historians, for Emma was much older than her second husband, she was then living in Normandy, and it is very doubtful whether Canute had ever seen her before she became his bride. All, however, becomes plain if, as the cases of Feng and Wiglet seem to shew, it was an old Danish custom that marriage with a king’s widow carried the kingdom with it as a matter of right. In that case the young but prudent Canute married the mature widow merely out of policy in order to clinch, according to Danish notions, by a legal measure his claim to that crown which he had already won for himself by the sword.[918] Among the Saxons and their near kinsmen the Varini it appears to have been a regular custom for the new king to marry his stepmother. Thus Hermegisclus, King of the Varini, on his deathbed enjoined his son Radigis to wed his stepmother in accordance with their ancestral practice, and his injunction was obeyed.[919] Edbald, King of Kent, married his stepmother after the death of his father Ethelbert;[920] and as late as the ninth century Ethelbald, King of the West Saxons, wedded Judith, the widow of his father Ethelwulf.[921] Such marriages are intelligible if we suppose that old Saxon as well as old Danish law gave the kingdom to him who married the late king’s widow. [Sidenote: Traces of the system of female kinship among the Aryans.] To the view that the right to the Latin kingship was derived from women and not from men, it may be objected that the system of female kinship or mother-kin is unknown among the Aryans,[922] and that even if faint traces of it may be met with elsewhere, the last place in the world where we should look for it would be Rome, the stronghold of the patriarchal family. To meet this objection it is necessary to point to some facts which appear to be undoubted survivals among Aryan peoples of a custom of tracing descent through the mother only.