The public attitude of the Councillors being of this somewhat grandmotherly kind, it is not surprising that they left the young members of their families very little liberty in placing their affections. Love affairs and marriage for love were in fact not regarded with favour. Girls were betrothed by their parents at eight years of age and married at fourteen, often to old men of sixty or seventy. A couple were very seldom permitted to initiate for themselves an affair of the heart. So when Leonhard Groland, against good manners and tradition, had begun a love affair with Catherine, daughter of Hans Hardörfer, and this was discovered, the precocious lover was punished with two months' imprisonment and banished for five years from the town. When a father did allow his son to choose his own wife he very seldom allowed him to woo her. They tell us how when the young Paul Tucher said that he would like to marry Ursula, daughter of the late Albrecht Scheurl, his father did the wooing for him, and went to Andreas Imhof, her guardian, and these two "with unshaken calm and dignified respectability" arranged the dowry and settlements. The public betrothal took place first in the Rathaus and then in the house of the bride. The wedding, after many formalities, took place not in the church, but before the portal of the church,[32] and only after the marriage service was completed did the bridal pair enter the church to partake of the holy sacrament. After the service the bridal party danced in the morning and then, after dinner at the bride's home (where it was customary for the pair to reside for a year), another dance took place in the evening; in the case of members of the Patriciate, in the Rathaus. These proceedings were regulated by laws by which the Council continually strove to repress the tendency to luxury and extravagance which always accompanies commercial prosperity. * * * * * The _Rathaus_, the heart of the old trading Republic, fronts the chancel end of the Sebald-kirche, a position architecturally unfortunate. The original Councilhouse, which was shared by the Council with the Clothiers Guild, stood in the present Tuchgasse. But in 1332 the Council bought from the Heilsbronn Monastery a house on the site of the present Rathaus, and here they built themselves a new Council-house into which they first moved in 1340. In its oldest form the Rathaus consisted only of a large hall, large enough to hold with comfort and dignity the numerous assembly that might gather there on the occasion of a Reichstag. All that now remains intact of this hall is the outer architecture on the east side. The oldest portions of the Rathaus are to be seen from the interior quadrangle and from the Rathausgasse, the street at the back. [Illustration: RATHAUS (WINDOW)]