forbidding unions between persons of the same gens. In the description which the chronicler gives of the Drevlians we have an instance of an almost unlimited licence, whilst in that of the Radimich, Viatich, and Sever, we find a picture of an exogamous people; contracting marriage by capture, and yet retaining from the period of almost unlimited licence a sort of family communism, which appears in the relations between fathers and daughters-in-law.
No trace of this either limited or unlimited promiscuousness is to be found among the Polians, who, according to our old chronicler, “conducted themselves with much reserve” towards daughters-in-law and sisters-in-law, towards mothers and fathers, towards fathers-in-law and brothers-in-law. They seem to have been an exogamous tribe like the Radimich, Viatich, and Sever, their wives being brought to them from outside their own gens. Unlike the tribes just mentioned, they did not, however, procure them by capture. It was not the custom for the bridegrooms to go in search of their wives; they received them from the hands of the parents of the women, and they then paid the sum of money previously agreed upon. This means that their mode of constituting marriage was by buying their wives. The words of the chronicler concerning these payments are far from being clear, and Russian scholars have tried to interpret them in the sense of “dower” brought by the relatives of the wife. But it has been recently proved that no mention of “dower” is to be found in Russian charters before the fifteenth century, and that the word veno used in mediæval Russian to designate the payment made on marriage, has no other meaning than that of pretium nuptiale, or payment made by the bridegroom to the family of the bride.[1] The words of Tacitus concerning the dos paid amongst the German tribes by the future husband to his wife’s father, give precisely the meaning of the old Russian “veno”, and throw a light on the sort of payment which the chronicle of Nestor
- ↑ Compare Lange, On the Mutual Rights, according to Old Russian Law, of Husband and Wife, as regards Fortune. St. Petersburg, 1886.
