the same kin. A song[1] in vogue among the peasantry of Little Russia speaks of a bird wishing to marry, and finding no bride at his birth-place, all the females being his relations, there remains nothing for him to do but to cross the sea, and seek a bride of another kin than his own.
The complete discomfiture of endogamy, in its long struggle with exogamous prescriptions, is shown in the fact that in some parts of Russia, as for instance in the government of Simbirsk, in certain villages of the government of Olonizk, and of the district of Schadrinsk, inhabited by the Cossacks of the Don, the bride is always taken from another village than the bridegroom’s. Even in provinces in which no similar custom is known to exist, the remembrance of the time when exogamy was considered a duty, is preserved in the fact that the bridegroom is constantly spoken of as a foreigner (choujoy, choujaninin), and his friends and attendants are represented as coming with him from a distant country, in order to take away the future spouse.
The origin of exogamy has been sought for in the fact of the general prevalence, at a certain period of social development, of the custom of capturing wives. The co-existence of both customs has been already noticed by the old Russian chronicler in his description of the manners and customs of the Radimich, Viatich, and Sever. His testimony is corroborated by that of the nuptial songs, and of the ceremonies still in use at country weddings. The information which is derived from these sources as to the general prevalence in past times of marriage by capture, I have summed up in a work published in Russian under the title of The First Periods in the Evolution of Law. I shall take the liberty of bringing forward on this occasion the facts there summarised. They concern the Eastern as well as the Southern Slavs.
Amongst the Southern Slavs, marriage by capture was still in existence no longer ago than the beginning of the
- ↑ Tereschenko, Social Life of the Russians, vol. iv, p. 280.
