Note 1127 — Chapter VIII · RISE OF ECCLESIASTICAL MARRIAGE: THE CHURCH DEVELOPS AND ADMINISTERS MATRIMONIAL LAW

Much trouble grew out of the theory of spiritual affinity. Thus "in 1462, John Howthon, of Tonbridge, was sentenced by the Consistory Court of Rochester to be whipt three times round both market and church for having married Dionysia Thomas, for whom his former wife had been godmother. The like spiritual relation occasioned (Jan. 7, 1465) a dissolution of the marriage between John Trevennock and Joan Peckham; Letitia, the former wife of the said John having been godmother to a child of the said Joan." On December 29, 1472, William Lovelasse, of Kingsdown, was cited to appear "on a charge of having married his spiritual sister, viz., a woman whom his mother had held at her confirmation."—Burn, Parish Registers, 3, 4, notes, citing Thorpe, Customale. The case of Henry VIII. and Catherine, wife of his elder brother Arthur, and the anecdote of Andowera and Fredegonda, wife of King Chilperic of Neustria (Thierry, Narratives of the Merovingian Era, London, n. d., 20), are in point. On the evils of the complex system see Thwing, The Family, 83; Law Review (English), I, 353 ff.; Woolsey, Divorce, 120 ff.; and especially Huth, Marriage of Near Kin, 113 ff.