Note 274 — Chapter XI · HISTORY OF SEPARATION AND DIVORCE UNDER ENGLISH AND ECCLESIASTICAL LAW (continued 2)

Glanville, Tractatus, VI, 17; Bracton, De legibus, fol. 92, 304. Britton, II, 264, seems to say, though his statement is somewhat confusing, that in case of divorce a mensa et thoro "if verified or not denied, the wife shall not recover any dower." Were not that interpretation of the law in the highest degree improbable, Britton's context might appear to show that such a divorce worked a complete dissolution of marriage. "In the recorded cases it is often difficult to see whether the divorce that is pleaded is a dissolution of marriage; e. g., Note Book, pl. 690. It is believed however that divortium, standing by itself, generally points to a divorce [nullification] a vinculo, e. g., in Lit. sec. 380."—Pollock and Maitland, op. cit., II, 392 n. 5. Bishop, Marriage, Divorce, and Separation, I, §§ 1497, 1498 n. 3, appears to think that the "effect of a divorce for adultery ... was to dissolve the marriage" bond, because the guilty woman may "not be heard upon a claim of dower" (Beames, Glanville, 133). But this view is surely wrong, as the researches of Pollock and Maitland have finally established: op. cit., II, 372-95. Their results are thus summarized (373): "If however we can not argue that a woman was not married because she can not claim dower, still less can we argue that a union is a marriage because the issue of it will—or is not a marriage because the issue of it will not—be capable of inheriting English land."