Note 75 — Chapter XI · HISTORY OF SEPARATION AND DIVORCE UNDER ENGLISH AND ECCLESIASTICAL LAW

"Constantine the Great imposed death with confiscation of goods on the adulterer. His sons punished the adulteress with burning and took away from her paramour the privilege of appeal, but this seems to have been only a case of extraordinary and temporary legislation. Under Valentinian the guilty woman was again sentenced to death. Justinian's legislation shut up the woman in a cloister, making it illegal for her husband to take her back within two years. If the parties were not reconciled at the end of this term the marriage was dissolved, and the woman's imprisonment in the cloister was perpetual. As for the offending man, he was visited with death, but not with confiscation of goods, if he had near relatives in the direct line."—Woolsey, op. cit., 91, 92; Rein, Criminalrecht, 848-52; Nov., 134, § 10. In general, on the development of the law relating to adultery, see Freisen, op. cit., 615-35, 830 ff.; Esmein, Le mariage en droit canonique, I, 102, 103, 111, 384-90; II, 61, 62, 90 ff., 125, 296 ff.; idem, Mélanges, 157 ff.; Bennecke, Ehebruch, 13-33.