LEAP YEAR

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume XLV, Issue 3182, 6 January 1928, Page 3

LEAP YEAR

THE LADIES' PRIVILEGE

AN OLD SCOTTISH LAW

With 1928 now well eommeneetl, a newspaper may be excused for reminding its spinster readers that this year is also leap year. Bachelors, of whatever age, are equally entitled to be told, although whether as a warning or not is for them individually to decide.

Old customs are tumbling in scores nowadays. The bishops propose to remove St. Valentine from the Anglican calendar as a merely mythical person. Some are unkind enough to say the modern miss has no need of the leap year privilege—that she makes every year a leap-year. Certain commentators on twentieth century society will have it that woman never needs to go to the length of "popping the question" herself. Mr Arnold Bennett warns the young man of to-day to beware lest, when he thinks he is choosing, he is, in fact, being chosen. Mr H. L. Mencken, who is regarded as the leading American cynic, sums up the situation thus: "The average man does not marry because some marble fair one challenges his enterprise. He marries because chance throws into his way a fair one who repels him less actively than most, and because his delight in what he thus calls her charm is reinforced by a growing suspicion that she has fallen in love with him. In brief, it is chivalry that undoes him. The girl who infallibly gets a husband —in fact, any husband that she wants —is the one who tracks him boldly, fastens him with sad eyes, and then, when, his conscience has begun to torture him, throws her arms around his neck, bursts into maidenly tears on his shoulder, and tells him | that she fears her forwardness will destroy • his respect for her. It is only I a colossus who can resist such strategy. Perhaps it would be otherwise if the I gentler sex could rely upon statutory support such as given in Scotland in 1288, under the titular queen, Margaret, "the Maid of Norway." It was then enacted that "it is statut and ordaint that during the rein of hir maist blissit Megeste, for ilk yeare knowne as lepe yeare, ilk mayden ladye of bothe highe and lowe estait shall hae liberte to bespeke ye man she likes, albeit he refuses to taik hir to be his | lawful wyfe, he shall be mulcted in ye sum ane pundis or less, as his estait may be; except that he is betrothit ane ither woman then he shall be free.''

Margaret can scarcely be put forward as the feminist author of the law enacted in her name, for she did not cross the North Sea until 1290 and died in Orkney the same year, aged 17. The custom is believed to have had an earlier origin, although history is silent on the subject. It was pefpetuated in France and Northern Italy in the middle ages, but afterwards ceased to have legal sanction.

The Scottish law was in effect a tax on bachelors, although whether the fine went to the rebuffed lady or into the State's coffers is not clear. It must have been a good deal more severe than a straightout - tax in some cases —that of the good-looking and generally eligible bachelor, for example. Its results do not seem to have been put on record, nor yet the reasons for enacting it. Perhaps the Church desired on general principles that the people should be fruitful and multiply, and the State wanted fighting men to defend its borders.

Will it be left to Mussolini, who now taxes bachelors, to revive '•the old Scottish and Italian law in these times?