Relationship Of Hiring Wives Custom And Law During The Yuan,Ming,Qing Peirod

As a custom, hiring wives have been in the history for a long time.According to the Historical documents, this custom had different forms andnames during the different period. In fact, the forming of hiring wives as acustom had met certain demands. Hiring wives as a temporary marriage hadimpacted on tradition concepts of marriage and moral. So from Yuan dynastylaws began to prohibit people hiring wives. Legislative purpose was to stop thedisturbance of human relations caused by this custom. But in fact, in thejudicial practices, the law was not the only standard. In the cases ofinheritance, judicial officials often took certain customs as a standard, also withlaw, to decide the son’s inheritance.One of this custom’s important feature was it took wives as pawn’ssubjects. This needed the fathers and husbands had certain rights on thewives. As in tradition society, this kind of rights was confirmed by laws in somecircumstances. Different with the engagement of marriage, the contact ofhiring wives had not only formed a temporary marriage, but also a specialhiring relationship as wives to be the subjects.Back to the reason of the form of this custom, the economic problems hadplayed an essential part, and second was the tradition morals about heirs.When faced to the judicial practices, inspecting of facts and the sympathy wastaken as important standards. Although hiring wives was prohibited by the law,rethink it with the reasons, most judicial officials would take sympathies to bothsides. In fact, the sentiment and reason had played an important role both inthe legislation and judicature. In the past, people always want to find certainreason for certain legislation. And in the judicial practices, sentiment andreason were also important standards for the judgment. The judicial officialshad to inspect the facts, and then evaluated with the sentiment, reason andlaw, at last form the result of the cases as some kind of a balance betweensentiment and law. From the judgments of the hiring wives cases, we can not only see the confliction of legislation and judicature, but also the traditionalhormonal concept of sentiment, reason and law.