Card, Cross and Jones Criminal Law

No criminal law against male infidelity even existed until a French law of 1810, and that law only forbade a married man to keep a concubine in his conjugal house against his wife's wishes. Viewed from the perspective of human history, the absence or near-symmetry of modern Western adultery laws is a novelty that only appeared in the last 150 years. Even today, prosecutors, judges, and juries in the US and England often reduce a homicide charge to manslaughter of the lowest degree, or else acquit altogether, when a husband kills an adulterous wife or her lover caught in the act. Perhaps the most elaborate system to uphold confidence of paternity was that maintained by Chinese emperors of the T'ang Dynasty. For each of the emperor's hundreds of wives and concubines, a team of court ladies kept records on dates of menstruation, so that the emperor could copulate with that wife on a date likely to result in fertilization. Dates of copulation were also recorded, and as an auxiliary form of record-keeping, were commemorated by an indelible tattoo on the woman's arm and by a silver ring on her left leg ...»