Nanchen
The trend of marrying and discussing wealth prevails
"The court is Tian Shelang, and the twilight is the emperor's hall." As we all know, the relatively complete imperial examinations in the Song Dynasty broke the monopoly of the aristocratic family over the officialdom, and the emperor of the Song Dynasty wrote poems to encourage people to study for the examinations - "There are thousands of minutes in the book. Su", "There is a golden house in the book", "Yan Ruyu is in the book", "A man wants to fulfill his life's ambition, and reads the five classics diligently in front of the window".
In the Song Dynasty, scholars from poor families and children of merchants at the end of the "scholar, peasant, business, and industry" were all eligible to take the imperial examination, and they could change their destiny by taking the imperial examination.
Fame in scientific examinations is linked to official positions and money, which directly enables a large number of children of the common people to enter the upper classes of society.
Before the Song Dynasty, the conclusion of marriage paid great attention to family and status. The so-called "starting from the Sui and Tang Dynasties" and "family marriage must be based on genealogy", but now, "no family background is required for the selection of scholars, and the marriage does not ask about the clan", and the family status does not matter. Once again regarded as the first consideration in the measurement of marriage, it became more and more common for scholar-bureaucrats to marry the daughters of the common people.
If the prosperity of the imperial examination system promoted the innovation of the concept of marriage in the Song Dynasty, the Song people no longer emphasized the family background too much.
Then the development of the economy makes people more and more "rich" in the process of concluding marriage.
With the development of the commodity economy and the growth of commodity awareness in the Song Dynasty, doing business is no longer a "cheap industry". With its unique charm, money is increasingly eroding the people of the world and controlling the entire Song Dynasty society.
"Money can make ghosts, but money-less ghosts tease them", "The best way to help the world is to borrow green fens (referring to money) to establish a business and start a family" "Money is like honey, a drop is sweet" "Money is money, and people love it", and so on. Proverbs and common sayings are just around the corner, blowing in the face.
Before the Song Dynasty, not only did politicians put more emphasis on agriculture and suppress commerce, but as far as the whole society was concerned, "businessmen valued profit over separation", which was only profit-seeking, and was despised by the world.
In the Song Dynasty, the status of wealthy merchants and dignitaries increased rapidly. With the power of money, they were able to "communicate with princes; and the right of the township was no different from that of your neighbors."
Not only that, but wealth is an excellent means to win over good readers.
They can not only use money as a backing to "catch the son-in-law under the list", "catch the rich money to bait the scholars and make them subservient, one son-in-law to more than a thousand", they can also participate in the imperial examinations with legal status to obtain official positions, and they can also pass The royal family and the family of nobles and bureaucrats obtained privileges through marriage, and even became an official by paying money and grain to the government.
By the end of the Northern Song Dynasty, the wealthy merchants who wore the court's "life clothes" were already "all over the world, one prefecture and one county, nowhere and nowhere".
Influenced by the development of the commodity economy and the temptation of money, Song people's standard of marriage selection has also changed: marriage is a matter of wealth - "If you want to marry a woman, first ask about the thickness of the suit; ".
According to the records of Wu Zimu's "Dream Lianglu" in the Southern Song Dynasty, in the initial stage of marriage discussion, the Song people first communicated with the matchmaker through a cursive post, "begging for a reunion and auspicious post in a good city".
If both parties are satisfied with the "question or prayer lot" of the draft post, then exchange the main post.
In the main post, in addition to stating the basic situation of the family, the other main content is to specify the amount of property in the family.
The man will "bring gold and silver, fields, property, houses, corridors, and mountain gardens, all listed in the post", and the woman will "list the room, jewelry, gold and silver, pearls and emeralds, treasures, curtains, etc., and accompanying items." Marry the land, the house, the mountain garden." The marriage is decided only after the two are willing to compare.
If both men and women like after a blind date, then both parties will make an appointment.
Although the ceremonies can be symbolic objects, wealthy people often "use bead and jade jewelry, gold utensils, gold skirts, robes and satin, tea cakes, and two sheep to send them", and "golden bottles of wine four Zun or eight statues, etc. are sent to women's families, and women's families are often sent back "in violet and colored satin, pearls, emeralds, beards, soaps, scarves, and gold and jade".
Before getting married, a dowry is also required.
Whether a man and a woman can get married soon depends on the amount of betrothal gifts given by the families of both parties.
Therefore, both families have to pour their money into it.
According to the records of "Menglianglu", the dowry of a man's family, "Fugui's family should prepare three golds", that is, "gold bracelets, gold bracelets, and gold pendants".
The House of Officials also gave away "gold-sleeved Huangluo, gold-sleeved skirts, long red skirts, or red-sleeves", plus "flower tea, fruit, reunion cakes" and other items.
Of course, the amount of wealth and gifts depends on the rich and the poor, but people who have no money should also use "silver plating" instead.
This form of betrothal gifts, which is mainly gold, is obviously different from the use of silk for betrothal gifts in the Tang Dynasty. It highlights the popularity of marriage and wealth with the development of the commodity money economy.
This kind of marriage discussion of wealth has also spread to the royal family, and even the phenomenon of "the daughter of the royal family is married, and all the wealthy family names take the goods, and it is no longer a matter of choice".
According to volume 1 of the notebook book "Pingzhou Ke Tan" compiled by Zhu Yu of the Song Dynasty, it records: "In recent times, there are many daughters of the sect, and Zongzheng has established dozens of official media, who are in charge of discussing marriages. Gou seeks an official, shelters the door, and then invites each other as a relative."
Marriage is twice as much
In fact, the prominent "heavy wealth" in the marriage system of the Song Dynasty was not a thick marriage as we understood it, but a thick marriage.
Whether it's the woman getting married or the man getting married, the result is that the woman's family spends a lot of money.
Because whether a woman can marry with dignity and what her status in her husband's family after marriage depends largely on her dowry.
Marrying a daughter should be done according to one's ability, but under the promotion of the nobles and scholars of the dynasty, it has gradually become a means of comparison.
Song Zhang Duanyi said that "this dynasty is famous for being greedy", which refers to this ethos.
Driven by this ethos, some people even think that it is shameful not to accompany a generous dowry.
As seen in "Yuan's Demonstration": "As for the adopted daughter, you should also save the clothes and make-up tools early, and it will be easy to send a marriage. If you leave it alone and don't ask, but it is called temporary, what is the technique? Tian Lu and the shame of not sympathizing with their children."
According to historical records, when the princess of the Song Dynasty got married, the marriage money given to the concubine by the court was "times as much as the prince's betrothal gift".
Song Shenzong's younger brother, Yang Wang Zhao Hao, although he was a royal family member, did not have the financial resources to prepare a dowry when his daughters reached their wedding year, so they had to find the emperor's elder brother and asked for an advance salary to buy the dowry.
The same goes for senior officials and famous families.
When Fan Zhongyan first formulated the "Rules of Yizhuang", it stipulated: "Marry a woman pays 30 yuan, 20 yuan for re-marriage, 20 yuan for marrying a woman, and no payment for re-marrying." The "Patriarchal Articles" made by Lu Zuqian in the Song Dynasty also stipulated: The cost of marrying a woman is 100 yuan, and the cost of marrying a woman is 50 yuan.
In the Northern Song Dynasty Zeng Yu's "Southern Tour of the Old", it was recorded that Wang Anshi planned to marry his little girl to Cai Bian, his favorite protégé.
Cai Bian, the younger brother of Cai Jing, was very intelligent.
Mrs. Wang, because of her love for this daughter, purchased expensive "world music halo brocade" (a popular lantern pattern brocade in Song Dynasty) to make a bed tent as her daughter's dowry.
Coincidentally, Li Guang, a famous minister of the Southern Song Dynasty, was delighted to have a daughter, and his friends wrote to him to congratulate him, but Li Guang replied with a sad face: "I have five daughters in my family. "According to the information, the wife of Qin Hui, a traitor in the Southern Song Dynasty, once claimed that her dowry was worth 200,000 tons.
In order to prepare a dowry for his daughter, Su Shi's younger brother Su Zhe specially sold a good piece of land he had purchased in Xinxiang, Henan, and collected "nine thousand four hundred" to bring his daughter into her husband's house.
"Nine thousand four hundred thorns" is 9400 guans (each guan is equal to 1000 copper coins).
Su Zhe said in his diary that he was "breaking a family to marry a daughter".
It means that in order to give his daughter a dowry, he almost went bankrupt.
Therefore, when communicating with his friend Zhang Dun, Su Shi thought of his younger brother Su Zhe's current situation, and couldn't help but write: "Ziyou has five daughters, and his debts are like mountains."
The same goes for ordinary officials.
During the Jingding period of the Southern Song Dynasty, a daughter of a general officer with the surname Zheng of the 9th grade, married the son of Wanzhi County. In addition to the 500 mu of land with the marriage, there were also "100,000 kangaroos and 5,000 kangaroos for marriage" and used by newlyweds. All kinds of expensive textiles, such as "one piece of gold and red for Kaihepin, one piece of Li Shicai, one piece of official green uniform, and one piece of thrush, Tiansun Jin," and the textiles also include two different styles of " The official green gauze strips for the membership and the purple yarn for the membership, two pairs of straps with top buns, 15 pieces of embroidery, and 30 sets of red silk clothes.
In the "Double Goldfish Bag", "the book of gifts on the side of the book is sealed for three times".
Of course, although there are not many wives with so much property of the Zheng family, the records of judicial cases in the Song Dynasty show that it is not uncommon to use land for dowry.
With the competition among the scholar-officials, the purchase of luxurious dowries also spread to the people.
At that time, in the southern region, many young girls had to work and make money by themselves as soon as they reached the age of 14 or 15, and buy dowries.
But there are very few women who can really rely on their own money to buy their own dowry, because the cost of dowry is too great, so many women still can't get married.
According to records, people married women in Zhangzhou, Fujian, because of the "thick makeup, which cannot be seen by outsiders", they put "car money", "mostly more than a thousand, and less than a few hundred", if not, it must be Will be "scorned by the neighbors".
And "the people of Ba who marry a woman must be responsible for their wealth and give the woman's clan", and even "poor women have to be unmarried even when they are old."
In the early years of the Southern Song Dynasty, the county magistrate of Huacheng in Sichuan conducted a survey and found that there were hundreds of girls in this county who had not yet stepped out of the cabinet when they reached the age of marriage.
The reason is that they cannot afford an expensive dowry.
Sun Jue in Fuzhou once tried a local policy, stipulating that when a girl gets married, the amount of dowry she should bring should not exceed 100 tons.
After the implementation of this policy, hundreds of marriages were facilitated at once.
The style of thick marriage pervaded the society of the Song and Song Dynasties, and not all scholar-bureaucrats turned a blind eye to it.
Cai Xiang of the Song Dynasty complained about this: "Looking at the customs of today, marrying his wife does not care about the door, and seeks money directly." Sima Guang wrote an article criticizing this phenomenon of wanton purchase of dowry: "The greedy and humble people in the world today will marry The woman first asks about the thickness of the clothing, and the daughter who will marry first asks the amount of the betrothal wealth. As for those who make a contract saying 'a certain amount of something, a certain amount of something', in order to sell a certain woman. This is the way to sell slaves and slaves. How can it be called a marriage between scholars and officials?"
In fact, there are two important reasons why some of the scholar-bureaucrats are willing to buy dowries for their daughters, in addition to keeping their daughters from being wronged by their in-laws.
One is that the style of thick marriage increases the property factor in the relationship of in-laws, which in the Song Dynasty, when the commodity economy developed, will make the marriage relationship stronger.
The scholar-officials in the Song Dynasty hoped to conclude a good marriage through a huge dowry.
In other words, the natal family hopes to use a sufficiently generous dowry to maintain the connection between the two families. Even if they marry their daughter, they hope to get help from their daughter, son-in-law and even grandson in the future.
Therefore, this "common property" belonging to the two families also provides the woman's parents with an opportunity to consolidate or even change the family's social relations, social status, family prestige and economic status.
Second, the laws of the Song Dynasty protected the private property of married women. Neither husbands nor in-laws could embezzle the dowry brought by the woman.
In the historical records of the Song Dynasty, there are not a few cases where the wife used the dowry to finance the husband, or the husband used the wife's private property, but in these cases, the wife voluntarily proposed or expressed her consent.
In the laws of the Song Dynasty, the regulations on "wife wealth" were relatively detailed. When a husband and wife divorced or his wife remarryed, the wife had the right to take away her dowry assets and the property they purchased.
If the husband dies prematurely, the observant widow will have complete ownership of the cemetery for life, and the property will be shared by her legal heirs after death; if she leaves her husband's family, in the case of no children, the cemetery can generally be remarried or returned to the family. Take it back to your mother's house.
It is mentioned in "Song Dynasty Facts Garden" that if a widow remarrys, she can justifiably take the dowry away.
"Yuan Shifan" also records: "As a wife's name to buy property, the body dies and the wife remarrys, there are many people who follow them." Northern Song Dynasty Wenying said in "Yuhu Qinghua": "The family of the gentry: When the husband first stated that he belonged to the genus, there were many who wanted to include his nephew and beg him to couple and be fit.” This shows that in the Song Dynasty, there were not a few widow wives who remarryed along with their nephews.
Li Qingzhao, a famous female lyricist in the Southern Song Dynasty, once remarried Zhang Ruzhou.
But she later found out that Zhang Ruzhou just wanted to defraud her own money, so she angrily proposed "reconciliation" with him.
According to the laws of the Song Dynasty, after Li Qingzhao and Zhang Ruzhou "reconciled", they could also keep their property.
During the long period of Chinese history, from the point of view of dowry, the Song Dynasty seemed to be the best period for wives and daughters to meet, but Song Dynasty Confucian scholars showed more complicated feelings on the issue of women's requirement and use of dowry.
For example, Sima Guang believes that as long as a man is "husband-like", he should rely on his own ability, rather than relying on his wife's dowry to get rich, or even rely on the relationship of his mother-in-law to get promoted.
On the other hand, it is believed that daughters-in-law should hand over their property to their parents-in-law.
Later, Zhu Xi agreed with Sima Guang's point of view. He disapproved of women having private property in the family. He praised women who could spend all their dowry on their husband's family.
Marriage is crazy
Influenced by the concept of wealth through marriage, some clans and court officials, in order to obtain more betrothal gifts or dowries, ignore their own identity and status, and even ignore social order and morality, and marry wealthy businessmen.
For example, in the Northern Song Dynasty, "there are more than 30 county heads from the wealthy family of the capital, Datong Zhang," and the Datong Zhang family even married more than 30 county heads (titles of royal women). This phenomenon is so common that Song Renzong had to issue an edict to prohibit it: "If the imperial clan marry a daughter, choose a noble person who is righteous, and dare to take money as a marriage, and the imperial censor's Taiya will inspect it."
High-ranking officials and celebrities such as Sun Zude, the minister of officials in Song Renzong's time, "wanted a rich wife to have wealth by rules."
Ling Jingyang, a noble man in the pavilion, married the daughter of the big boss who opened the hotel, regardless of the difference in status.
During the reign of Emperor Zhezong and Shaosheng, a wealthy man in Yangzhai County, Xuzhou, Gaijian, had a wealth of tens of thousands of dollars, and there were three women.
In the Southern Song Dynasty, even the marriage of Zhu Xi's family was discussed in terms of the amount of money.
Many scholar-bureaucrats did not hesitate to marry widows and become "in-laws" in order to enter the "rich and powerful family".
According to "Xu Zi Zhi Tong Jian Chang Bian", Volume 471: "There are widows in Jiangyin County, Changzhou. The family is rich and rich, not only huge... (Wang Que) benefits from high capital and becomes a son-in-law." In the time of Song Zhezong, The Right Dynasty asked Lang Zhixiuzhou Wang Qu to covet the widowed "rich woman" in Jiangyin County, Changzhou, and he would not hesitate to enter the house at the expense of officialdom.
What's more, in the early years of the Northern Song Dynasty, two high-ranking officials fought to marry a wealthy widow. and large fortunes.
According to the law at the time, widows could carry their own births when they remarry.
The two "prime ministers" at that time, Zhang Qixian (You Pushe) and Xiang Minzhong (Tongping Zhangshi), both took a fancy to the Xue family's large fortune.
In order to marry the Chai family, the two fought hard. Although Zhang Qixian succeeded in the end, the matter disturbed the emperor Song Zhenzong, and both of them were demoted.
It is also quite common for folks to talk about money in marriage.
In addition, according to the record in Volume 31 of "Xu Zizhi Tongjian Changbian", "the rich people in Chuanxia often recruit extramarital marriages and have children with their children. When the rich die, their wealth is divided, so the poor often give up their relatives and give birth to children."
If it is said that the poor are forced to leave their relatives to live, there is even more strange, for the sake of money, some people are willing to marry a monk and a Taoist wife.
Although the decree of the Song Dynasty stipulated: "All monks and Taoists marrying wives, and if they marry, each of them is judged as traitor, plus one class, and the monks and Taoists will send them five hundred miles to organize and manage." However, there are many cases of monks and Taoists marrying wives in the Song Dynasty. record.
For example, Chenghui, a monk from Xiangguo Temple, took Yan Chang as his wife, and thought that he was "happy and romantic, never before and after."
In addition, according to the "Chicken Ribs" volume: "Guangnan customs, market evaluations, many monks do it, and all of them get rich", so that "women are often married to monks.
In accordance with this, "the monk's hat is made here, and there is no room for one circle", so that when the monk is newly married, "the hairpin is on it".
This shows that it is very common for monks in Guangnan to marry, so the "Chicken Rib" tells that monks in Guangdong and Guangxi "have a family".
The marriage of monks in the Song Dynasty may have something to do with the secularization of Zen Buddhism, but there is no doubt that those who are willing to marry their daughters to monks are mostly greedy for money.