Such was one side of marriage in the days of chivalry. A woman could inherit property, but seldom defend it. The situation was too tempting to man's cupidity; and no less temptation was offered by the equally helpless class of orphans. A wardship, which in our days is generally an honourable and thankless burden, was in Chaucer's time a lucrative and coveted windfall. In London the city customs granted a guardian, for his trouble, ten per cent. of the ward's property every year.[209] This was an open bargain which, in the hands of an honourable citizen, restored to the ward his patrimony with increase, but gave the guardian enough profit to make such wardships a coveted privilege even among well-to-do citizens. Elsewhere, where the customs were probably less precisely marked--and certainly the legal checks were fewer--wardships were treated even more definitely as profitable windfalls. We have seen how the Baron of Berkeley paid £10,000 in modern money for a single ward; Chaucer, as we know from a contemporary document, made some £1500 out of his, and Gaston de Foix a proportionately greater sum. Moreover, even great persons did not blush to buy and sell wardships, from the King downwards. The above-quoted Stephen Scrope, who sold his own daughter as a matter of course, is indignant with his guardian, Sir John Fastolf, who had sold him to the virtuous Chief Justice Gascoigne for 500 marks, "through which sale I took a sickness that kept me a thirteen or fourteen years ensuing; whereby I am disfigured in my person, and shall be whilst I live." Gascoigne had purchased Scrope for one of his own daughters. Fastolf bought him back again to avoid such a _mésalliance_; but the costs of each transfer, and something more, came out of the hapless ward's estate. "He bought and sold me as a beast, against all right and law, to mine own hurt more than a thousand marks." Moreover, the means that were taken to avoid such disastrous wardships became themselves one of the most active of the many forces which undermined the strict code of chivalry. A knight, in theory, was capable of looking after himself; therefore careful and influential parents like the Berkeleys sought to protect their heirs by knighthood from falling into wardships as minors, in defiance of the rule which placed the earliest limit at twenty-one. Thus Maurice de Berkeley (IV.) was knighted in 1339 at the age of seven, and one of his descendants in 1476 at the age of five; and Eustache Deschamps complains of the practice as one of the open sores of contemporary chivalry--