On the one hand, then, the marriage law was theoretically of the utmost strictness, though only to the poor man; but, on the other hand, it was of the most incredible laxity. A boy of fifteen and a girl of twelve might, at any time and in any place, not only without leave of parents, but against all their wishes, contract an indissoluble marriage by mere verbal promise, without any priestly intervention whatever. In other words, the whole world in Chaucer's time was a vaster and more commodious Gretna Green.[201] Moreover, not only the civil power, but apparently even the Church, sometimes hesitated to enforce even such legal precautions as existed against scandalous child-marriages. A stock case is quoted at length in the contemporary "Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln" (R.S., pp. 170-177), and fully corroborated by official documents. A wretched child who had just turned four was believed to be an heiress; a great noble took her to wife. He died two years later; she was at once snapped up by a second noble; and on his death, when she was apparently still only eleven, and certainly not much older, she was bought for 300 marks by a third knightly bridegroom. The bishop, though he excommunicated the first husband, and deprived the priest who had openly married him "in the face of the church," apparently made no attempt to declare the marriage null; and the third husband was still enjoying her estate twenty years after his wedding-day. In the face of instances like this (for another, scarcely less startling, may be found in Luce's "Du Guesclin," p. 139), we need no longer wonder that our poet's father was carried off in his earliest teens to be married by force to some girl perhaps even younger; or that in Chaucer's own time, when the middle classes were rapidly gaining more power in the state, Parliament legislated expressly against the frequent offences of this kind.