Since a husband owed it to the community to sustain himself, he was under the inevitable compulsion to sustain his other self, his wife, who was ‘bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, and no man did ever hate his own flesh so far as not to preserve it.’ The marriage and its incidents were exclusively within the jurisdiction of the Ecclesiastical Courts, so that for the common law to have entertained a claim for maintenance by the wife against her husband would have amounted to an invasion of the spiritual jurisdiction. A wife could neither claim nor enforce any right to maintenance in the civil courts.
Citations:
(1663) 1 Mod 124
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Secretary of State for Work and Pensions v Kehoe CA 5-Mar-2004
The claimant had applied to the Child Support Agncy for maintenance. They failed utterly to obtain payment, and she complained now that she was denied the opportunity by the 1991 Act to take court proceedings herself.
Held: The denial of . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Family
Updated: 04 July 2022; Ref: scu.194386