the year 1566 began to be punished if they commenced living together before the wedding, and an ordinance of 1582 declares that a formal betrothal before a minister and witnesses shall precede a wedding, it was not yet expressly ordered that a Church ceremony was the only way of legalising a marriage, and, in fact, this was not done till a hundred years later.[1] Tycho Brahe lived just at a time when the law of the land was still formally unaltered, and it is therefore intelligible how his children might be considered legitimate, and the companion of his life have been looked upon as his lawful wife. Doubtless the only fault anybody had to find with her was her low origin, and if she had been his equal in rank nobody would have thought that she was anything but his wife.[2]
Tycho's eldest child, a daughter of the name of Christine, was born in October 1573, but died in September 1576. His other children were Magdalene (born in 1574), Claudius (born in January 1577, died six days after), Tyge (born in August 1581), Jörgen (born 1583), and three other daughters, Elizabeth, Sophia, and Cecily, as to the dates of whose birth nothing is known.[3]
The ague seems to have left Tycho in August 1573, as
- ↑ By the Danske Lov of 1683 and the Church ritual of 1685. See an article in the Historisk Tidsskrift, fifth series, vol. i. 1879, by the Danish Minister of Justice, J. Nellemann.
- ↑ Early in the sixteenth century a Danish nobleman, Mogens Lövenbalk, brought a young Scotch lady, Janet Craigengelt (on the female side said to have been related to the Grahams of Montrose), home to his castle, Tjele, in Jutland, where she lived for many years and bore him two children. Her son tried in vain to obtain recognition as his father's legitimate heir, and his claims were set aside chiefly because his mother had clearly not been treated as the mistress of the house, but rather as a dependent. On the other hand, the University of Wittenberg declared in favour of the legitimate birth of the children, evidently guided by the then ruling principle of canonical law, that a long intercourse with all the outer resemblance of wedlock had the same legal weight as a formal marriage.
- ↑ The eldest daughter was buried in Helsingborg church. In the epitaph she is called filiola naturalis, which has made Langebek doubt whether she had the same mother as the other children (D. Magazin, ii. p. 194); but this
