Word Finder - dowry

definition

Payment, such as property or money, paid by the bride's family to the groom or his family at the time of marriage.

definition

Payment by the groom or his family to the bride's family: bride price.

definition

Dower.

definition

A natural gift or talent.

definition

To bestow a dowry upon.

example

1999, Judith Everard, Michael C. E. Jones, Charters Duchess Constance Br, Page xvi

The dowry was never paid, and the king held himself free of his promise.

In that case the dowry must be returned to the wife.

If she thus bring a good dowry to her husband, he does not care to inquire, or is not sensitive, about the mode in which it was acquired.

The girl's family pay a dowry to her new family.

The icons, and my dowry bed, all the rest is lost.

The marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine with Henry Plantagenet in 1152 brought it under the sway of England; but when Richard Cceur-de-Lion married his sister Joan to Raymund VI., count of Toulouse, in 1196, Agenais formed part of the princess's dowry; and with the other estates of the last independent count of Toulouse it lapsed to the crown of France in 1271.

A large dowry was stipulated for; and in consideration of this the king promised to forgo all claims that his wife might otherwise possess to the Spanish crown or any part of its territories.

William the Aetheling having perished in the wreck of the "White Ship" (25th of November 1120), Fulk, on his return from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1120-1121), married his second daughter Sibyl, at the instigation of Louis VI., to William Clito, son of Robert Courteheuse, and a claimant to the duchy of Normandy, giving her Maine for a dowry (11 22 or 1123).

Bayezid first married Devlet Shah Khatun, daughter of the prince of Kermian, who brought him in dowry Kutaiah and its dependencies.

As son-in-law of Agathocles, he claimed to be specially king of Sicily, and he held the Sicilian conquest of Corcyra as the dowry of Lanassa.

Anna Mikhaylovna, who often visited the Karagins, while playing cards with the mother made careful inquiries as to Julie's dowry (she was to have two estates in Penza and the Nizhegorod forests).

The dowry might include real estate, but generally consisted of personal effects and household furniture.

If she had no children, he returned her the dowry and paid her a sum equivalent to the bride-price, or a mina of silver, if there had been none.

A betrothed girl, seduced by her prospective father-in-law, took her dowry and returned to her family, and was free to marry as she chose.

Among the ancients it was in request for poles, rafters, joists, and for the construction of winepresses, tables and musical instruments; and on that account was so valuable that a plantation of cypresses was considered a sufficient dowry for a daughter.

It was bestowed in 1180 on Philip Augustus of France by Philip of Alsace, as the dowry of his niece Isabella of Hainaut.

In Domesday it was royal demesne and during the following centuries figures in numerous grants generally as the dowry of queens.

When the islands were given as security for the princess's dowry, there seems reason to believe that it was intended to redeem the pledge, because it was then stipulated that the Norse system of government and the law of St Olaf should continue to be observed in Orkney and Shetland.

He made one fatal mistake - he dreamt of the French frontier being the Rhine and the Scheldt, and that a Spanish princess might bring the Spanish Netherlands as dowry to Louis XIV.

In the same year, with characteristic imprudence, he married a wife without dowry.

In 1662 as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza on her marriage to Charles II., it came into the possession of the English, and they defended it against Mulai Ismail in 1680, but in 1684 it was decided, on account of expense, to abandon the place to the Moors.

In 1440 he paid the ransom of Charles of Orleans (the son of his father's old enemy), who had been a prisoner in England since the battle of Agincourt; received him with great honour at Gravelines; and married him to Mary of Cleves, upon whom he bestowed a handsome dowry.

A dowry is always given, and a simple marriage ceremony performed by afiki (a schoolmaster, or one who recites the Koran, properly one learned in fiqh, Mahommedan law) in the presence of two witnesses.

The native contracts with the wife gave to her child all the husbands property, and divorce or separation was provided for, entailing forfeiture of the dowry.

In July 1469 James, then about eighteen, married Margaret, daughter of King Christian of Norway, who pledged the Orkney and Shetland Isles for her dowry, which remains unpaid.

From this wedding, disturbed by quarrels over the queen's jewels and dowry, was to result the union of the crowns on the head of Margaret's great-grandson, James VI., after a century of tragedies and turmoil.

Philadelphus gave his daughter Berenice with a great dowry to Antiochus II.

In the following year, on the announcement of the contemplated marriage, the House of Commons unanimously voted a dowry of £30,000 and an annuity of £6000 to the princess.

He secured an ally against them, and an addition to the royal domain, by marrying, on the 28th of April 1180, Isabella or Elizabeth, daughter of Baldwin V., count of Hainaut, and of Marguerite, sister of Philip of Alsace, the reigning count of Flanders, who ceded Arras, St Omer, Aire and Hesdin, and their districts, as Isabella's dowry, a district afterwards called Artois.

As midnight approaches they return to the house of the bride, and escort her, with her dowry, to the house of the bridegroom, and, having delivered her safely to her future lord and master, disperse to their respective homes.

In 1146 Guglielmo, the last of the Adelardi, died, and his property passed, as the dowry of his niece Marchesella, to Azzolino d'Este.

Ten thousand marks of his ransom were remitted as Jane's dowry, and in April 1424 James and his bride entered Scotland.

The poem called the Cypria was said to have been given by Homer to Stasinus of Cyprus as a daughter's dowry.

The county of Portugal, which had already been won back from the Moors (1055-1064), was included in Theresa's dowry.

The dowry to be paid by Portugal was fixed at £500,000 and the cession to Great Britain of Bombay and Tangier.

She had been brought up in a narrow retirement, could speak no language but her own, had no looks, no accomplishments and no dowry, her only recommendations being her proficiency in needlework, and her meek and gentle temper.

Accordingly the Hun, who had something of the bully in his nature, now turned upon Valentinian the trembling emperor of the West, and demanded redress for the wrongs of Honoria, and one-half of Valentinian's dominions as her dowry.

Mithradates was at the battle of Ancyra (c. 241), in which he assisted Antiochus Hierax against his brother Seleucus Callinicus, in spite of the fact that he had married the daughter of the latter with Greater Phrygia as her dowry.

Henry d'Avaugour, heir of this dynasty, was dispossessed of the countship in 1235 by the duke of Brittany, Pierre Mauclerc, who gave it as dowry to his daughter, Yolande, on her marriage in 1238 to Hugh of Lusignan, count of La Marche.

It finally became the property of the British in 1661 as part of the dowry of the infanta Catherine of Portugal on her marriage to Charles II., but was not actually occupied by the British until 1665, when they experienced much difficulty in overcoming the opposition of the Portuguese, and especially of the religious orders, to the cession.

After the disgrace of Roger in 1139 the castle was seized by the Crown; in the 14th century it formed part of the dowry of the queens of England, and figured prominently in history until its capture and demolition by Cromwell in the Civil War of the 17th century.

His patrimony and his wife's dowry must both have been trifling.

In 1139 it was given as a dowry to Ada, daughter of William de Warenne, earl of Surrey, on her marriage to Prince Henry, the only son of David I.

The demand was absurd and exorbitant and was refused, though the French government offered him the hand of their kings daughter Catherine with a dowry of 800,000 crowns and the districts of Quercy and Prigordsufficiently handsome terms. When he began to collect a fleet and an army, they added to the offer the Limousin and other regions; but Henry was determined to pick his quarrel, and declared war in an impudent and hypocritical manifesto, in which he declared that he was driven into strife against his will.

The English king no doubt imagined that he had secured a good bargain, as he had kept the princesss dowry, and yet never gave Ferdinand any practical assistance in war or peace.

In this manner a farmer's wife will often decorate herself with her entire dowry.

During the 14th century Cricklade formed part of the dowry of the queens of England.

He succeeded, however, in forcing upon Louis the treaty of Conflans (1466), by which the king restored to him the towns on the Somme, and promised him the hand of his infant daughter Catherine, with Champagne as dowry.

It became a direct apanage of the Bohemian crown in 1625 at the extinction of the male line of its dukes, and since 1766 it bore the name of Saxe-Teschen, owing to the fact that Prince Albert of Saxony, who married a daughter of Maria Theresa, received it as part of his wife's dowry.

Peleus took refuge in Phthia with his uncle Eurytion, who purified him from the guilt of murder, and gave him his daughter Antigone to wife, and a third of the kingdom as her dowry.