In the 14th century either the female character was utterly dissolute, or the tyranny of husbands utterly reckless, when we find that it was no uncommon circumstance that women were strangled by masked assassins, or walking by the river side were plunged into it. This drowning of women gave rise to a popular proverb: “It is nothing, only a woman being drowned.” And this condition constituted the domestic life of England from the 12th century to the first civil war, when the taste of men for bloodshed found wider scope, and from the murder of women they advanced to the practice of cutting one another’s throats. Disraeli.--Amenities of Literature, Vol. I., p. 95.