Incest

Incest (Lat. in, 'not,' and castus, 'chaste') is the marrying of a person within the Levitical degrees. In the old ecclesiastical law (now obsolete), and in Scotland, it comprehends cohabitation irrespective of marriage. The law of England, as declared by statutes passed in the reign of Henry VIII., forbids marriage within the prohibited degrees (see CONSANGUINITY). A marriage between a widower and his deceased wife's sister comes within these rules, and is void, and it makes no difference that the marriage was celebrated in a foreign country, as, for example, Denmark, in the United States, or in one of the British colonies, where these marriages are legal, if the parties were domiciled in England, and went abroad merely to evade the English law. It has also been decided in England that the same rules which apply between legitimate relations apply between natural relations, though one is legitimate—as, for example, between a man and the daughter of an illegitimate sister of his deceased wife. Though incestuous marriages are utterly void in England, still it is not a criminal offence to marry incestuously, not even in those cases in which the connection is most abhorrent to the moral sense of mankind, and the remedy in the ecclesiastical courts may be considered obsolete. In Scotland incest, which is calculated on the same grounds, not only makes a marriage void, but the better opinion is that to marry incestuously, as well as to commit incest, is a capital offence. See MARRIAGE.