exercise agency, and otherwise function as legal actors equivalent to single or married men; these rights contrasted with Holy Roman Empire legal constraints on women and were a significant factor in The English Reformation and English Midlands Enlightenment. These rights continued to be suspended for many married women, however, who in many regions of England remained under legal disability during marriage under common laws of Coverture that traced from the Norman Conquest. England was one of the first places in the world to grant voting rights to women citizens universally and regardless of marital status, which it did by passage of the 1918 Representation of the People Act that gave voting rights to women aged 30 years and over who met a property qualification (equal voting rights with men was achieved a decade later under the Equal Franchise Act 1928, which permitted all women aged 21 and over to vote). Several centuries earlier, some of its colonies in North America, including New Jersey Colony by its constitution, had granted voting rights to women who could meet the same property requirements men had to meet; common laws of Coverture requiring a married woman's property to be held by her husband meant married women typically could not qualify. Prior to the Norman Conquest in 1066, the laws varied by the separate regions in England. The laws of Athelstan contained a peculiarly brutal provision for the punishment of a female slave convicted of theft: She was to be burned alive by eighty other female slaves.[Is this different than the treatment a male slave would have received?] >Other laws were directed against the practice of witchcraft by women. Burning was the punishment specially appropriated to women convicted of treason or witchcraft. A case of sentence to execution by burning for treason occurred as late as 1789. [Again, is this treatment different for women than for men convicted of treason?] Monogamy was enforced both by the civil and ecclesiastical law [for women? for men? in what time period and region?]. Second and third marriages involved penance. A glimpse of cruelty in the household is afforded by the provision, occurring no less than three times in the ecclesiastical legislation, that if a woman scourged her female slave to death, she must do penance. Traces of wife-purchase were still seen in the law of Æthelberht of Kent, which stated that if a man carried off a freeman's