Q: Who said: "A man's home is his castle"?

a. King Henry VIII, upon returning to his throne after the execution of his wife Ann Boleyn.

b. 17th Century English jurist Sir Edward Coke, in arguments for the supremacy of common law.

c. Conservative Phyllis Schlafly, in a 1970s speech about roles for women. (Home section, Page 1.)

Q: Who said: "A man's home is his castle"?

A: English jurist and politician Sir Edward Coke, in arguments for the supremacy of the common law, in the early 17th Century

The castle's foundation: When it was first uttered, the phrase "For a man's house is his castle..." had little to do with which of the sexes ruled the roost and everything to do with the human right to privacy. "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations" (Little, Brown & Co., $40) attributes the saying to Sir Edward Coke, an English jurist and politician from the early 17th Century. According to Bartlett's, Sir Edward adopted the idea from the Pandects, the 6th Century digest of Roman civil law. The ideal, based on the right to individual privacy, later became fundamental to the U.S. system of government, report E.D. Hirsch Jr., Joseph F. Kett and James Trefil in their book "The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy" (Houghton Mifflin Co., $24.95).

No matter how humble: The concept of home as castle has appeared throughout the ages in politics and the arts. Nineteenth Century poet Thomas Carlyle used the theme in a poem called "My Own Four Walls," and writer John Ruskin wrote about it in a series of essays.

"The idea developed from the house being a place of safety and refuge into a place where you have a central importance," says Micael Clarke, associate professor of English at Loyola University. "In Carlyle's thinking, no matter how humble your work or home, your spirit is great."

Of kings and queens: Ruskin espoused the view that women as well as men should be viewed as royalty in their homes--an opinion quite ahead of its Victorian day.

"Ruskin's view was that it was not enough for women to stay home and be subordinate to the husband, but that women should be queens at home by exercising the special powers given to them," Clarke says. "He felt queens had a duty to people outside the home as well as inside, and he urged Victorian women to involve themselves in public life."

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