Due to prevailing norms of modesty, women would wear clothing that covered the whole of their body except their hands. While women among the poor sometimes wore sleeveless tunics, most women were obliged to cover even their hair with the long "maphorion" () veil. Women of means, however, spared no expense in adorning their clothes with exquisite jewelry and fine silk fabrics. Divorces were hard to obtain even though there were laws permitting them. Husbands would often beat their wives, though the reverse was not unknown, as in Theodore Prodromos's description of a battered husband in the Ptochoprodromos poems.