The Child in Human Progress

No distinction was made by the Fathers between infanticide and exposure.369 Both were murderous acts, particularly bitterly condemned by the Christians because their enemies had charged them with murdering infants at secret rites. The letter attributed to Barnabas by Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and which in any case goes back to the earliest days of the religion, severely condemned infanticide. “Thou shalt not slay the child by procuring abortion, nor again shalt thou destroy it after it is born.”370 By such protests as these, made with one cannot tell what frequency, the Christians took their stand on the basic principles.

Justin, whose vigorous manner of addressing the Emperor is so attractive, succumbed, at the age of seventy-four, to the calumnies of the cynic Crescentius, and became a martyr; but his example and fervour left an indelible mark upon his time.

“As for us,” he says, “we have been taught that to expose newly born children is the part of wicked men; and this we have been taught lest we should do any one an injury, and lest we should sin against God; first, because we see that almost all so exposed (not only the girls, but also the males) are brought up to prostitution.... Now we see you rear children only for this shameful use; and for this pollution a multitude of females and hermaphrodites, and those who commit unmentionable iniquities are found in every nation. And you receive the hire of these, and duty and taxes from them, whom you ought to exterminate from your realm.”371

And again he says: “We fear to expose children, lest some of them be not picked up, but die, and we become murderers. But whether we marry, it is only that we may bring up children; or whether we decline marriage, we live continently.”372

Athanagoras,373 the Athenian philosopher, who presented to Marcus Aurelius and to Commodus an apology for the Christians, in 166 A. D., asked the logical Romans to use their famous common sense in weighing false charges made against Christians.

“What man of sound mind,” he said, “will affirm that we, who abhor murder, are murderers; we who condemn as murder the use of drugs for abortion, and declare that those who even expose a child are chargeable with murder.”374

Tertullian, whose apology was written in the year 200, or 205, of our era, was equally bold.

“Riders of the Roman Empire,” he began, “seated for the administration of justice on your lofty tribunal”—and then made the charge direct: “You first of all expose your children, that they may be taken up by any compassionate passer-by, to whom they are quite unknown; or you give them away to be adopted by those who will act better to them the part of parents.”375

Later, in another address, this time to the pagan people, he returns to the charges.

“Although you are forbidden by the laws to slay new-born infants, it so happens that no laws are evaded with more impunity or greater safety, with the deliberate knowledge of the public and the suffrages of this entire age, ... You make away with them in a more cruel manner, because you expose them to cold and hunger, and to wild beasts, or else you get rid of them by the slower death of drowning [sic].”376

“Man is more cruel to his offspring than animals,” said the learned Clement of Alexandria. “Orpheus tamed the tiger by his songs, but the God of the Christians, in calling men to their true religion, did more, since he tamed and softened the most ferocious of all animals—men themselves.”377

No abler pleader for the new order of things was there than Minucius Felix, a Roman lawyer of education, who, on his conversion to the new faith, became one of the eloquent founders of Latin Christianity. A disciple of Cicero, he has been called the “precursor of Lactantius in the graces of style.”

“How I should like to meet him,” he exclaims, indignantly, “who says or believes that we are initiated by the slaughter and blood of an infant ... no one can believe this except one who can dare do it. And I see that you at one time exposed your begotten children to wild beasts and to birds; and another, that you crush them when strangled with a miserable kind of death ... and these things assuredly come down from the teachings of your gods. For Saturn did not expose his children, but devoured them. With reason were infants sacrificed to him by parents in some part of Africa, caresses and kisses repressing their crying, that a weeping victim might not be sacrificed. Moreover, among the Tauri of Pontus, and to the Egyptian Busiris, it was a sacred rite to immolate their guests, and for the Galli to slaughter to Mercury human, or rather inhuman, sacrifices. The Roman sacrifices buried living a Greek man and a Greek woman, a Gallic man and a Gallic woman; and to this day, Jupiter Latiaris is worshipped by them with murder; and, what is worthy of the son of Saturn, he is gorged with the blood of an evil and criminal man.”378

To drive home the awful character of a crime that was so common we have the vision of Paul, who sees the man and woman who have exposed children, suffering in hell the terrible tortures of the damned.

“‘They [the parents] gave us for food to dogs and to be turned out to swine. Some of us they threw into the river,’ exclaimed these children; “and so now the guilty are condemned to eternal punishment while the children are committed to the angels.”379

We have quoted already the eloquent Lactantius. Basil the Great thundered against infanticide and the spectacle of free children being sold by avaricious creditors of their fathers. The same Ambrosius, who, although only a Christian Bishop, castigated the Emperor Theodosius for the massacre at Thessalonica, brought his force and courage to play against the law which permitted a debtor to satisfy his claim, at the cost of the liberty of his son, or the debauchery of his daughter, as the fisc was then authorized to sell infants to pay unsatisfied taxes.

A new religion in one of the least important provinces of the Roman Empire, Christianity, in three centuries, pushed its doctrines to the very end of the vast Roman domain, and even made the conquest of the imperial throne itself.

Its impassioned preachers and apostles vaunted the humanity of their new faith; for cast-out infants and the despised slaves the new priests fought such a battle of perseverance and martyrdom as the world had never seen before.

In the name of their new God, Jesus, himself admittedly a poor Jew and a carpenter, they took all the truth there was in the aristocratic philosophy of the Romans and their emperors, and made it live indeed—they applied it to the lowest, and the most humble—even to children. “Nothing human is alien”—this was a verity in the lives of the men who fought the first battles of Christianity.

Every human being had a soul—that was a vital point in their fight. They asserted that children had souls, to which religious doctrine probably more is due in the way of checking the practice of infanticide than any other single idea. We have seen how Plutarch, the polished philosopher, had gone as far as the pagan mind could under its philosophy, in directing thought as to man’s responsibility for actions toward the child, by collecting opinions of the philosophers as to when an unborn child became a human being.

The Fathers won the battle in that they convinced the Roman world that children had souls—but the economic battle was one not yet to be won by preaching. But it was not by orations and preaching alone that they had won as much as they had.

Constantine, in the year 315, as we have seen, had put forth the proclamation:

“Let a law be at once promulgated in all the towns of Italy, to turn parents from using a parricidal hand on their new-born children, and to dispose their hearts to the best sentiments. Watch with care over this, that, if a father brings his child, saying that he cannot support it, someone should supply him without delay with food and clothing; for the cares of the new-born suffer no delay, and we order that our revenue, as well as our treasure, aid in this expense.”380

To this he added, in 321, including the provinces:

“We have learned that the inhabitants of provinces, suffering from scarcity of food, sell and put in pledge their children. We command then that those found in this situation, without any personal resource, and being able only with great trouble to support their children, be succoured by our treasury before they fall under the blows of poverty; for it is repugnant to our morals that any one under our Empire should be pushed by hunger to commit a crime.”381

Ten years later, Constantine had to modify the laws in relation to children—so acute were the sufferings in the Empire—by permitting those who “took up” children to have the right of property in them.382

“Whoever,” said Constantine in his latest law, “has taken in a new-born boy or girl, exposed by the order and with the knowledge of its father or master, outside of the house of the one or the other, has the power to keep him as son or slave without fear that those who rejected him can reclaim him.”

The conditions of the times, as Dugour points out, are well shown by the frequency with which these conditions are referred to. Julius Firmicus, an astrologer of the fourth century, devotes a chapter of his work to revealing combinations of planets that will tell what will be the fate of the child that is exposed. Under certain signs the child will perish through lack of food; under others it will drown; under still another it will be eaten by dogs, and another combination indicated that it would find a saviour and a second father.

In 374, the Emperors Valentinian, Valens, and Gratian declared that the exposure of all infants was punishable, and ordered that parents see to it that their children were fed. The main question that seemed to agitate both the Empire of the East and the Empire of the West was that of the rights of the adoptive parent, as against those who owned the land where the child had been abandoned.

“Let men look to it that they nourish their children. If they expose them, they may be punished in conformity with the law. If other persons take the children up they cannot be reclaimed; as people cannot take again children they have wilfully permitted to perish.”

In 391, Valentinian, Theodosius, and Arcadius permitted, by other law, the child sold by its father to become a free man after a short term of servitude, without reimbursing a master.383

In 409, Honorius and Theodosius issued an edict in favour of Romans sold to other Romans, limiting the period of slavery to five years. Nevertheless, in 412, Honorius and Theodosius confirmed the law of Constantine concerning the sale of infants purchased or taken up with the knowledge of the bishop of the diocese.

An edict of the emperors maintained the rights of the adoptive parents. The right of the latter to their property was also confirmed in cases where the parent or master willingly and knowingly had allowed the child to be exposed.

Another imperial edict ordered that no new-born could be taken from the place where it had been found without the presence of witnesses. A form was drawn up which was to be signed by the bishop.

In 438, these regulations were collected by Theodosius the Second under the Code that bears his name.

In 451, Valentinian the Third declared that the nutritor, or person who had taken up the child, should receive an indemnity, independent of the years of service, and fixed the price to be paid him. The Emperor also declared that those who had sold children to barbarians, or who had purchased a free person for the purpose of transporting him across seas, should be compelled to pay to the fisc, six ounces of gold.384

Following the preachings of the Fathers, and supplementing and strengthening the laws of the Empire, the Church at various councils, called always for some other purpose, took action and frequently condemned the loose morals of the day.

Not orations, nor apologies and pleas alone, says Labourt, would have brought about the new point of view among people so hard pressed and so thoroughly imbued with the ideas of another civilization. At the Council of Ancyra, the modern city of Angora, in the year 314, it was decreed that the woman guilty of killing her offspring should be punished by being forbidden to enter a church for the rest of her life, a terrible punishment in those days.

At the Council of Elvira, the first one held in Spain, by some held to have met before 250, but by Tillemont placed in the year 300, a decree limited the period of retribution to ten years, of which two were to be passed in weeping, at the end of which time the recreant mother could receive the sacraments.

At a Council in 546, the period of penitence was reduced to seven years. At the Council of Constantinople, in 588, or 592, the crime was compared to homicide, and finally Sixtus Quintus and Gregory the Fourteenth stated that the culprits should suffer capital punishment.

At the Council of Nicaea, in 325,—the famous council at which a controversy between Bishop Arius and Bishop Athanasius was “settled,” with the result that Arius was declared a heretic,—it was prescribed, in Article Seventy of its conclusions, that in each village of the Christian world there should be established an asylum, under the name of the Xenodocheion, the object of which was to assist voyageurs, the sick, and the poor. Without doubt, as Labourt suggests, these places became asylums for abandoned children.

The question of the property right was one that the Church had to face in the Council of Vaison, in 442. Frequently after charitable strangers had taken children off the highways, educated them, and brought them up, their parents or their owners would demand their return. It was a vital question of the day: to whom did these children belong?

The Emperor Constantine had declared that those who received them had a right to them and the Emperor Honorius had added the restriction that the Church must know of the adoption. Many were the arguments and the legal battles that ensued, during which time people were little inclined to rescue the abandoned infants and many perished as victims of the voracity of dogs, many as the victims of hunger and cold.385

These conditions were presented to the Council, which ordered the following measures:

“Whoever takes up an abandoned child shall bring him to the Church where that fact will be certified. The following Sunday the priest will announce that a new-born child has been found and ten days will be allowed to the real parents to claim their infant. When these formalities have been complied with, if any one then claims a child or in any way calumniates those who have received it, he will be punished according to the Church laws against homicide.”386

Ten years later the act of the Council of Vaison was sanctioned at the Council of Arles and again in 505, by the Council of Agde.

It has been said that this was comparatively little when one thinks of this great union of bishops representing not only the interests of religion but “the moral needs of the epoch.” On the other hand, any criticism would be unjust that did not take into consideration the fact that it was great progress in the face of great poverty and greater barbarity.387

Church and State united in the movement for the protection of the child in the laws of Justinian, who, raised to the throne in 527, published in 529, and with considerable changes in 534, a collection of laws that have immortalized his name, in which the great lawyer Tribonian remade the three other codes, the Gregorian, Hermogenian, and the Theodosian.

Justinian proclaimed absolute liberty for foundling children, declaring that they were not the property of either the parents who exposed them or of those who received them.

One of these laws, promulgated in 553, punished severely those who tried to hold as slaves, children who had been exposed. This law stated expressly that all children left at churches or other places were absolutely free. It also stated that the act of exposing a child exceeded the cruelty of an ordinary murder, inasmuch as it struck at the most feeble and the most pitiable.

The imperial edict of 553 invited the Archbishop of Thessalonica and the prefect to give to the foundlings all the help possible and to punish those who disobeyed the injunction with a fine of five livres of gold. In addition, the Justinian Code contained a provision by which a father whose poverty was extreme was allowed to sell his son or his daughter at the moment of birth and to repurchase the infant later. The Emperor also ordered that some organized endeavour be made to take care of children for whom no other provision had been made. Unchanged and little modified, with the exception of those amendments made by the Emperor Leon, the philosopher, these laws and these conditions governed the Eastern Empire from now on until its fall before the arms of the Turks.

CHAPTER XIX

CONDITIONS AMONG THE PEOPLES WHO CONQUERED THE ROMAN EMPIRE—IRISH SACRIFICED FIRST BORN—THE WERGELD—THE SALIC LAW—CODE OF THE VISIGOTHS ON EXPOSED CHILDREN—THEODORIC AND CASSIODORUS.

WITH Church and State united in defence of the child’s right to live, we turn to the barbaric hordes that were then enfilading the Roman civilization. For the first time in the history of man the religious law was the same as the civil law, and for the first time in the history of man both represented human law.

With Diocletian’s division of the Empire into four almost equal parts under two Augusti and two Cæsars, there was frank acknowledgment that the great Roman Empire was at an end. With him, too, ended the fiction of a popular sovereignty. The Roman Emperor became an Eastern despot. He was no longer a man of the people easily to be seen and showing his democracy in frequent unofficial parade.

He was now a secluded person wearing the dress of the Orientals, surrounded by servile officials; and the Orientalism of the government went further when Constantine, at the farthest limit of Europe, built a new city, Constantinople, named after himself. Nominally it was but to divide with Rome the honours of being the capital; in reality it was to dim the even now fading lustre of the Seven Hills.

From the frontiers of China to the Baltic there came pressing down on the fast disintegrating Roman Empire armies of barbarians. Amid all the disorder, the calamities without number, when civilization, science, and the arts were all obscured, the Church gained strength, its tenets held sway, its humanities were accepted as the conquerors in their turn became the conquered. The Christian religion slowly gripped them all as out of the convulsions of government there was born the modern Europe.

To the Romans and their adopted allies it was a world of terror—to the Christians it was a friendly world, for the barbarians were known to the Church long before they were known to the soldiers who tried to repulse them.

It has been the fashion to decry the value of the check that the Church put on the barbarous tribes in the early part of the Christian era.388 Up to the very door of the Church there was, it is true, slaughter—there it stopped. Had it not been for the Church upholding what it did of civilization and humanity, it is difficult to say what would have been the outcome of the hordes of Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Gephids, Longobards, Vandals, Burgundians, Franks, and Saxons who, at one time or another, fell upon Rome.

But from the third century these invaders in their very triumph came face to face with a moral force that checked them as no army could, softened their manners, and uniting their rude strength with the last remains of the glory of Rome, gave to the world the civilized nations that now practically control both hemispheres.

Of the first missionary efforts little is known. Jesus himself had said, “Go ye therefore and teach all nations.... Teach them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you,”389 and was indeed himself the first missionary of the new faith. Of his immediate followers only three undertook missionary work.

After the death of Jesus, the Apostles scattered over the whole world. “Thomas,” says Eusebius, “received Parthia as his alloted region; Andrew received Scythia, and John, Asia.... Peter appears to have preached through Pontus, Galatia, Bithynia, Cappadocia, and Asia ... and Paul spread the Gospel from Jerusalem to Illyricum.”390

From another source we are told that Matthew went into Æthiopia, but in the following century there is little light as to who were the missionaries; but that they were everywhere successful is shown by the reports of the Roman governors to the emperors. Undisputed claims of Tertullian and Justin also show that the work of conversion, despite the proscriptions, was going on rapidly enough. Ulfilas, “the Apostle of the Goths,” translated the Bible into their language in 325; Eusebius, Bishop of Vercelli in 370, made his cathedral the centre of missionary work. Chrysostom trained people in the Gothic language and in missionary work and sent them among the Goths according to Theodoretius.391

It was harder work in the West but it was more lasting. From Berins, an islet off the roadstead of Toulon where, in 410 A. D., a Roman patrician, Honoratus, had founded a monastic home, there were sent bishops to Arles, Avignon, Lyons, Troyes, Metz, and Nice, and many other places in southern and western Gaul, all to become the centres of missionary work.392

The proselyting spirit among these Frankish bishops gave rise to a great movement in the north. The preaching of Patrick was followed by what has been described as a marvellous burst of enthusiasm; and Celtic enthusiasm was from now to be counted on. Columba, the founder of Iona, was the missionary for the Northern Picts and the Albanian Scots; Aidan for the Northumbrian Saxons; Columbanus for the Burgundians of the Vosges; Callich or Gallus for north-eastern Switzerland and Germany; Kilian for Thuringia; Virgilius for Carinthia; Fridolin in Suabia and Alsace; Magnoald founded a monastery in Fingen; Trudpert penetrated as far as the Black Forest, where he was killed.

Among these people there had been a variety of conditions before the coming of, first the Romans, and secondly the Christians. Before the arrival of St. Patrick and the conversion of the natives there is very little doubt that part of the pagan worship included human sacrifice. On a plain in what is now the county of Leitrim which was then called the Magh-Sleacth, or Field of Slaughter, these primeval rites took place.

“There on the night of Samhin, the same dreadful tribute which the Carthaginians are known to have paid to Saturn in sacrificing to him their first-born, was by the Irish offered up to their chief idol, Crom-Cruach.”393

Of the Gauls and the Germans we learn something from Cæsar and Tacitus, but both are vague enough when it comes to the subject of children. The two people, according to Strabo, were as much alike as brothers.

“The two races have much in common,” said Martin, “in their social organization.” In Gaul the power of the father was absolute—viri in uxores sicut in liberos vitæ necisque habent potestatem, wrote Cæsar, and Tacitus tells us in Germanicus that the husband had assisted in the execution of his adulterous wife by her nearest relatives—a condition that would lead one to believe that there was high regard for the mother of the family, although it has been said that Tacitus in painting the Germans as virtuous as he did394 was following much along the lines of Fenimore Cooper in painting the Indians a holy pink—he wished to improve the morals of his own countrymen and sacrificed truth as a detaining cargo.

The Germans of the fourth century represented about the period of culture that our American Indians did when the English first arrived in this country. Unlike the Indians, they had the power to learn, whereas the Indians seemed to be able to learn only the vices of civilization. Their imagination stirred by the stories that came back to them of the glory of Rome, they were for pressing forward. With the growing population that made migration necessary, and with the inimical forces pushing them from the rear, the “open road” beckoned them on to Rome.

Before the close of the fourth century the Gospel had been carried to them, especially to those near the Roman border.

We have seen the laws of old Rome become more humane—what were the laws of this later Rome?

Among some of the German tribes, notably among the Frisians, we learn that the father had the right to kill and expose his children when he was unable to provide them with nourishment; but once the child had taken of milk or eaten honey it could not be killed. The Emperor Julian, who loved literature more than he loved religion and has been decorated with the title Apostate, speaks of a custom of some of the barbarians who lived on the banks of the Rhine, which consisted of abandoning the new-born children on the waves of the river, believing that adulterous children would drown and legitimate children would survive.

The Church was here able “to concord the essentials of two bodies of law by discarding the elements of formalism and egoism in the Roman law and the hard and barbaric qualities of the German law; and introduced as governing principles of social and communal life the grave moral principles which Christ had proclaimed. The New Testament was the great law, the legislative ideal for all the Romano-Germanic peoples.”395

In the semi-barbarian laws that came out as the result of the blending of their own customs with the Roman law, the combined product being softened by the Christian teaching, there is evident always the Germanic idea of the wergeld by which a man paid for a crime, from the smallest to the greatest. And instead of the patria potestas we find the mundium, this word (hand) being used to describe all classes of protection.

Infanticide is not mentioned as frequently as is abortion. To the belief that the infant had a soul was traceable this phase of semi-barbarian legislation.

The Franks were not spoken of in history until 240 A. D. (Aurelianus) and Salian Franks whose laws Montesquieu declared were much quoted and seldom read were subdued by Julianus.396

According to the Salic law397 to “kill a child that did not as yet have a name, that is to say one under eight days of age, was to be subject to a fine or wergeld of 100 sous or 4000 deniers”398 xxiii., 4. Si utero in ventre matris sui occisus fuerit, aut ante quod nomen abait, malb anneando, sunt din. iiiM fac. sol. culp. iud.

To kill a boy under ten, according to the early manuscripts, meant a fine of 24,000 deniers, while the later manuscripts raised the age to twelve, as there was greater wergeld for killing one who was then considered a man. Oghlou suggests that while it cost but 200 sous to kill an ordinary free man, the price of an infant under twelve was 600 because “the cowardice of killing a child that had not arrived at the twelfth year appealed to the barbarians.” Such an interpretation would be crediting the Salians with a most humanitarian and nineteenth-century point of view. As a matter of fact, the fine for the murder of a child is the same as for the killing of a sagbaron (Dicuntur quosi senatores).

The words puer crintus have been shown by Kern399 to refer not to the fact that the boy was one of twelve years who had been allowed to wear his hair long, but one who “by right of birth is allowed to wear his hair long in contradistinction to slaves and serfs.”400

To cut the hair of a boy or girl by force—and apparently against their will—meant a fine of forty-five sous. To kill a free girl before the age of twelve cost 200 sous, after the age of twelve, here given as the age of puberty, meant 600 sous. To kill a woman who was enceinte meant a wergeld of 700 sous; to strike a woman who was enceinte was 200 sous; if the child died, 600 sous, if the woman also died, 900 sous, and if the woman was in verbo regis, under the care of the king, 1200 sous.

The Salic law, which was put together by four chosen seigneurs and corrected by Clovis, Childbert, and Lothair, is also interesting in that it put a penalty on murders in such a way as to show that even the unborn child was given a value. A wergeld of 700 sous was declared against one who killed a woman who was enceinte, and to kill an unborn child entailed a wergeld of 200 sous.

The law of the Allemands, the people who have passed away but who have left the name by which the French designate the Germans, differed from the Salic law in an interesting way.

The tendency and underlying idea of the laws of the time is well shown in the law of the Angles which punished the murder of a noble girl non nubile with the same wergeld of 600 sous that it punished the murder of a noble woman who was no longer able to bear children. The murder of a woman who was capable of bearing children was punishable by a wergeld three times the size of this. But the fine for a young girl or non fecund woman of the plain people was only 160 sous.

The Burgundians in their law had no regulation on either infanticide or abortion. The Ripurian Francs declared strongly against both in a law that imposed a fine of 100 sous on “any one who killed a new-born child that had not been named.”

The code of the Visigoths which was arranged after the middle of the fifth century is the severest of all in its penalties as to abortion and those in any way responsible for it.

In the matter of exposed children the law went into details. Parents could not sell children, it states, nor put them in pawn.

“Whoever nourished a child that had been exposed, gained the value of a slave, which had to be paid by the parents of the exposed child when it was reclaimed by its parents. If the parents did not present themselves but they should be found out, they were forced to pay and might be sent into exile. If they did not have the means to pay, the one who had exposed the child became a slave in his place to the rescuer.

“If a slave expose a child unknown to the master and the master swear that he was ignorant of the act, the person who rescues and brings up the child can recover only one fourth of its value; but if the exposure has been with the master’s knowledge, the rescuer can recover the full value of the child.”401

Those to whom a child had been given away to bring up received an agreed price during the first ten years of the child. After that the law declared that the service of the child was sufficient compensation for its nurture—an interesting sidelight on the time when a child became amenable to the “laws of industry.”

In these laws of the Visigoths it is easy to see the influence of Codex Theodosianus.

Among the Anglo-Saxons there was a law (domas) of Ina, King of Wessex, which declared that the nourishment for a child exposed and recovered should be fixed at six sous for the first year, twelve sous for the second year, and thirty for the third. Another law of the same peoples, ascribed to Alfred, made it necessary for the person in charge of a foundling at the time of its death, to establish the fact that the death had occurred in a perfectly natural way, a sage precaution and one centuries ahead of the time.

Theodoric, or Dietrich as Charles Kingsley called him to the chagrin of Max Müller and others, as King of the Ostrogoths made an interesting ruling on the subject of the freedom of children in the year 500. We learn of this through his secretary, Cassiodorus, for, like other kings, the Ostrogoth was wise enough to have the cleverest literary man of his day to write his letters and leave behind his own approved account of his reign.

According to this law, when a father because of poverty was obliged to sell his child, the child did not therefore lose his liberty.402

Showing how nimble was not only the literary talent but the spirit of Cassiodorus, it is interesting to read in another part of the writings of the same author a rescript sent in the name of King Athalaric, the successor of Theodoric and his grandson, to Severus, the governor of Lucania. As a picture of the times that we are accustomed to think of as dark, as well as an example of the dexterous literary skill of Cassiodorus, the letter is worth printing, for while it takes a most reactionary stand on the matter of the sale of children it suggests the epistle of Trajan to Pliny.

“King Athalaric to Severus, Vir Spectabilis.

“We hear that the rustics are indulging in disorderly practices, and robbing the market-people who come down from all quarters to the chief fair of Lucania on the day of St. Cyprian. This must by all means be suppressed, and your Respectability should quietly collect a sufficient number of the owners and tenants of the adjoining farms to overpower these freebooters and bring them to justice. Any rustic or other person found guilty of disturbing the fair should be at once punished with the stick, and then exhibited with some mark of infamy upon him.

“This fair, which according to the old superstition was named Leucothea (after the nymph) from the extreme purity of the fountain at which it is held, is the greatest fair in all the surrounding country. Everything that industrious Campania, or opulent Bruittii, or cattle-breeding Calabria, or strong Apulia produces, is there to be found exposed for sale, on such reasonable terms that no buyer goes away dissatisfied. It is a charming sight to see the broad plains filled with suddenly reared houses formed of leafy branches intertwined: all the beauty of the most leisurely built city, and yet not a wall to be seen. There stand ready boys and girls; with the attractions which belong to their respective sexes and ages, whom not captivity but freedom sets a price upon. These are with good reason sold by their parents, since they themselves gain by their servitude. For one cannot doubt that they are benefited even as slaves (or servants?), by being transferred from the toil of the fields to the service of the cities.

“What can I say of the bright and many coloured garments? what of the sleek well-fed cattle offered at such a price as to tempt any purchaser?

“The place itself is situated in a wide and pleasant plain, a suburb of the ancient city of Cosilinum, and has received the name of Marcilianum from the founder of these sacred springs.

“And this is in truth a marvellous fountain, full and fresh, and of such transparent clearness that when you look through it you think you are looking through air alone. Choice fishes swim about in the pool, perfectly tame, because if anyone presumes to capture them he soon feels the Divine vengeance. On the morning which precedes the holy night (of St. Cyprian), as soon as the priest begins to utter the baptismal prayer, the water begins to rise above its accustomed height. Generally it covers but five steps of the well, but the brute element, as if preparing itself for miracles, begins to swell, and at last covers two steps more, never reached at any other time of the year. Truly a stupendous miracle, that streams of water should thus stand still or increase at the sound of the human voice, as if the fountain itself desired to listen to the sermon.

“Thus hath Lucania a river Jordan of her own. Wherefore, both for religion’s sake and for the profit of the people, it behoves that good order should be kept among the frequenters of the fair, since in the judgment of all, that man must be deemed a villain who would sully the joys of such happy days.”403

CHAPTER XX

GROWTH OF THE HUMANITARIAN MOVEMENT THROUGHOUT EUROPE—IN THE DARK AGES—CHURCH TAKES UP THE HUMANITARIAN WORK IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY—SALE OF CHILDREN COMMON—STORY OF SAINT BATHILDE—CHILDREN SOLD FOR FATHER’S DEBTS—DATHEUS THE FIRST TO OFFER CHILDREN A HOME—APPEAL OF POPE INNOCENT III.

IN the Eastern Empire it was always a fight with the Church on the one hand and barbarian customs on the other for the humanization of the rapidly developing peoples. We may now look at the Dark Ages in a very different spirit from that which animated our fathers. We now know that whatever may have been the faults of the priests or the rulers, the world was making progress, and new and inherently strong peoples were developing as fast as they could assimilate a superior civilization.404

The Church, very early in the history of the Christian era, became the avowed protector of the parentless children and it soon became a custom to confide infants to the Church when mothers felt that they were unable to raise their offspring. The gain made by the Church by this step was immeasurable, for however much those opposed to Christianity might argue, the onward march was irresistible when religion rested itself on the mother instinct and, without accusation or attempted retribution, willingly assumed the ties that maternity was obliged to forego.

By the door of the churches it became the custom to have a marble receptacle in which mothers placed the children that they were forced to abandon. The newly born was received by the matricularii or by the priest, who, following the form prescribed, asked those who assisted at the adoption ceremonies if there was any known person who would consent to take charge of the infant. These formalities had to receive the sanction of the bishop. Not infrequently the priest succeeded in finding among the parishioners of his church someone who would adopt the infant, but if he did not, the church always assumed the responsibility and took care of the orphan. In some places the children that had been abandoned by their mothers were, by the order of the bishop, shown at the door of the church for ten days following their abandonment, and if any one recognized and was able to declare who the parents were, he made such a declaration to the ecclesiastical authorities—a dangerous custom as many unfortunate though innocent people discovered.

In the case where some person not officially connected with the church assumed the responsibility of bringing up the abandoned child, such a person (nutricarii) received with the charge, a document wherein the fact of adoption was set forth, the circumstances under which the child was found, and the right of the adoptive parent to hold the child henceforth as a slave. In this connection it must be remembered that the Code of Justinian, which had put an end to this custom in the East, had no force in the West. The result was that in the European States which succeeded to the Western Roman Empire it was an almost general custom that abandoned children grew up in slavery. Indeed, so general was this custom that even the Church placed the newly born as among its assets, the church of Seville in Spain enumerating the number of abandoned children taken in as among its revenues.

At the Council of Rouen, held in the seventh century, the priests of each diocese were enjoined to inform their congregations that women who were delivered in secret might leave their infants at the door of the church. The church thereby attended to the immediate care of the newly born, and while the fact that the children were brought up in slavery was bad, it was a great improvement over the conditions in Rome and Greece. At least, if brought up in slavery, they were brought up with no criminal purpose and as far as the ecclesiastical authorities were able to regulate their lives, they were not condemned to lives of immorality.

So bad, however, were the conditions in the seventh century, and so miserable and poor were the people, that despite the example and the preachings of the Church, thousands of children were thrown on the highways or left in deserted places to perish of starvation. Among the Gauls, before the domination of the Franks, the heads of families that lacked food, or the means to obtain it, took to the market their children and sold them as they would the veriest chattels.405 This traffic was not only common but it took place publicly, and not only in ancient France but in Germany, in Flanders, in Italy, and in England. Northern Europe was colder, more swampy, and more desolate then than it is now and across the bleak and uncultivated country, country such as one finds nowhere in Europe today but on the professional and bleak battlefields of Bulgaria and Servia, the half-starved peasants tramped, each with his group of children to place on sale when the coasts of Italy or France were reached.

It was in this way that Saint Bathilde, afterward the wife of King Clovis II., became the slave of the mayor of the palace, Archambault. Bought by the latter, she was working as a slave in his household when the King saw her and fell in love with her.406

Moved by such great misery and such odious traffic, holy men went, purse in hand, to the places where these infants were being sold and purchased the unfortunates, giving them later their liberty. In this manner, Saint Eunice was purchased by an Abbé du Berry and Saint Thean by Saint Eloi.

The poverty led to even worse crimes than the selling of their own children for when it was found by the shiftless and impoverished that they could sell their own children and the foundlings that they picked up, not infrequently they robbed more fortunate parents of children that were being well taken care of.

Similar distress and want had led to similar conditions in the fifth century. In 449 A. D., the times were so hard and the people were in such a famished condition in Italy and Gaul that parents sold their children to middlemen even though they knew the children were to be resold to the Vandals in Africa. Two years later Valentinian broke up this practice, declaring that the person who sold a free person for the purpose of having that person sold to the barbarians would be fined six ounces of gold.407

This traffic was carried to such an excess in the British Islands that it became the principal object of an apostolic mission of Gregory who became Pope in 590.

“Our Divine Redeemer,” he wrote, “has delivered us from all servitude and has given unto us our original liberty. Let us imitate his example by freeing from slavery those men who are free by the laws of nature.”

The attitude toward children in England under the Anglo-Saxon kings408 is shown by the fact that a boy’s accountability, his capability of bearing arms and of the management of his property began, according to the earlier laws, in his tenth, but according to the laws of Æthelstan, in his twelfth year.409 “The accountability of children was extended even to the infant in the cradle, whereby, in the case of theft committed by the father, they, like those of mature age, were consigned to slavery, but this cruel practice was by a law of Cnut strictly forbidden.410 This premature majority of the Anglo-Saxon youth accounts for the early accession to the throne of some of the kings, as Edward the Martyr, who was crowned in his thirteenth year. Majority at the age of ten is not mentioned in any other Germanic laws, excepting in favour of the young testator, or the son whose father could not or would not support him. The beginning of the thirteenth year as that of majority is strictly and universally Germanic.”411

“The doctrines of the Church,” say Terme and Monfalcon, “were indeed admirable—they breathed the purest, the finest morality and the most ardent love of humanity, but they were unable to prevail against the ignorance of the people and the barbarity of their morals.”

Coming to the first attempts at organized effort to save children by the Church we find that Article 70 of the Council of Nicaea instructed the bishop to establish in each city a place to which travellers, the sick and the poor, might appeal for aid and shelter. The Xenodocheion, as it was called, is to this day the word for “hotel” in modern Greece, where the traveller in Europe will conclude there is little evidence of improvement since the ecclesiastical foundation. These places were also used as the asylums for children, a fact that led them to be called Brephotrophia.412

In the West a similar movement sprang up, and in the life of Saint Gour, contemporary of Childebert, it is said that at Trèves there was something like a systematic endeavour to protect children. A great obscurity hangs around this foundation, and it is equally difficult to determine positively what is the exact character of the institution ascribed to Saint Marmbœuf, who died in Angers in 654.

Of the efforts of Datheus, however, there are no doubts, though interesting is the fact that no biographical encyclopædia contains even his name. He was Archbishop of Milan, and the first institution to take care of helpless children was founded by him in 787.

“An enervating and sensual life,” declared Datheus in founding the asylum, “leads many astray. They commit adultery and do not dare show the fruits in public and therefore put them to death. By depriving the children of baptism they send them to hell. These horrors would not take place if there existed an asylum where the adulterer could hide her shame, but now they throw the infants in the sewers or the rivers and many are the murders committed on the new-born children as the result of this illicit intercourse.

“Therefore, I, Datheus, for the welfare of my soul and the souls of my associates, do hereby establish in the house that I have bought next to the church, a hospital for foundling children. My wish is that as soon as a child is exposed at the door of a church that it will be received in the hospital and confided to the care of those who will be paid to look after them.... These infants will be taught a trade and my wish is that when they arrive at the age of eight years they will be free from the shackles of slavery and free to come or go wherever they will.”413

In 1380 a similar institution was opened in Venice, and in Florence in 1421. There is no doubt that similar institutions were most frequent in the fifteenth century. Pontanus, a writer of that age, speaks of having seen nine hundred children in the one at Naples, and openly expresses his admiration for the liberal education that they received and the care bestowed on them by their teachers.414

The most purely religious institute appears to have been, according to the able Gaillard, that of the Bourgognes415 in imitation of the charity of St. Marthe in her house in Bethany. An order, that of the chanoines réguliers du Saint Esprit, was founded, or at least encouraged by Guy of Montpellier about the end of the twelfth century for the express purpose of caring for poor and abandoned children. The same institution is also said to have had for its founder, Olivier de la Crau in 1010. In any case it was not until 1188, eight years after the foundation of the order ascribed to Guy of Montpellier, that the hospital of Marseilles was established.

The historians of Languedoc416 do not justify the assumption that this same Guy was the son of the Count of Montpellier, and all that we know is that “Brother Guy” or “Master Guy,” as he was differently called,417 apparently founded an asylum for sick men and abandoned children.

The success of this order was immediate. In 1197, Bernard de Montlaur and his wife left a substantial donation to the Hospital of Saint Esprit at Montpellier, and to Guy, its founder.418 Public approval was followed by official approval, for the Senate of Marseilles, or the Honourable Council, as it was called, held its meetings in the hospital founded there by Guy in 1188 and began its deliberations always with a discussion about the condition of the poor.419

Following the efforts of Guy of Montpellier, at Montpellier and at Marseilles, the movement, under the auspices of the hospitaliers of Saint Esprit, spread so rapidly that before the end of the century there were institutions at Rome,420 one at Bergliac, and one at Troyes, and others in different places.421 The order founded by Guy was given the approval of the Holy See, and its founder was called to Rome by Innocent III. and placed in charge of the house of Santa Maria in Sassia, where the Pope wished the same spirit that had marked Guy’s own institution at Montpellier. Guy died in Rome, 1208.