[205] Justin Martyr, Apologia I. pro Christianis, 29, 27 (Migne, Patrologiæ cursus, Ser. Graeca, vi. 373 sq., 369 sqq.).
[206] Cf. Spangenberg, in Neues Archiv des Criminalrechts, iii. 20; Lecky, History of European Morals, ii. 23.
[207] Canon Hludowici regis, 9 (Pertz, Monum. Germaniæ historica, iii. 413).
[208] Isambert, Decrusy, and Armet, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, xiii. 472 sq.
[209] Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, iv. 198.
[210] Erskine, Principles of the Law of Scotland, p. 560.
[211] Lecky, History of European Morals, ii. 23.
If the Pagans had been comparatively indifferent to the sufferings of the exposed infant, the Christians became all the more cruel to the unfortunate mother, who, perhaps in a fit of despair, had put to death her new-born child. The Christian emperor Valentinian I. made infanticide a capital offence.[212] According to the Coutume de Loudunois, a mother who killed her child was burned.[213] In Germany and Switzerland she was buried alive with a pale thrust through her body;[214] this punishment was prescribed by the criminal code of Charles V., side by side with drowning.[215] Until the end of the eighteenth, or the beginning of the nineteenth, century, infanticide was a capital crime everywhere in Europe, except in Russia.[216] Then, under the influence of that rationalistic movement which compelled men to rectify so many preconceived opinions,[217] it became manifest that an unmarried woman who destroyed her illegitimate child was not in the same category as an ordinary murderess.[218] It was pointed out that shame and fear, the excitement of mind, and the difficulty in rearing the poor bastard, could induce the unfortunate mother to commit a crime which she herself abhorred. That no notice had been taken of all this, is explicable from the extreme severity with which female unchastity was looked upon by the Church. At present most European lawbooks do not punish infanticide committed by an unmarried woman even nominally with death.[219] In France the law which regards infanticide as an aggravated form of meurtre[220] has become a dead letter;[221] and in England no woman seems for a long time to have been executed for killing her new-born child under the distress of mind and fear of shame caused by child-birth.[222]
[212] Codex Theodosianus, ix. 14. 1. Institutiones, ix. 16, 7.
[213] Tissot, Le droit pénal, ii. 40.