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]