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 kings[408] 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.