Si autem ibi filios et filias generaverit, ipsi servi et ancillæ permaneant, potestatem exinde (exeundi) non habeant.
“But if she shall have there borne sons and daughters, they shall continue slaves, and not have power of going forth.”
Her freedom was not, however, immediately destroyed, for the law proceeds—
Illa autem mater eorum, quando exire voluerit, ante annos iii, liberam habeat potestatem.
“But she, their mother, when she may desire to go forth before three years, shall have free power therefor.”
In this case the marriage subsisted, but the free woman could separate, without however the marriage-bond being rent. If she remained beyond the time of three years, she lost her freedom; and it shows us that, probably, previous to this amendment, any free woman who married a slave, thereby lost her own freedom; and that the tenth canon, showing the marriage of which it treated to be invalid, showed that the woman should not lose her liberty. The concluding provision of the ninth law is as follows:
Si autem iii annos induraverit opus ancillæ, et parentes ejus non exadomaverunt eam ut libera fuisset, nec ante comitem, ducem, nec ante regem, nec in publico mallo, transactis tribus kalendis Martis, (Martu,) post hæc ancilla permaneat in perpetuum, et quicumque ex ea nati fuerint servi et ancillæ sunt.
“But if she shall have continued three years doing the work of a slave, and her relations have not brought her out so that she should be free, either before the count, or the duke, or the king, or in the public high court, (mall,) when the kalends of March shall have thrice passed, after this she shall remain perpetually a slave, and they who shall be born of her, male and female, shall be slaves.”
In 774, Pope Adrian I. delivered to Charlemagne a digest of canon law, then in force, in which we find—
“The third of Gangræ, condemning as guilty of heresy those who taught that religion sanctioned the slave in despising his master; the thirtieth in the African collection, which showed that the power of manumission in the church was derived from the civil authority; the one hundred and second of the same, which declared slaves and freed persons disqualified to prosecute, except in certain cases and for injuries done to themselves.”