[350]. “And eác heó hafað gefreód ða men ða heó þingede æt Cwæspatrike;” And she hath also freed the men whom she interceded for with Cospatrick. Cod. Dip. No. 925. Marculf gives the Frankish formulary, as follows; it is the case of one who has been redeemed from capital punishment: “Et ego de rebus meis, unde vestra beneficia rependere debuissem, non habeo; ideo pro hoc statum ingenuitatis meae vobis visus sum obnoxiasse, ita ut ab hac die de vestro servitio penitus non discedam.” Form. Marculf. ii. 28.
[351]. The wife, by the act of the husband, I think very doubtful, in point of right. In point of fact this case may have occurred much more frequently than our records vouch.
[352]. The illegitimate offspring of his own wife, a husband was not likely to spare. An old German tale records this fact. Her lord returning from a long absence and finding a child which could not be his own in the house, was told by the faithless mother, that when walking in the fields a flake of snow had fallen into her bosom and impregnated her. Afterwards the husband took the child to Italy and sold him there, excusing himself to the mother by the assertion that the heat of the sun had melted the snow-child:—
“De nive conceptum quem mater adultera finxit;
Hunc dominus vendens liquefactum sole retulit.”
[353]. Lingard (A. S. Church, i. 45) accuses the pagan Saxons of selling their children into foreign slavery. I am not sure that this is not asserted too strongly by this estimable author, who appears unjustly to depreciate the Saxons, in order to enhance the merit of their convertors. I admit the probability of the fact, only because the right is a direct corollary from the paternal power, and because Archbishops Theodore and Ecgberht (the first a Roman missionary) recognize it; but I cannot suppose its exercise to have been common.
[354]. Tac. Annal. iv. 72.
[355]. Theodori Arch. Cant., Liber Poenitentialis, xxviii. Thorpe, A. S. Laws, ii. 19.
[356]. Confessionale Ecgberhti Arch. Ebor. xxvii. Thorpe, ii. 153.
[357]. The only way of getting rid of this strange contradiction is, either to assume the passage to be a later interpolation, which there is no ground for, save the contradiction itself; or to take the passage in connection with Theodor. Poen. xlii. § 3, 4, 5, which refer to sale of a Christian among Jews or Heathens, and generally to fraudulent or illegal sale. But then, one cannot understand why the words “infantem suum proprium, vel proximum suum cognatum” should have been introduced by Ecgberht, though omitted by Theodore. Perhaps we may reconcile the passages, by assuming Ecgberht to refer to an illegal sale, viz. when the child was above seven years old, but still in the same category as those for whose safety Theodore provides by the same ecclesiastical penalty. The child or very near relation were precisely those who were most liable to be in “alteram regionem seducti, furati,” etc.