“Query. 1. Are cousin germans allowed to marry? Answer. This indulgence was formerly granted by the Roman law; but experience having shewn that no posterity can come from such marriages, they are prohibited. Query. 2. Is it lawful to baptize a woman with child? Answer. No inconvenience can arise from the practice. Query. 3. How soon after the birth may a child be baptized? Answer. Immediately if necessary. Query. 4. How soon may the husband return to the wife after her delivery? Answer. Not till after the child is weaned. Query. 5. How soon after sexual intercourse, is it lawful for a husband to enter the church? Answer. Not till he has purged himself by prayer and ablution.”
These nice and delicate queries, with more of the same sort, were accompanied by others concerning episcopal duties.—With the solution of these problems, the pope sent Austin the pall, (a piece of white woollen cloth, to be thrown over the shoulders, as a badge of archiepiscopal dignity;) sundry other ecclesiastical vestments and utensils, and instructions to erect twelve sees within his province, and particularly to appoint one at York, which, if the country should become christian, he was to convert into a province, with its suffragan bishops.—Thus did Austin become the first archbishop of Canterbury, and thus originated our ecclesiastical establishment, the renowned Church of England. [Aikin’s Biogr. vol. 1.]—Among other counsels which Austin received from the pontiff on the above occasion, was an exhortation “not to be elated with vanity on account of the miracles which he had been enabled to perform in confirmation of his ministry, but to remember that this power was given, not for his own sake, but for the sake of those whose salvation he was appointed to procure.”—Thus we have it from very high authority, that the first archbishop of Canterbury was a worker of miracles.
[253] The other orders were the middle and inferior thanes: the former are said to be the lesser barons, or lords of manors; and the latter made up the lowest degree of freeholders. Dyde Hist. Tewksbury. 141.—All others in the Anglo-Saxon community below these thanes, who were the nobles of those times, are sometimes comprized under the heads of untitled freemen, and slaves—the latter, constituting the great mass of the inhabitants, were the property of their lords, like the present Russian or Bohemian peasantry.
[254a] Petit Andrews, 1. 83.
[254b] Henry, and Petit Andrews.
[257a] Dyde’s History of Tewksbury, 139, 40, 41.
[257b] See Parkin.
[257c] “Directly opposite the Irish coast, (says William of Malmsbury) there is a seaport town, called Bristol, the inhabitants of which frequently sail into Ireland, to sell there people whom they had bought up throughout all England. They expose to sale maidens in a state of pregnancy, with whom they had made a sort of mock-marriages. There you might see with grief, fastened together by ropes, whole rows of wretched beings, of both sexes, of elegant forms, and in the very bloom of youth, (a sight sufficient to excite pity, even in barbarians,) daily offered for sale to the first purchaser. Accursed deed! Infamous disgrace! that men, acting in a manner which brutal instinct alone would have forbidden, should sell into slavery their relations, nay even their offspring!”—Life of Wolstan, bishop of Worcester, B. ii, C. 20.—[see Edinburgh Review, July, 1808.]
[259] Petit Andrews Hist. of Great Britain, 1. 84. Another historian informs us, that the great lords and abbots, among the Anglo-Saxons, possessed a criminal jurisdiction within their territories, and could punish or protect without appeal. This power, he says, was in some measure restrained by the established administration of justice, by the courts of decennary, the hundred, and the county. In the Anglo-Saxon courts, the accused was allowed to clear himself by his own oath, and the concurring oaths of his friends. These were called compurgators, and sometimes amounted to 300. The practices also of single combat, and the ordeal, were allowed in doubtful cases; and absurd as they may appear, the result was deemed complete evidence, for or against the accused, or suspected person.—The punishment of crimes was not less singular than the general proofs of guilt. A fine was the customary mode of commuting the punishment of the blackest offences; and as fines were a source of revenue, they were fixed with the nicest care, on a graduated scale, corresponding to the magnitude of the crime. Thus a wound of an inch long, under the hair, was compounded for with one shilling; a wound of the like size in the face, with two shillings; and thirty shillings was the compensation for the loss of an ear; and so on in proportion.—Mavor, 1. 77.
[260] See Andrews.