Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/73

Rh were bought and sold with the land as if they had been sheep or cattle. Now it was ordained that they, with the rest of humanity, should rest on Sundays and feast days, and further, that their lives should be protected, in so much as a man who slew his slave was to do penance for two years, and the woman who, in a rage, beat her slave to death should do penance for seven years.

These penances, or fasts, played a very large part in the social life of this period. They must have been a very real trial to the Anglo-Saxon community, whose old ideal of material enjoyment can hardly have passed entirely. Severe indeed sounds the penance ordered to such as these. Each clause seems intended to mortify to the full the peculiar vanities of these men of old. To expiate sin, they must lay aside all weapons and walk bare-foot, nor must they take shelter at nightfall. They must fast and watch and pray day and night, weary though they be. They must take no warm bath, cut no hair or nails, touch no flesh, drink no ale or mead, enter no church, but just grieve continually for sin.

The possibility of redeeming these penances