Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/273

THE HEIAN EPOCH enactments received modification at the beginning of the ninth century. Thenceforth the issue of a mixed marriage received the status of whichever parent stood higher in the social scale. But the spirit of exclusiveness underwent no change, and there is also evidence that, in the long medieval era of incessant war, the practice of kidnapping young persons of both sexes and selling them into serfdom constituted one of the prominent abuses of the age. 243