GROWTH OF THE HUMANITARIAN MOVEMENT THROUGHOUT EUROPE—IN THE DARK AGES—CHURCH TAKES UP THE HUMANITARIAN WORK IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY—SALE OF CHILDREN COMMON—STORY OF SAINT BATHILDE—CHILDREN SOLD FOR FATHER’S DEBTS—DATHEUS THE FIRST TO OFFER CHILDREN A HOME—APPEAL OF POPE INNOCENT III.

IN the Eastern Empire it was always a fight with the Church on the one hand and barbarian customs on the other for the humanization of the rapidly developing peoples. We may now look at the Dark Ages in a very different spirit from that which animated our fathers. We now know that whatever may have been the faults of the priests or the rulers, the world was making progress, and new and inherently strong peoples were developing as fast as they could assimilate a superior civilization.404

The Church, very early in the history of the Christian era, became the avowed protector of the parentless children and it soon became a custom to confide infants to the Church when mothers felt that they were unable to raise their offspring. The gain made by the Church by this step was immeasurable, for however much those opposed to Christianity might argue, the onward march was irresistible when religion rested itself on the mother instinct and, without accusation or attempted retribution, willingly assumed the ties that maternity was obliged to forego.

By the door of the churches it became the custom to have a marble receptacle in which mothers placed the children that they were forced to abandon. The newly born was received by the matricularii or by the priest, who, following the form prescribed, asked those who assisted at the adoption ceremonies if there was any known person who would consent to take charge of the infant. These formalities had to receive the sanction of the bishop. Not infrequently the priest succeeded in finding among the parishioners of his church someone who would adopt the infant, but if he did not, the church always assumed the responsibility and took care of the orphan. In some places the children that had been abandoned by their mothers were, by the order of the bishop, shown at the door of the church for ten days following their abandonment, and if any one recognized and was able to declare who the parents were, he made such a declaration to the ecclesiastical authorities—a dangerous custom as many unfortunate though innocent people discovered.

In the case where some person not officially connected with the church assumed the responsibility of bringing up the abandoned child, such a person (nutricarii) received with the charge, a document wherein the fact of adoption was set forth, the circumstances under which the child was found, and the right of the adoptive parent to hold the child henceforth as a slave. In this connection it must be remembered that the Code of Justinian, which had put an end to this custom in the East, had no force in the West. The result was that in the European States which succeeded to the Western Roman Empire it was an almost general custom that abandoned children grew up in slavery. Indeed, so general was this custom that even the Church placed the newly born as among its assets, the church of Seville in Spain enumerating the number of abandoned children taken in as among its revenues.

At the Council of Rouen, held in the seventh century, the priests of each diocese were enjoined to inform their congregations that women who were delivered in secret might leave their infants at the door of the church. The church thereby attended to the immediate care of the newly born, and while the fact that the children were brought up in slavery was bad, it was a great improvement over the conditions in Rome and Greece. At least, if brought up in slavery, they were brought up with no criminal purpose and as far as the ecclesiastical authorities were able to regulate their lives, they were not condemned to lives of immorality.

So bad, however, were the conditions in the seventh century, and so miserable and poor were the people, that despite the example and the preachings of the Church, thousands of children were thrown on the highways or left in deserted places to perish of starvation. Among the Gauls, before the domination of the Franks, the heads of families that lacked food, or the means to obtain it, took to the market their children and sold them as they would the veriest chattels.405 This traffic was not only common but it took place publicly, and not only in ancient France but in Germany, in Flanders, in Italy, and in England. Northern Europe was colder, more swampy, and more desolate then than it is now and across the bleak and uncultivated country, country such as one finds nowhere in Europe today but on the professional and bleak battlefields of Bulgaria and Servia, the half-starved peasants tramped, each with his group of children to place on sale when the coasts of Italy or France were reached.

It was in this way that Saint Bathilde, afterward the wife of King Clovis II., became the slave of the mayor of the palace, Archambault. Bought by the latter, she was working as a slave in his household when the King saw her and fell in love with her.406

Moved by such great misery and such odious traffic, holy men went, purse in hand, to the places where these infants were being sold and purchased the unfortunates, giving them later their liberty. In this manner, Saint Eunice was purchased by an AbbÉ du Berry and Saint Thean by Saint Eloi.

The poverty led to even worse crimes than the selling of their own children for when it was found by the shiftless and impoverished that they could sell their own children and the foundlings that they picked up, not infrequently they robbed more fortunate parents of children that were being well taken care of.

Similar distress and want had led to similar conditions in the fifth century. In 449 A. D., the times were so hard and the people were in such a famished condition in Italy and Gaul that parents sold their children to middlemen even though they knew the children were to be resold to the Vandals in Africa. Two years later Valentinian broke up this practice, declaring that the person who sold a free person for the purpose of having that person sold to the barbarians would be fined six ounces of gold.407

This traffic was carried to such an excess in the British Islands that it became the principal object of an apostolic mission of Gregory who became Pope in 590.

“Our Divine Redeemer,” he wrote, “has delivered us from all servitude and has given unto us our original liberty. Let us imitate his example by freeing from slavery those men who are free by the laws of nature.”

The attitude toward children in England under the Anglo-Saxon kings408 is shown by the fact that a boy’s accountability, his capability of bearing arms and of the management of his property began, according to the earlier laws, in his tenth, but according to the laws of Æthelstan, in his twelfth year.409 “The accountability of children was extended even to the infant in the cradle, whereby, in the case of theft committed by the father, they, like those of mature age, were consigned to slavery, but this cruel practice was by a law of Cnut strictly forbidden.410 This premature majority of the Anglo-Saxon youth accounts for the early accession to the throne of some of the kings, as Edward the Martyr, who was crowned in his thirteenth year. Majority at the age of ten is not mentioned in any other Germanic laws, excepting in favour of the young testator, or the son whose father could not or would not support him. The beginning of the thirteenth year as that of majority is strictly and universally Germanic.”411

“The doctrines of the Church,” say Terme and Monfalcon, “were indeed admirable—they breathed the purest, the finest morality and the most ardent love of humanity, but they were unable to prevail against the ignorance of the people and the barbarity of their morals.”

Coming to the first attempts at organized effort to save children by the Church we find that Article 70 of the Council of Nicaea instructed the bishop to establish in each city a place to which travellers, the sick and the poor, might appeal for aid and shelter. The Xenodocheion, as it was called, is to this day the word for “hotel” in modern Greece, where the traveller in Europe will conclude there is little evidence of improvement since the ecclesiastical foundation. These places were also used as the asylums for children, a fact that led them to be called Brephotrophia.412

In the West a similar movement sprang up, and in the life of Saint Gour, contemporary of Childebert, it is said that at TrÈves there was something like a systematic endeavour to protect children. A great obscurity hangs around this foundation, and it is equally difficult to determine positively what is the exact character of the institution ascribed to Saint Marmboeuf, who died in Angers in 654.

Of the efforts of Datheus, however, there are no doubts, though interesting is the fact that no biographical encyclopÆdia contains even his name. He was Archbishop of Milan, and the first institution to take care of helpless children was founded by him in 787.

“An enervating and sensual life,” declared Datheus in founding the asylum, “leads many astray. They commit adultery and do not dare show the fruits in public and therefore put them to death. By depriving the children of baptism they send them to hell. These horrors would not take place if there existed an asylum where the adulterer could hide her shame, but now they throw the infants in the sewers or the rivers and many are the murders committed on the new-born children as the result of this illicit intercourse.

“Therefore, I, Datheus, for the welfare of my soul and the souls of my associates, do hereby establish in the house that I have bought next to the church, a hospital for foundling children. My wish is that as soon as a child is exposed at the door of a church that it will be received in the hospital and confided to the care of those who will be paid to look after them.... These infants will be taught a trade and my wish is that when they arrive at the age of eight years they will be free from the shackles of slavery and free to come or go wherever they will.”413

In 1380 a similar institution was opened in Venice, and in Florence in 1421. There is no doubt that similar institutions were most frequent in the fifteenth century. Pontanus, a writer of that age, speaks of having seen nine hundred children in the one at Naples, and openly expresses his admiration for the liberal education that they received and the care bestowed on them by their teachers.414

The most purely religious institute appears to have been, according to the able Gaillard, that of the Bourgognes415 in imitation of the charity of St. Marthe in her house in Bethany. An order, that of the chanoines rÉguliers du Saint Esprit, was founded, or at least encouraged by Guy of Montpellier about the end of the twelfth century for the express purpose of caring for poor and abandoned children. The same institution is also said to have had for its founder, Olivier de la Crau in 1010. In any case it was not until 1188, eight years after the foundation of the order ascribed to Guy of Montpellier, that the hospital of Marseilles was established.

The historians of Languedoc416 do not justify the assumption that this same Guy was the son of the Count of Montpellier, and all that we know is that “Brother Guy” or “Master Guy,” as he was differently called,417 apparently founded an asylum for sick men and abandoned children.

The success of this order was immediate. In 1197, Bernard de Montlaur and his wife left a substantial donation to the Hospital of Saint Esprit at Montpellier, and to Guy, its founder.418 Public approval was followed by official approval, for the Senate of Marseilles, or the Honourable Council, as it was called, held its meetings in the hospital founded there by Guy in 1188 and began its deliberations always with a discussion about the condition of the poor.419

Following the efforts of Guy of Montpellier, at Montpellier and at Marseilles, the movement, under the auspices of the hospitaliers of Saint Esprit, spread so rapidly that before the end of the century there were institutions at Rome,420 one at Bergliac, and one at Troyes, and others in different places.421 The order founded by Guy was given the approval of the Holy See, and its founder was called to Rome by Innocent III. and placed in charge of the house of Santa Maria in Sassia, where the Pope wished the same spirit that had marked Guy’s own institution at Montpellier. Guy died in Rome, 1208.

The house of Santa Maria in Sassia to which Guy was called was attached to the church of that name which had been founded by Gna, king of the later Saxons, in 715. It had undergone many disastrous changes, but in 1198 Innocent III., at his own expense, had it renovated and repaired for the sick and poor of Rome. In 1204, moved by the frequency with which the fishermen of the Tiber found in their nets the bodies of children that had been thrown into the river, the Pope dedicated part of the hospital to the care of abandoned children, and it was to this institution that Guy of Montpellier was called.

The humane movement spread rapidly, generally under at least the nominal guidance of the Order of Saint Esprit. Many institutions, however, were founded in the name of Saint Esprit where little attention was paid to children.

The institution at Embeck422 founded in 1274 made a special work of taking care of abandoned children in the name of Saint Esprit. We come now to the name of Enrad Fleinz,423 that bourgeois of Nuremberg, who in 1331 founded in his natal town the first hospital where not only children might be left, but where women might go to be delivered, without regard to whether the offspring were legitimate or not. This, too, was in the name of Saint Esprit, and in the year 1362, a similar asylum for orphans was founded in Paris.

It was indeed under the auspices of this order that the movement which began with the imperial Brephotrophia in the sixth century grew, until the various institutions of one sort or another intended to prevent the outright murder of children or their abandonment in deserted places were dependent, not on the humanity of any one man or group of men, but on the new-born spirit that was then spreading throughout Europe and that continued to spread even when individualism and materialism as ruling forces had supplanted religion and asceticism. The history of charity, which, as Lecky says, is yet to be written, will doubtless reveal, when it comes to be written, the various unappreciated factors that went to produce the humane movement.

Some idea of how rapidly these institutions had multiplied may be obtained from a bull of Nicholas IV., containing a long enumeration of the various foundations, which includes places in Italy, Sicily, Germany, England, France, and Spain.424

Besides those enumerated by the Pope, there were however other institutions springing up where, either as an adjunct to hospital work or as an independent work itself, children were being cared for. As one of the original and most scholarly writers on this phase of the subject has pointed out, it is difficult to make positive statements about these foundations, for the men interested were intent on their work rather than on leaving a record of it behind. Perhaps in this connection, some future historian, in viewing the voluminous charitable records of our day, will assume that “social” egotism has been well saddled, and made to do more than the work of a timely charitable impulse.

The conditions that led to the crusade of Vincent of Paul antedated that philanthropist by several hundred years. Where the religious spirit had failed to arouse interest in the problem of the welfare of parentless children, the large cities of Europe were themselves forced to take some action. Milan, in 1168, on the prayer of the Cardinal Galdinus, founded a hospital (which would indicate that the institution founded by Datheus had either fallen into disuse or was inadequate) and Venice in 1380 followed the example of Milan, while the magnificent hospital for foundling children in Florence (Spidale degl’ Innocenti) was founded, after a long deliberation in open council, on October 25, 1421.

Included in these governmental or municipal movements is that of St. Thomas of Villeneuve, Archbishop of Valence, who created an asylum in his own palace at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and gave orders that no children presented there should be turned away.

The Hotel-Dieu de Notre Dame de PitiÉ of Lyons, which by letters patent of 1720 was declared to be the oldest hospital of France, commenced in 1523 the same work, and in that year is recorded as having received nine children. On February 25, 1530, FranÇois the First recognized the right of the institution to take in these children.

In 1596 the city of Amsterdam began to make provision for the abandoned children.

The beginning of the movement in Paris, we learn, was the result of the terrible conditions that followed the war in 1360, 1361, and 1362.425 Poverty and misery were everywhere, and a large number of orphans practically lived and died in the streets, says Breuil in his AntiquitÉs de Paris. Various charitable people took in some of these unfortunates, the Hotel-Dieu being overrun; but, as the conditions were but little ameliorated, on February 7, 1362, a group of citizens went to the “Reverend father in God, Messire Jean de Meulant, 88th Bishop of Paris,” and discussed with him the frightful conditions of the poor boys and girls of Paris. The evils attending the homeless condition of the latter were especially considered. We are told that the result of the conference was that the Bishop gave them permission to institute and erect a hospital of Saint Esprit and bestowed on each one of the conferees forty days’ indulgence.

The institution that arose as a result of this conference has been criticized as being narrow in its purpose, inasmuch as the rules declared that only legitimate children, born of parents in Paris, were to be admitted; but the restriction, it must be understood, was necessary, in view of the small funds in hand.

But humanitarian feeling was growing; and people were beginning to be proud of being thoughtful and kind. It was no longer a mark of superiority to be lustful of blood. Botterays, in a Latin poem on Paris,426 spoke of the splendid way in which the orphan children of Paris were brought up, referring to the Hospital of Saint Esprit and the House of the Enfants-Dieu. After long years of nominal acquiescence in its teachings, the barbarians of the North were really beginning to accept the Christianity of Christ.