There is a very curious paragraph relating to infants in the Pœnitentiale of Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury, which furnishes us with a singular picture of early Anglo-Saxon domestic life, for Theodore flourished in the latter half of the seventh century. It may be perhaps right to explain that a Pœnitentiale was a code of ecclesiastical laws directing the proportional degrees of penance for each particular class and degree of crimes and offences against public and private morals, and that these laws penetrate to the innermost recesses of domestic life. The Pœnitentiale of archbishop Theodore directs that “if a woman place her infant by the hearth, and the man put water in the cauldron, and it boil over, and the child be scalded to death, the woman must do penance for her negligence, but the man is acquitted of blame.”[10] As this accident must have been of very frequent occurrence to require a particular direction in a code of laws, it implies great negligence in the Anglo-Saxon mothers, and seems to show that, commonly, at least at this early period, they had no cradles for their children, but laid them, swaddled as they were, on the ground close by the fire, no doubt to keep them warm, and that they left them in this situation. [Illustration: _No. 36. Mother and Child._] We are not informed if there were any fixed period during which the infant was kept in swaddling-cloths, but probably when it was thought no longer necessary to keep it in the arms or in the cradle, it was relieved from its bands, and allowed to crawl about the floor and take care of itself. Walter de Bibblesworth, the Anglo-Norman writer of the thirteenth century already quoted, tells us briefly that a child is left to creep about before it has learnt to go on its feet:-- _Le enfaunt covent de chatouner_ _Avaunt ke sache à pées aler._ When the Anglo-Saxon youth, if a boy, had passed his infancy, he entered that age which was called _cnithad_ (knighthood), which lasted from about eight years of age until manhood.