We learn nothing in the facts of history to the discredit of the Anglo-Saxon character in general. As in other countries, in the same condition of society, they appear capable of great crimes, and of equally great acts of goodness and virtue. Generally speaking, their least amiable trait was the treatment of their servants or slaves; for this class among the Anglo-Saxons were in a state of absolute servitude, might be bought and sold, and had no protection in the law against their masters and mistresses, who, in fact, had power of life and death over them. We gather from the ecclesiastical canons that, at least in the earlier periods of Anglo-Saxon history, it was not unusual for servants to be scourged to death by or by order of their mistresses. Some of the collections of local miracles, such as those of St. Swithun, at Winchester (of the tenth century), furnish us with horrible pictures of the cruel treatment to which female slaves especially were subjected. For comparatively slight offences they were loaded with gyves and fetters, and subjected to all kinds of tortures. Several of these are curiously illustrative of domestic manners. On one occasion, the maid-servant of Teothic the bell-maker (_campanarius_), of Winchester, was, for “a slight offence,” placed in iron fetters, and chained up by the feet and hands all night. Next morning she was taken out to be frightfully beaten, and she was put again into her bonds; but in the ensuing night she contrived to make her escape, and fled to the church to seek sanctuary at the tomb of St. Swithun, for being in a state of servitude there was no legal protection for her. On another occasion, a female servant had been stolen from a former master, and had passed into the possession of another master in Winchester. One day her former master came to Winchester, and the girl, hearing of it, went to speak to him. When her mistress heard that she had been seen to talk with a man from a distant province, she ordered her to be thrown into fetters, and treated very cruelly. Next day, while the mistress had gone out on some business, leaving her servant at home in fetters, the latter made her escape similarly to the sanctuary of the church. Another servant-girl in Winchester, taking her master’s clothes to wash in the river, was set upon by thieves, who robbed her of them. Her master, ascribing the mishap to her own negligence, beat her very severely, and then put her in fetters, from which she made her escape like the others. The interesting scene represented in our cut, No. 37, taken from the Harleian MS., No. 603, fol. 14, v^o., may be regarded as showing us the scourging of a slave. In a picture in Alfric’s version of Genesis, the man scourged, instead of being tied by the feet, is fixed by the body in a cloven post, in a rather singular manner. The aptness with which the Saxon ladies made use of the scourge is illustrated by one of William of Malmesbury’s anecdotes, who tells