According to the Code of Hammurabi, adopted some 2,500 years before Christ’s time, a surgeon of Babylon who performed an unsuccessful operation, lost the hand that operated upon the patient and for other offenses, mutilation and blindness was provided for by this ancient code of laws.[88] William the Conqueror prohibited his nobles from inflicting the death penalty upon criminals who formerly suffered death by hanging, but in lieu of this more humane punishment, he authorized that criminals convicted of certain felonies should be blinded, by having their eyes pulled out; they were subjected to castration and to mutilation, by having their _hands and feet cut off_, according to the greatness of the offense, to the end that they might live and furnish a horrible example to others committing such crimes.[89] According to Wigorn, in his annals, certain Welchmen, convicted of treason, in the eleventh century, had all these several kinds of punishment inflicted upon them.[90] Fox, in his work on Martyrology, reports a miracle in the case of Elivard, of Weston Regis, in Bedfordshire, who, being convicted of stealing a pair of hedging gloves and a whetstone, in the reign of Henry II., lost his eyes and genitals, and through his devout prayers, at the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, they were restored to him again.[91] This punishment by blinding and mutilation continued but a short time, in England, however, for King Henry I., in the year 1108, in the ninth year of his reign repealed this law and provided hanging for felons convicted of theft or robbery,[92] who had formerly been subject to the punishment of blinding or mutilation, by this harsh law of William the Conqueror. In Switzerland, at an early day, blasphemers were subject to having their _lips and tongue cut off_[93] and under the custom of Avignon, in 1243, a perjurer was liable to punishment by having his lips and nose removed.[94] _Cutting off the ears_ was a punishment inflicted upon religious and political criminals in England, as late as the seventeenth century and the notable case of Bastwick, Burton and Prynne, who had their ears removed all at one time, in the Palace Yard, in London, in the year 1637, illustrates the barbarous cruelty then obtaining as to this class of criminals.