This personal independence of the freeman is one of the distinguishing characteristics of all the primitive Teutonic institutions. Corporal punishments for him were unknown to the laws. The principal resource for the repression of crime was by giving free scope to the vengeance of the injured party, and by providing fixed rates of composition by which he could be bought off. As the criminal could defend himself with the sword against the _faida_ or feud of his adversary, or could compound for his guilt with money, the suggestion of torturing him to extort a confession would seem an absurd violation of all his rights. Crimes were regarded solely as injuries to individuals, and the idea that society at large was interested in their discovery, punishment, and prevention, was entirely too abstract to have any influence on the legislation of so barbarous an age. Accordingly, the codes of the Feini, the Ripuarians, the Alamanni, the Angli and Werini, the Frisians, the Saxons, and the Lombards contain no allusion to the employment of torture under any circumstances; and such few directions for its use as occur in the laws of the Salien Franks, of the Burgundians, and of the Baioarians, do not conflict with the general principle. The personal inviolability which shielded the freeman cast no protection over the slave. He was merely a piece of property, and if he were suspected of a crime, the readiest and speediest way to convict him was naturally adopted. His denial could not be received as satisfactory, and the machinery of sacramental purgation or the judicial duel was not for him. If he were charged with a theft at home, his master would undoubtedly tie him up and flog him until he confessed, and if the offence were committed against a third party, the same process would necessarily be adopted by the court. Barbarian logic could arrive at no other mode of discovering and repressing crime among the friendless and unprotected, whose position seemed to absolve them from all moral responsibility. The little that we know of the institutions of the ancient Gauls presents us with an illustration of the same principle developed in a somewhat different direction. Cæsar states that, when a man of rank died, his relatives assembled and investigated the circumstances of his death. If suspicion alighted upon his wives, they were tortured like slaves, and if found guilty they were executed with all the refinements of torment.[1457]