In accordance with this tendency of legislation, therefore, we find that among the Barbarians the legal regulations for the torture of slaves are intended to protect the interests of the owner alone. When a slave was accused of crime the master, indeed, could not refuse to hand him over to the torturer, unless he were willing to pay for him the full _wer-gild_ of a freeman, and if the slave confessed under the torture, the master had no claim for compensation arising either from the punishment or crippling of his bondman.[1458] When, however, the slave could not be forced to confess and was acquitted, the owner had a claim for damages, though no compensation was made to the unfortunate sufferer himself. The original law of the Burgundians, promulgated in 471, is the earliest of the Teutonic codes extant, and in that we find that the accuser who failed to extract a confession was obliged to give to the owner another slave, or to pay his value.[1459] The Baioarian law is equally careful of the rights of ownership, but seems in addition to attach some criminality to the excess of torture by the further provision that, if the slave die under the torment without confession, the prosecutor shall pay to the owner two slaves of like value, and if unable to do so, that he shall himself be delivered up as a slave.[1460] The Salic law, on the other hand, only guards the interests of the owner by limiting the torture to 120 blows with a rod of the thickness of the little finger. If this does not extort a confession, and the accuser is still unsatisfied, he can deposit with the owner the value of the slave, and then proceed to torture him at his own risk and pleasure.[1461] It will be observed that all these regulations provide merely for extracting confessions from accused slaves, and not testimony from witnesses. Indeed, the system of evidence adopted by all the Barbarian laws for freemen was of so different a character, that no thought seems to have been entertained of procuring proof by the torture of witnesses. The only allusion, indeed, to such a possibility shows how utterly repugnant it was to the Barbarian modes of thought. In some MSS. of the Salic law there occurs the incidental remark that when a slave accused is under the torture, if his confession implicates his master, the charge is not to be believed.[1462]