In the case where some person not officially connected with the church assumed the responsibility of bringing up the abandoned child, such a person (_nutricarii_) received with the charge, a document wherein the fact of adoption was set forth, the circumstances under which the child was found, and the right of the adoptive parent to hold the child henceforth as a slave. In this connection it must be remembered that the Code of Justinian, which had put an end to this custom in the East, had no force in the West. The result was that in the European States which succeeded to the Western Roman Empire it was an almost general custom that abandoned children grew up in slavery. Indeed, so general was this custom that even the Church placed the newly born as among its assets, the church of Seville in Spain enumerating the number of abandoned children taken in as among its revenues. At the Council of Rouen, held in the seventh century, the priests of each diocese were enjoined to inform their congregations that women who were delivered in secret might leave their infants at the door of the church. The church thereby attended to the immediate care of the newly born, and while the fact that the children were brought up in slavery was bad, it was a great improvement over the conditions in Rome and Greece. At least, if brought up in slavery, they were brought up with no criminal purpose and as far as the ecclesiastical authorities were able to regulate their lives, they were not condemned to lives of immorality. So bad, however, were the conditions in the seventh century, and so miserable and poor were the people, that despite the example and the preachings of the Church, thousands of children were thrown on the highways or left in deserted places to perish of starvation. Among the Gauls, before the domination of the Franks, the heads of families that lacked food, or the means to obtain it, took to the market their children and sold them as they would the veriest chattels.[405] This traffic was not only common but it took place publicly, and not only in ancient France but in Germany, in Flanders, in Italy, and in England. Northern Europe was colder, more swampy, and more desolate then than it is now and across the bleak and uncultivated country, country such as one finds nowhere in Europe today but on the professional and bleak battlefields of Bulgaria and Servia, the half-starved peasants tramped, each with his group of children to place on sale when the coasts of Italy or France were reached. It was in this way that Saint Bathilde, afterward the wife of King Clovis II., became the slave of the mayor of the palace, Archambault. Bought by the latter, she was working as a slave in his household when the King saw her and fell in love with her.[406]