Moved by such great misery and such odious traffic, holy men went, purse in hand, to the places where these infants were being sold and purchased the unfortunates, giving them later their liberty. In this manner, Saint Eunice was purchased by an Abbé du Berry and Saint Thean by Saint Eloi. The poverty led to even worse crimes than the selling of their own children for when it was found by the shiftless and impoverished that they could sell their own children and the foundlings that they picked up, not infrequently they robbed more fortunate parents of children that were being well taken care of. Similar distress and want had led to similar conditions in the fifth century. In 449 A.D., the times were so hard and the people were in such a famished condition in Italy and Gaul that parents sold their children to middlemen even though they knew the children were to be resold to the Vandals in Africa. Two years later Valentinian broke up this practice, declaring that the person who sold a free person for the purpose of having that person sold to the barbarians would be fined six ounces of gold.[407] This traffic was carried to such an excess in the British Islands that it became the principal object of an apostolic mission of Gregory who became Pope in 590. “Our Divine Redeemer,” he wrote, “has delivered us from all servitude and has given unto us our original liberty. Let us imitate his example by freeing from slavery those men who are free by the laws of nature.” The attitude toward children in England under the Anglo-Saxon kings[408] is shown by the fact that a boy’s accountability, his capability of bearing arms and of the management of his property began, according to the earlier laws, in his tenth, but according to the laws of Æthelstan, in his twelfth year.[409] “The accountability of children was extended even to the infant in the cradle, whereby, in the case of theft committed by the father, they, like those of mature age, were consigned to slavery, but this cruel practice was by a law of Cnut strictly forbidden.[410] This premature majority of the Anglo-Saxon youth accounts for the early accession to the throne of some of the kings, as Edward the Martyr, who was crowned in his thirteenth year. Majority at the age of ten is not mentioned in any other Germanic laws, excepting in favour of the young testator, or the son whose father could not or would not support him. The beginning of the thirteenth year as that of majority is strictly and universally Germanic.”[411] “The doctrines of the Church,” say Terme and Monfalcon, “were indeed admirable—they breathed the purest, the finest morality and the most ardent love of humanity, but they were unable to prevail against the ignorance of the people and the barbarity of their morals.”