In the Germanic and Scandinavian countries adultery has primitively been considered as an enormous crime. Thus the ancient Danes punished adultery with death, whilst murder was only fined. The old Saxons began by burning alive the adulteress, and on the extinct fire they hung or strangled her accomplice. In England King Edmund assimilated adultery to murder. King Canute ordered that the man should be banished, and the woman should have her nose and ears slit. Tacitus tells us that with the Germans the adulteress was made to walk naked through the villages. Prior to the ordinances of Canute this old German custom was still preserved in England. Her head shaved, and her body bare to the waist, the woman was dragged out of her husband’s house in the presence of her relations, and then whipped to death through the streets. Her lover was hung on a tree. According to the laws of the Visigoths, and in virtue of the law of retaliation, the adulteress was given into the hands of the wife of her lover, if the latter was married. And if the lover had no children, his goods were confiscated to the profit of the injured husband (lib. iii.). The penalties ended by becoming entirely pecuniary, especially for the man. The fifth section of the Salic law, and the thirty-fifth section of the Ripuarian law, both inflict a fine of two hundred pence on whoever abducts a married woman. A law of Charlemagne orders the ravisher to restore the wife and all that she has carried off. If the husband does not exact a composition, the sheriff takes up the matter, banishes the guilty man, and condemns him to pay a fine of sixty pence. In the Middle Ages the adulteress was generally shut up for life in a convent, and lost her dowry. Whipping was sometimes added to these punishments, as is proved by an ordinance made in 1561.[718] The laws of King John (1362), of Charles le Bel (1325), of Louis XI. (1463), show that certain towns preserved the old custom of making the adulteress run naked through the city. Lastly, until 1789, legislation, although moderating its severity, remains undecided, varies according to place, circumstance, and even social position; but the atrocious and coarse penalties of ancient times are abolished and forgotten. XII. _Adultery in the Past and in the Future._