But yet there was a gleam of hope: one solitary ray that made even the surrounding darkness tolerable, and may have cheered the broken-hearted serf through years of unrequited toil and suffering. The law that reduced him to slavery made it also possible that he should be restored to freedom. It did not shut from him this blessing, however distant it might seem. Tacitus knew of _liberti_ among the Germans, men who had been slaves, had been manumitted, and were free[390]. Thus in yet pagan times, general kindliness of disposition, habits of domestic intercourse, perhaps the suggestions of self-interest, may have tended to raise the condition of the serf even to the restoration of freedom: but it was the especial honour and glory of Christianity, that while it broke the spiritual bonds of sin, it ever actively laboured to relieve the heavy burthen of social servitude. We are distinctly told that Bishop Wilfrið, on receiving the grant of Selsey from Caedwealha of Wessex, immediately manumitted two hundred and fifty unfortunates, whom he found there attached to the soil,—that those, whom by baptism he had rescued from servitude to devils, might by the grant of liberty be rescued from servitude to man[391]. In this spirit of charity, the clergy obtained respite from labour for the þeów on the Sabbath, on certain high festivals and on the days which preceded or followed them[392]; the lord who compelled his þeów to labour between the sunset on Saturday and the sunset on Sunday, forfeited him altogether[393]; probably at first to the king or the geréfa; but in the time of Cnut the serf thus forfeited was to become _folkfree_[394]. To their merciful intervention it must also be ascribed that the will of a Saxon proprietor, laic as well as clerical, so constantly directs the manumission of a number of serfs, for the soul’s health of the testator[395]; Ælfred even goes so far as to give free power to the serf of bequeathing to whomsoever he pleases, whatever may have been given him for God’s sake, or he may have earned in his own moments of leisure[396]; and this provision, which probably implies a prohibition to the lord of removing his labourer arbitrarily from a plot of ground well cultivated by his own efforts, tends to secure to the unfortunate serf some interest in the produce of his industry: the Hungarian will recognize in it the spirit of Maria Theresia’s _Urbarium_. It is moreover obvious from many surviving documents, that, in the later periods, the serf could purchase his own release[397], at least with the lord’s consent[398], or be bought by another for the purpose of manumission[399], or even be borrowed on pledge for a term of years[400], during which his labour might be actively employed in laying up the means of future freedom. It cannot indeed be denied that the slave might be sold like any other chattel, and that even as late as Æðelred and Cnut, the law ventured to prohibit no more than the selling