CHAPTER XXXIV

CONCERNING THE LIBERATION OF THOSE FREE PERSONS WHO HAD BEEN CONDEMNED TO LABOUR IN THE WOMEN’S APARTMENTS, OR TO ANY OTHER SERVITUDE

“LASTLY, if any have wrongfully been deprived of the privileges of noble lineage, and subjected to a judicial sentence which has consigned them to the women’s apartments for weaving or spinning, there to undergo a cruel and miserable labour, or reduced them to servitude for the benefit of the public treasury, without any exemption on the ground of superior birth; let such persons, resuming the honours they had previously enjoyed, and their proper dignities, henceforward exult in the blessings of liberty, and lead a life of happiness and joy. Let the free man, too, whom the unjust and inhuman fury of his persecutors has made a slave, who has felt the sudden and mournful transition from liberty to bondage, and ofttimes bewailed his unwonted labours, return to his family once more a free man in virtue of this our ordinance, and seek those employments which befit a state of freedom: and let him dismiss from his remembrance those services which he found so oppressive, and which so ill became his condition.