The Rights of Sanctuary. before that time, he might be slain with impunity. Plutarch notes the institution of sanctuary among the ancient Greeks. He tells us that the oratory of Theseus was a place of refuge for servants and persons of mean condition, who fled from the powerful and oppressive. But although it started with the beneficent intention of protecting the weak and un fortunate, it soon fell into abuse, for as Dr. Pegge tells us on the authority of Tacitus, "they soon confounded and perverted every thing, making no difference between casual ties and premeditated acts of violence, but opening their asyla indiscriminately to refugees of all kinds. They seem to have had no thought or intention of bringing notorious criminals to trial, but suffered themto continue in the franchise quite easy and unmolested as long as they pleased; by which means they made their deities, from whom their holy places, temples, altars, and statues derived all their sanctity, the direct patrons and abettors of the most shocking and most abominable vices and crimes." Among the Greeks the right of sanctuary was not steadily inviolable. Alexander respected it, so that a slave of his who had taken refuge in a temple remained there unmolested; but other rulers did not scruple to kill their victims at the very altar. Still others compromised on the matter by starv ing the refugees out, or otherwise compelling them to come forth from the sacred precincts. From Greece the institution spread to Rome, retaining unfortunately its worst features. As Plutarch declares, the heathen priests would neither "deliver up the slave to his master, the debtor to his creditor, nor the murderer to the magistrate." Nor was this state of affairs improved upon the accession of the Christian emperors. The sanctuary privileges of the heathen temples were transferred to the Christian churches, but not emended with that proper distinction between the unfortunate and the vicious which
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characterized the method of the great Jewish lawgiver. To quote Dr. Pegge once more, "the churches became so many dens of thieves, traitors, murderers, parricides, in a word, of all kinds of villains." With the further history of sanctuary in Italy we need not concern ourselves. Suffice it to say that it had a fluctuating existence under the various rulers, and that it was still extant in the eighteenth century, when Tobias Smollett wrote of seeing a man, who three days before had murdered his wife in the last month of her pregnancy, taking the air with great composure and serenity on the steps of the church at Florence. "Nothing is more common," he continued, "than to see the most execrable villains diverting themselves in the cloisters of some convents at Rome," where they had taken sanctuary. Coming now to England, we find that the right of sanctuary prevailed in the seventh century. Its existence there previous to that time is doubtful. One of the laws of Ina, King of the West Saxons, dated 693, ordained that if a person convicted of a capital offense fled to a church, his life should be spared; and also that if any one who deserved to be flogged sought refuge there, the stripes should be withheld from him. It was clearly added, however, that the fugitive should make every recompense in his power for his crime. During the succeeding centuries, the privilege underwent many modifications. In the ninth century, Alfred the Great allowed the protection of the church to the culprit for three days only, so as to enable him to provide for his safety. If this brief sanctuary was violated by the inflicting of blows, wounds, or bonds upon the refugee, the violator was compelled to pay one hundred and twenty shillings for the offense — in those days no mean sum. A law concerning sanctuary in the time of William the Conqueror, ordained that whosoever took a person from an abbey was
