There was among that barbarous [Cambrian] people a public law from former days that a girl who committed fornication in her father’s house, and was found to be pregnant, would be cast headlong from the brow of the highest mountain, and her seducer would be beheaded….with the Saxons from olden days, almost up to these modern times, a sanction endured that any virgin who was deflowered willingly in her father’s house should be buried alive, without any hope of retraction, and the violator himself was to be hanged over her tomb….If such zeal for chastity inflamed pagans, who were ignorant of divine laws, because of their honor and the observance of their fathers’ traditions, what should a Christian do, who is bound fast to the custody of chasteness by the divine law?
