Freedom for Those Condemned to the Weaving Works or to Slavery

“Lastly, there are some who have been wrongfully deprived of the privileges of noble birth, and put under a judicial sentence that sent them to the women’s quarters and the linen works, to undergo cruel and miserable labor there, or reduced them to slavery for the benefit of the public treasury, with no exemption on account of their higher birth. Let such people take up again the honors they formerly enjoyed and their proper ranks, and from now on rejoice in the blessings of liberty and live a glad life. Let the free man, too, who has been made a slave by some injustice and cruelty, or even madness, who has felt the sudden fall from liberty into bondage and has often wept over labors he was not used to, return once more to his family a free man by virtue of this our decree, and look for the kinds of work that befit a free man. And let him put out of his memory the services he found so oppressive and that so little suited his condition. [a]