CHAPTER XVI.

CONFIDENCE REPOSED IN THE ORDEAL.

The degree of confidence really inspired by the results of the ordeal is a somewhat curious subject of speculation on which definite opinions are not easily reached. Judicially, the trial was, for the most part, conclusive; he who had duly sunk under water, walked unharmed among the burning shares, or withdrawn an unblistered hand from a caldron of legal temperature, stood forth among his fellows as innocent. So, even now, the verdict of a few fools or knaves in a jury-box may discharge a criminal, against the plainest dictates of common sense, but in neither case would the sentiments of the community be probably changed by the result. The reverential feelings which alone could impart faith in the system seem scarcely compatible with the practice of compounding for ordeals, which, as we have seen above (p. 384), was occasionally permitted.

Charlemagne, at the commencement of his reign, does not seem to have entertained much respect for the judgment of God when he prescribed the administration of the ordeal for trifling affairs only, cases of magnitude being reserved for the regular investigation of the law.[1265] Thirty years later, the public mind appears afflicted with the same doubts, for we find the monarch endeavoring to enforce confidence in the system by his commands.[1266] The repeated use of the ordeal in the affair of the divorce of Teutberga shows that it was expected to have no little effect on public opinion, and the same is seen when in 876 Charlemagne’s grandson, Louis of Saxony, forced to defend his dominions against his uncle Charles le Chauve, commenced by proving the justness of his title by the judgment of God. After fasting and prayer ten of his followers were exposed to the ordeal of red-hot iron and ten each to those of cold and boiling water; all escaped without injury, and the righteousness of the verdict was shown soon after by the victory of Andernach, which sent the invader flying back to France.[1267] Yet a rule of English law, nearly four hundred years later, during the expiring struggles of the practice, would show that the result was regarded as by no means conclusive. By the assizes of Clarendon in 1166, which directed that all malefactors defamed for murder, robbery, and other felonies should be at once tried by the water ordeal, it was provided that those who had confessed or who had been found in possession of stolen property should not be allowed the privilege of clearing themselves in this manner; and a still more irreverential rule decreed that those who were pronounced innocent by the judgment of God, if regarded as guilty by common report, should have eight days to quit the kingdom, under pain of outlawry.[1268] In the revision of these laws, made at Northampton ten years later, it was provided that in all cases those who passed safely through the ordeal should give bail for their future good conduct, except in charges of murder or aggravated felony, when they were banished within forty days, under penalty of outlawry as before.[1269]

St. Ivo of Chartres, though he had no scruple in recommending and enjoining the ordeal for laymen, and, on one occasion at least, pronounced its decisions as beyond appeal, yet has placed on record his conviction of its insufficiency, and his experience that the mysterious judgment of God not infrequently allowed in this manner the guilty to escape and the innocent to be punished.[1270] A case related by Peter Cantor in the twelfth century shows how recklessly it often was abused as a relief to careless judges in doubtful cases. Two Englishmen were returning in company from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, when one of them wandered off to the shrine of St. Jago de Compostella, and the other went directly home. The kindred of the absent one accused the latter of murdering his companion; as no evidence was procurable on either side, he was hurried to the ordeal, convicted, and executed, shortly after which the missing man came back in safety.[1271]

The manifest injustice of the decisions thus rendered by the ordeal put a severe strain on the faith of believers, and led them to the most ingenious sophistry for an explanation. When, in 1127, the sacrilegious murder of Charles the Good, Count of Flanders, sent a thrill of horror throughout Europe, Lambert of Redenberg, whose participation in the crime was notorious, succeeded in clearing himself by the hot iron. Shortly afterwards he undertook the siege of Ostbourg, which he prosecuted with great cruelty, when he was killed in a sally of the besieged. The pious Galbert assumes that Lambert, notwithstanding his guilt, escaped at the ordeal in consequence of his humility and repentance, and philosophically adds: “Thus it is that in battle the unjust man is killed, although in the ordeal of water or of fire he may escape, if truly repentant.”[1272] The same doctrine was enunciated under John Cantacuzenes, in the middle of the fourteenth century, by a bishop of Didymoteichos in Thrace. A frail fair one being violently suspected by her husband, the ordeal of hot iron was demanded by him. In this strait she applied to the good bishop, and he, being convinced of her repentance and intention to sin no more, assured her that in such a frame of mind she might safely venture on the trial, and she accordingly carried the glowing bar triumphantly twice around the bishop’s chair, to the entire satisfaction of her lord and master.[1273]

In fact it was a recognized doctrine of the Church that confession, contrition, and absolution so thoroughly washed away a sin that a culprit thus prepared could safely tempt the justice of God. A case related by Cæsarius of Heisterbach as a most edifying example illustrates the curious nature of the superstition thus inculcated by the religious teachers of the period. In the diocese of Utrecht a fisherman notoriously maintained illicit relations with a woman, and fearing to be called to account for it by an approaching synod, where he would be convicted by the red-hot iron, and be forced to marry her, he consulted a priest. This ghostly counsellor advised him that, if he was firmly resolved to sin no more, he could safely deny the fact and endure the ordeal, after receiving absolution. The event verified the prediction; he carried the burning iron unhurt, and to the surprise of all the country round he was acquitted. Shortly afterwards, while in his boat, a companion expressed his wonder, when the fisherman, whose short-lived repentance was already over, boastingly struck his hand on the water, exclaiming, “It hurt me no more than that!” By the marvellous justice of God, the water was to him as red-hot iron, and as he hastily withdrew his hand the skin peeled off in strips.[1274] Even as late as 1539, the learned Ciruelo reproves the use of ordeals because the accused, though innocent of the special crime at issue, may succumb in consequence of other offences; or though guilty may escape because he has confessed and received absolution; and he states that he had personally known more than one case in which women, rightly accused of adultery by their husbands and forced to undergo the ordeal, had thus succeeded in being acquitted.[1275]

This doctrine of Ciruelo’s that the innocent were sometimes liable to conviction on account of previous misdeeds was likewise a belief of old standing. We have already seen (p. 137) that there was papal authority for it in the wager of battle. A striking instance of the vague notions current is afforded in the middle of the eleventh century by a case related by Othlonus, in which a man accused of horse-stealing was tried by the cold-water ordeal and found guilty. Knowing his own innocence, he appealed to the surrounding monks, and was told that it must be in consequence of some other sin not properly redeemed by penance. As he had confessed and received absolution before the trial, he denied this, till one of them pointed out that in place of allowing his beard to grow, as was meet for a layman, he had impiously carried the smooth chin reserved for ecclesiastics. Confessing his guilt, promising due penance, and vowing never to touch his beard with a razor again, he was conducted a second time to the water, and being now free from all unrepented sin, he was triumphantly acquitted. It is added that, taking advantage of a quibble as to the kind of instrument employed, he lapsed again into the sin of shaving, when the anger of Heaven manifested itself by allowing him to fall into the hands of an enemy, who put out his eyes.[1276]

Yet, on the other hand, the ordeal sometimes was regarded as the most satisfactory kind of proof, entitled to respect beyond any other species of evidence. The age was not logical, men acted more from impulse than from reason, and the forms of jurisprudence were still in a state too chaotic for regular and invariable rules to be laid down. The confusion existing in the popular mind is well illustrated by a case occurring in the twelfth century. A serf of the Abbey of Marmoutiers married a serf who had been given by the Viscount of Blois to one of his retainers named Erbald. The husband purchased his wife’s liberty, and by paying an additional sum had the deed of manumission confirmed by the viscount and viscountess. Years passed away, the serf and wife died, and then also their son, when their property fell to the abbey, which enjoyed it until the heirs of Erbald and the viscount claimed it. The monks produced the deeds of manumission, and the viscountess, then the only surviving witness to the transaction, testified to its authenticity, but to no purpose. The claimants demanded the wager of battle, and the monks, in refusing this as unsuited to their calling, were obliged to produce a man who offered to undergo the ordeal of red-hot iron to prove the validity of the deed. Then the claimants at last desisted, but still succeeded in extorting sixteen livres from the abbey as the price of appending their signatures to the controverted deed.[1277]

In general, however, as the result depended mostly upon those who administered the ordeal, it conferred an irresponsible power to release or to condemn, and it would be expecting too much of human nature to suppose that men did not yield frequently to the temptation to abuse that power. When Sigurd Thorlaksson was accused by Saint Olaf the King of the murder of his foster-brother Thoralf, and offered to clear himself by the red-hot iron, King Olaf accepted his offer, and appointed the next day for the trial at Lygra, where the bishop was to preside over it. When Sigurd went back at night to his ship, he said to his comrades that their prospects were gloomy, for the king had probably caused himself the death of Thoralf, and then brought the accusation against them, adding, “For him, it is an easy matter to manage the iron ordeal so that I doubt he will come ill off who tries it against him;” whereupon they hoisted sail in the darkness and escaped to their home in the Faroe Islands.[1278] The collusion thus hinted at must often have been practised, and must have shaken the most robust faith, and this cause of disbelief would receive additional strength from the fact that the result itself was not seldom in doubt, victory being equally claimed by both parties. Of this we have already seen examples in the affairs of the lance of St. Andrew and of the Archbishop of Milan, and somewhat similar is an incident recorded by the Bollandists in the life of St. Swithin, in which, by miraculous interposition, the opposing parties beheld entirely different results from an appeal to the red-hot iron.[1279]

Efforts of course were made from time to time to preserve the purity of the appeal, and to secure impartiality in its application. Clotair II., in 595, directs that three chosen persons shall attend on each side to prevent collusion;[1280] and among the Anglo-Saxons, some four hundred years later, Ethelred enjoins the presence of the prosecutor under penalty of loss of suit and fine of twenty _ores_, apparently for the same object, as well as to give authenticity to the decision.[1281] So in Hungary, the laws of St. Ladislas, in 1092, direct that three sworn witnesses shall be present to attest the innocence or guilt of the accused as demonstrated by the result.[1282] A rule announced by the Council of Grateley in 928, that if the accused is accompanied by more than twelve comrades he shall be adjudged as though he had failed in the ordeal, points to an obvious source of miscarriage of justice by which a crowd of partisans could interfere with the proceedings and then proclaim that the result had been successful.[1283] A law adopted by the Scottish Parliament under William the Lion, in the second half of the twelfth century, shows that corruption was not uncommon, by forbidding those concerned in the administration of ordeals from receiving bribes to divert the course of justice,[1284] and a further precaution was taken by prohibiting the Barons from adjudging the ordeal without the intervention of the sheriff to see that law and justice were observed.[1285]

In spite of all that we have seen, the ordeal, with its undoubted cruelty, was not as cruel as it appears to us, and in its practical results it probably acquitted the guilty far more often than it convicted the innocent. Mr. Maitland tells us that in his researches in the English records from 1201 till the abolition of the ordeal in 1219—a period in which, as stated above (p. 387), it was in constant use—he has found but one instance in which it failed to clear the accused.[1286] It is true that the cold-water ordeal was the one most freely resorted to, but the red-hot iron was also freely employed, and the one case of failure occurred in the water ordeal. At this distance of time it would be useless to frame a positive explanation of this, although bribery and collusion of course naturally suggest themselves in the notorious and almost universal corruption of the period. Contemporaries reconciled themselves to this as best they could, but while relying comfortably upon the inscrutable judgment of God, and the preservative power of contrition and confession, they were not without other solutions of the problem.

We have seen that in the judicial duel magic arts were popularly supposed to have power to control the interposition of God. This was likewise the case with the vulgar ordeals, and in addition a special power was attributed to the use or abuse of the holy chrism. The Council of Tours, in 813, informs us that it was generally believed that a criminal who drank the chrism or anointed himself with it could not be convicted by any ordeal.[1287] So serious indeed was this considered that Charlemagne in 809 decreed that a priest giving out the chrism for this purpose should not only be degraded but should lose a hand—a law which long continued in force, nominally at least.[1288] The belief was not ephemeral, for until the early part of the twelfth century a canon was carried through all the collections which speaks of the matter as a fact proved by experience.[1289] The superstition probably died out towards the middle of the century when the number of sacraments was increased from three to seven, and the comparative importance of the chrism was thus diminished in the popular eyes. The belief that the judgment of God could be perverted or eluded by magic arts still continued, however, and precautions were commonly taken to prevent their use.[1290] Holy water, moreover, was lavishly sprinkled on the materials employed in the ordeal and on the patient, and was given to him to drink to prevent diabolic illusions by which it was imagined that the purposes of God could be defeated.[1291]

Precautions also were taken to guard against processes by which, in the fire ordeals, it was believed that the human frame could be rendered incombustible, and for this object a widely prevailing custom required that for three days previous the hand should be wrapped up to guard against its being thus fortified.[1292] The nature of these unguents may be guessed from a prescription given by Albertus Magnus, consisting of mallow and radish juice, white of egg, lime, and “psillus” seeds, the use of which he assures us will enable a man with impunity to enter the flames or to carry red-hot iron.[1293] Doubtless reliance on some such expedients may partially explain the readiness with which the ordeal was undertaken.