Before the Conquest, and for long after, local justice in England was administered by two courts—that of the Hundred and that of the Shire. The first nominally consisted of the freeholders of the district, but the real business was done by a Committee of Twelve. The second was made up of the chief men of the district, and representatives from each township; but here, again, the work was left to a select few. If a man were charged with (say) theft before either court, he was tried in a fashion vastly different from that obtaining to-day. The complainant was sworn on the holy relics: "By the Lord I accuse not this man either for hatred, or for envy, or for unlawful lust of gain." This solemn accusation made out a prim facie case against the suspect, who instantly rebutted oath with oath. "By the Lord I am guiltless, both in deed and in counsel of this charge." Then he produced twelve compurgators, who swore by the Lord, "The oath is clean and unperjured which this man hath sworn"; then the prisoner went free. These compurgators were witnesses to character. Their testimony had no reference to the particular facts of the case; they simply alleged their belief in accused's innocence, but sometimes their oath "burst" (as the curious technical phrase ran), that is, he could not find compurgators, or those he produced said little good of him; or he was a stranger of whom nothing was known; or a Welshman whose veracity has never been an article of faith; or the accused was caught with his booty; or was a woman; or the charge was peculiarly odious, as treason, or witchcraft; then in all these cases there was an appeal to the Judicium Dei, the Creator was called upon to prove beyond dispute the guilt or innocence of the accused.

Trial by Ordeal was more ancient than the Church itself. There are traces of it in the Old Testament; it is discussed in great detail in the Laws of Manu; a famous passage in the Antigone (verses 264-267) reveals it as well known to the Greeks, and before Augustine came, or St Columba preached, it prevailed in some form or other in Britain. Yet the higher ecclesiastical powers continually thundered against it, and finally brought about its disuse. There were several varieties, but many forms were common to all. First, there was the ordeal of cold water, chiefly reserved for the baser fellow. As a preliminary the accused submitted to a fast of three days, during which he was watched by a priest, then he was taken to church to hear Mass; and was adjured by Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, by the gospels and relics of the saints, by everything held most sacred, not to partake of communion if he were guilty. Next came the adjuratio aquÆ, wherein the water was enjoined to cast him forth if he were guilty, but to receive him into its depths if innocent. And now, having been stripped, he kissed the Book and the Cross, was sprinkled with holy water and was cast in, to float if he were guilty, to sink if he were not. But there was the rub—how about death by suffocation? Sir James Stephen suggests that it was all a mode of happy despatch! Or (one fancies) it might be an elementary form of the famous verdict "not guilty, but don't do it again," with the chance of doing it again effectually provided against. On the other hand, a recipe for immersion in a thirteenth century MS. of the Monastery of Becca reduces the proceedings to the level of farce. The hands of the accused were tied, and a rope was put round his waist; "and let a knot be made in the rope as high up as the longest hair of the man's head will reach, and then in this way let him be gently lowered into the water; and if he sinks down to the knot, let him be pulled out as innocent; if not, let him be adjudged guilty." How not to sink under such conditions? The practice of testing witches by throwing them, securely tied, into the nearest pond was clearly a survival of this form of ordeal.

In the ordeal by hot water the accused, plunging his hand to the wrist in the boiling fluid, brought forth a stone suspended therein by a cord. (This was the Single Ordeal, and it became the Triple when the plunge was up to the elbow.) The arm was done up in bandages not to be removed till after three days; if the scald had healed the man was innocent, if it still festered he was guilty. In the ordeal by hot iron, a piece of red-hot metal was carried a distance of nine feet; it was then dropped and the hand was bandaged as already set forth. A knight had to thrust his fist into a glowing gauntlet; another form was a walk with naked feet over a sequence of red-hot ploughshares. We have a picturesque circumstantial and absolutely untrustworthy monkish account of how Emma, mother of Edward the Confessor, being suspected of an all too intimate acquaintance with Alwyn, Bishop of Winchester, underwent this trial. She took nine steps for herself and five for the Bishop, fixing her eyes the while on heaven. "When shall we reach these ploughshares?" queried she. How agreeable a surprise to find her little promenade already past and done with! No need to swathe her feet, the red-hot iron had marked them not at all!

The last mode was the CorsnÆd, or Cursed Morsel—a piece of barley-bread (or cheese), one ounce in weight. This "Creature of Sanctified Bread" was adjured, in terms terrible enough to make the sinner quake, to stick in the guilty throat, and cause the guilty jaws to be clenched and locked up. If in spite of all it went softly down, who dared to refuse belief in the man's innocence? It was chiefly for the clergy, and from every point of view must have been the most agreeable of the three, though a legend as untrustworthy as that of Emma ascribes to it the death of Earl Godwin, father of Harold. As he sat at meat with Edward the Confessor, the king brought up an old scandal about his brother's murder, "May God cause this morsel to choke me," passionately exclaimed the earl, "if I am guilty of the crime!" Edward blessed the bread; Godwin made an effort to swallow, choked and died. "Take away that dog," said the monarch in what would seem an outburst of savage glee. This was on April 15th, 1053, thirteen years before the Conquest. Godwin in truth died of a fit. It soon was the policy of the monkish chroniclers to write down the national party of which he had been the head, a fact which explains the fable were it worth serious examination. More interesting to note the survival of the rite in the still current rustic formula, "May this bit choke me if I lie!" If the ordeal proved a man guilty, the punishment was fine, death or outlawry, but even if he escaped, the Assize of Clarendon (1164) ordered that, in certain cases, he should abjure the realm. By that time compurgation was gone; in 1215 the Lateran Council issued a solemn decree against Trial by Ordeal; and soon after it had vanished from English law. There is a curious reference to it in the State Trials as late as 1679. John Govan, a Jesuit priest, was indicted in that year at the Old Bailey for an alleged share in the Popish Plot. With some hesitation he claimed the right of Trial by Ordeal as an ecclesiastical privilege of a thousand years' standing, but Scroggs and North peremptorily refused to listen to his plea. "We have no such law now," said the latter. Sir James Stephen assures us that the formula, "By God and by my country," wherein, till 1827, a prisoner must answer the question how he would be tried, sets forth a memory of it.

Of the customs akin to Trial by Ordeal only one can find mention here. It was held that if the murderer touched, nay, even approached, the body of his victim, the wounds gushed forth blood, thus in Richard the Third, "dead Henry's wounds" are seen "to open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh" as Gloucester draws near the bier. And according to one of the picturesque legends of English history, when Richard the Lion-Heart encountered at Fontevrault his father's body, the blood gushed from the nostrils of the dead king, a proceeding which, as Richard's offence was at the worst but unkindness, showed a somewhat excessive sensibility on the part of the royal clay. The oddest and latest case of all is from Scotland. In 1688 Philip Stanfield was tried for parricide at Edinburgh; one count of the indictment stated how his father's body had bled at his sacrilegious touch. The Lord Advocate, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, the "Bluidy Mackenzie" of covenanting legend and tradition, conducted the prosecution, and philosophic and cultured jurist as he was, he yet dwelt with much emphasis on the portentous sign. There was no lack of more satisfactory if more commonplace evidence, and young Stanfield assuredly merited the doom in the end meted out to him.