Trial by ordeal
Trial by ordeal was an ancient judicial practice by which the guilt or innocence of the accused (called a "proband"[1]) was determined by subjecting them to a painful, or at least an unpleasant, usually dangerous experience.
In pre-industrial society, the ordeal typically ranked along with the oath and witness accounts as the central means by which to reach a judicial verdict.
Priestly cooperation in trials by fire and water was forbidden by Pope Innocent III at the Fourth Council of the Lateran of 1215 and replaced by compurgation.
One famous story about the ordeal of plowshares concerns the English King Edward the Confessor's mother, Emma of Normandy.
According to a legend, she was accused of adultery with Bishop Ælfwine of Winchester but proved her innocence by walking barefoot unharmed over red-hot plowshares.
During the First Crusade, the French mystic Peter Bartholomew allegedly went through the ordeal by fire in 1099 by his own choice to disprove a charge that his claimed discovery of the Holy Lance was fraudulent.
"[6] In 1498, Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, the leader of a reform movement in Florence who claimed apocalyptic prophetic visions, attempted to prove the divine sanction of his mission by undergoing a trial by fire.
The first of its kind in over 400 years, the trial was a fiasco for Savonarola, since a sudden rain doused the flames, canceling the event and taken by onlookers as a sign from God against him.
Persons accused of cheating in contracts or lying might be asked to prove their innocence by ordeal of fire as an ultimate test.
The most simple form of such ordeals required the accused to take an oath, then drink a potion of sulfur (Avestan: saokant, lit.
In one, the accused parties are ordered to retrieve an item from a container of boiling oil, with those who refuse the task being found guilty.
He describes how a Catholic saint, Hyacinth,[clarification needed] bested an Arian rival by plucking a stone from a boiling cauldron.
Gregory said that it took Hyacinth about an hour to complete the task (because the waters were bubbling so ferociously), but he was pleased to record that when the heretic tried, he had the skin boiled off up to his elbow.
The practice reappeared in the Late Middle Ages: in the Dreieicher Wildbann of 1338, a man accused of poaching was to be submerged in a barrel three times and to be considered innocent if he sank, and guilty if he floated.
[23] The ordeal of the cross was apparently introduced in the Early Middle Ages in an attempt to discourage judicial duels among Germanic peoples.
Numbers 5:12–27 prescribes that a woman suspected of adultery should be made to swallow "the bitter water that causeth the curse" by the priest in order to determine her guilt.
One writer has recently argued that the procedure has a rational basis, envisioning punishment only upon clear proof of pregnancy (a swelling belly) or venereal disease (a rotting thigh).
[27][28] Residents of Madagascar could accuse one another of various crimes, including theft, Christianity, and especially witchcraft, for which the ordeal of tangena (Cerbera manghas) was routinely obligatory.
[28] In early modern Europe, the Mass was used as a form of ordeal by ingestion: a suspected party was forced to take the Eucharist because they would be eternally damned if they were guilty, and thus their unwillingness to take the test would give an indication of their guilt.
[34] in other cases the wounds of the victim would start to bleed[35] “...the blood cry as a divinely revealed piece of legal evidence, extracted through irrepressible force and expressed through the active demonstration of the corpse ‘bleeding afresh.’”[36] The ordeals of fire and water in England likely have their origin in Frankish tradition, as the earliest mention of the ordeal of the cauldron is in the first recension of the Salic Law in 510.
[41] After the Conquest of 1066, the Old English customs of proof were repeated anew and in more detailed fashion by the Normans, but the only notable innovation of the ordeal by the conquerors was the introduction of the trial by battle.
[44] However, this skepticism was not universally shared by the intellectuals of the day, and Eadmer depicts Rufus as irreligious for rejecting the legitimacy of the ordeal.
[50] The Assize of Clarendon declared that all those said by a jury of presentment to be "accused or notoriously suspect" of robbery, thievery, or murder or of receiving anyone who had committed such a wrong were to be put to the ordeal of water.
[2] Eventually Pope Innocent III in Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215) promulgated a canon forbidding blessing of participants before ordeals.
[2] The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250) was the first king who explicitly outlawed trials by ordeal as they were considered irrational (Constitutions of Melfi).
Innocent III's prohibition of clerical participation in trial by ordeal was essentially a call to action for secular authorities to move away from it, a process which took centuries to complete.
[2] According to a theory put forward by economics professor Peter Leeson, trial by ordeal may have been effective at sorting the guilty from the innocent.
[55] Peter Brown explains the persistence and eventual withering of the ordeal by stating that it helped promote consensus in a society where people lived in close quarters and there was little centralized power.
In a world where "the sacred penetrated into the chinks of the profane and vice-versa" the ordeal was a "controlled miracle" that served as a point of consensus when one of the greatest dangers to the community was feud.
[57] From this analysis, Brown argues that the increasing authoritativeness of the state lessened the need and desire for the ordeal as an instrument of consensus, which ultimately led to its disappearance.
