Download PDF | Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal, Oxford University Press, 1986.
202 Pages
IN trial by ordeal the accused was subjected to some harsh test—holding hot iron, being cast into a pool of water—and guilt or innocence decided according to the outcome. To modern thinking this is a strange and alien custom, yet it has been an important legal procedure in many periods and regions. This book examines the workings of trial by ordeal from the time of its first appearance in the barbarian law codes, tracing its use by Christian societies down to its last days as a test for witchcraft in modern Europe and America. Bartlett presents a critique of recent theories about the operation and the decline of the practice, and attempts to make sense of the ordeal as a working institution and to explain its disappearance. Finally, he considers some of the general historical problems of understanding a society in which religious beliefs were so fundamental.
Robert Bartlett is Wardlaw Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Andrews. He is also the author of Gerald of Wales 1146-1223 (Oxford, 1982) and England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075-1225 (forthcoming from Oxford, 1999).
Introduction
O God, the just judge, who are the author of peace and give fair judgement, we humbly pray you to deign to bless and sanctify this fiery iron, which is used in the just examination of doubtful issues. If this man is innocent of the charge from which he seeks to clear himself, he will take this fiery iron in his hand and appear unharmed; if he is guilty, let your most just power declare that truth in him, so that wickedness may not conquer justice but falsehood always be overcome by the truth. Through Christ.'
With these words medieval priests initiated one common form of trial by ordeal. A man accused of a crime, or a man seeking to claim or defend his rights, would, after a solemn three-day fast, pick up a hot iron, walk three paces, and put the iron down. His hand would be bandaged and sealed, then, after three days, inspected. If it was ‘clean’—that is, healing without suppuration or discoloration—he was innocent or vindicated; if the wound was unclean, he was guilty.
The medieval ordeal is a subject of great intrinsic interest and fascination. It is one of the more dramatically alien practices of medieval society and, as such, it demands and yet resists explanation. For those concerned to make the imaginative leap into a past society, the ordeal is a hurdle and a challenge. Its ‘otherness’ represents an explanatory problem. Just as anthropologists seek to understand the inner rationale of strange and apparently incomprehensible practices and beliefs among peoples of other cultures, so here the medievalist is confronted with the problem of a custom which has no familiar counterpart in the modern West. Medieval armies, farms, or, even, churches do not seem obviously opaque-there are modern armies, farms, and churches which suggest to us how these kinds of thing work in general. Trial by ordeal has no real counterpart in the modern world. It is necessary to stretch our minds to understand this custom.
Yet a true grasp of its nature might give a deep and penetrating insight into the society which practised it. Recent scholarship has seized the challenge and a series of distinguished historians have attempted to examine the ordeal as a key or focus for understanding social processes and social change in the medieval period: social change, especially, for the ordeal was abandoned in the thirteenth century and the inherent lure of this exotic custom is increased by the need to explain its disappearance, by the prospect of understanding, through the microcosm of the ordeal, a major social change. Such phrases as ‘the ending of sacral society’, the atrophy of ‘the world of the ordeal’, a growing ‘impersonality’ in society, a ‘shift from consensus to authority’, spring up in the literature on the subject and illustrate this generalizing urge.’ Clearly the explanation of the abandonment of the ordeal is as problematic, and yet holds as much promise, as the characterization of the practice itself. Obviously, the two enterprises are related: no satisfactory account can be given of the demise of a practice unless it is clear what the practice Js.
Trial by hot iron was only one form of ordeal. There were numerous other varieties, some important, some mere monuments to the ingenuity of long-vanished communities (the Navarrese ‘ordeal of the candles’,’ for example). The central focus here will be upon the trials of fire and water: holding or walking on hot iron, immersing the hand in boiling water, or complete immersion in a pool or stream. Such practices have two important features in common. They were all unilateral, usually undertaken by only one party in the case; and they all required that the natural elements behave in an unusual way, hot iron or water not burning the innocent, cold water not allowing the guilty to sink. In this respect they differed from another major form of ordeal, the duel or trial by battle, which is discussed in Chapter 6.
Ordeals of fire and water have been employed by peoples in many different parts of the world and throughout history. They crop up in the laws of Hammurabi and in the judicial practice of modern Kenya; men have undergone the ordeal from Iceland to Polynesia, from Japan to Africa.’ It is enlightening to compare and contrast the form, func-tion, and workings of the ordeal in different times and places. Students of trial by ordeal can usefully consider the diverse contexts and environments in which this form of proof flourished. It mav even be possible to make large-scale generalizations about the kind of social structure which is most congenial to the ordeal.* This book, however, is historical. It concentrates upon the story of trial by ordeal in Christian, European societies, ranging from the laws of the Franks in the early Middle Ages to the last vestiges of the custom in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and Europe.
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