\ 79. THE ORDEAL. 345
such appeals were not commanded by the law of God. As late as 1215 the ferocious inquisitor Conrad of Marburg freely used the hot iron against eighty persons in Strassburg alone who were suspected of the Albigeusian heresy. The clergy pre pared the combatants by fasting and prayer, and special liturgi cal formulas ; they presided over the trial and pronounced the sentence. Sometimes fraud was practiced, and bribes offered and taken to divert the course of justice. Gregory of Tours men tions the case of a deacon who, in a conflict with an Arian priest, anointed his arm before he stretched it into the boiling caldron; the Arian discovered the trick, charged him with using magic arts, and declared the trial null and void ; but a Catholic priest, Jaciutus from Ravenna, stepped forward, and by catching the ring from the bubbling caldron, triumphantly vindicated the orthodox faith to the admiring multitude, de claring that the water felt cold at the bottom and agreeably warm at the top. When the Arian boldly repeated the experi ment, his flesh was boiled off the bones up to the elbow.1
The Church even invented and substituted new ordeals, which wrcre less painful and cruel than the old heathen forms, but shockingly profane according to our notions. Profanity and superstition are closely allied. These new methods are the ordeal of the cross, and the ordeal of the. eucharist. They were especially used by ecclesiastics.
The ordeal of the cross2 is simply a trial of physical strength. The plaintiff and the defendant, after appropriate religious cere monies, stood with uplifted arm before a cross while divine service was performed, and victory depended on the length of endurance. Pepiu first prescribed this trial, by a Capitulary of 752, in cases of application by a wife for divorce. Charle-
1 De Gloria Mnrtyrnm I. 81. Lea, p. 198.
* Judicium crucis, or stare ad crucem, Kreuzesprobe. A modification of it was the trial of standing with the arms extended in the form of a cro^s. In this way St. Lioba, abbess of BischoHsheim, vindicated the honor of her convent against the charge of impurity when a new-born child was drowned in the neighborhood. Lea, p. 231.
346 FOURTH PERIOD. A. D. 590-1049.
magne prescribed it in cases of territorial disputes which might arise between his sons (806). But Louis-le-Debonnaire, soon after the death of Charlemagne, forbade its continuance at a Council of Aix-la-Chapelle in 816, because this abuse of the cross tended to bring the Christian symbol into contempt. His son, the Emperor Lothair, renewed the prohibition. A trace of this ordeal is left in the proverbial allusion to an experimentum crucis.
A still worse profanation was the ordeal of consecrated bread in the eucharist with the awful adjuration : "May this body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ be a judgment to thee this day." 1 It was enjoined by a Synod of Worms, in 868, upon bishops and priests who were accused of a capital crime, such as murder, adultery, theft, sorcery. It was employed by Cautinus, bishop of Auvergne, at the close of the sixth century, who administered the sacrament to a Count Eulalius, accused of patricide, and acquitted him after he had partaken of it without harm. King Lothair and his nobles took the sacrament in proof of his separation from Walrada, his mistress, but died soon afterwards at Piacenza of a sudden epidemic; and this was regarded by Pope Hadrian II. as a divine punishment. Rudolf us Glaber records the case of a monk who boldly received the consecrated host, but forthwith confessed his crime when the host slipped out of his navel, white and pure as be fore. Sibicho, bishop of Speier, underwent the trial to clear himself of the charge of adultery (1049). Even Pope Hildebrand made use of it in self-defense against Emperor Henry IV. at Canossa, in 1077. "Lest I should seem/' he said, "to rely rather on human than divine testimony, and that I may remove from the minds of all, by immediate satisfaction, every scruple, behold this body of our Lord which I am about to take. Let it be to me this day a test of my innocence, and may the Omnipotent God this day by his judgment absolve me
1 Judicium O/CB, panis conjuratio, corsnced, Abendmahlsprobe. Comp. Hefele IV. 370, 552, 735.