THE CHURCH AND THE ORDEAL.
The relation of the Church to the vulgar ordeals presents even a more
complex question than that which has already been discussed of its
connection with the judicial combat. The ordeals were less repugnant to
its teachings and more completely dependent upon its ministrations, for
while a duel might be fought without the aid of a priest the efficacy
of an ordeal depended wholly upon the religious rites which gave it
the sanction of a direct invocation of the Almighty.
We have seen above that the Church readily accepted the pagan practices
of its Barbarian converts, and gave them fresh claim to confidence by
surrounding them with the most impressive solemnities of the faith.
Notwithstanding the worldly advantage derivable from this policy,
there were some minds superior to the superstition or the cunning of
their fellows. Even as early as the commencement of the sixth century,
Avitus, Bishop of Vienne, remonstrated freely with Gundobald on account
of the prominence given to the battle ordeal in the Burgundian code;
and some three centuries later, St. Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons,
attacked the whole system in two powerful treatises, which in many
points display a breadth of view and clearness of reasoning far in
advance of his age.[1294] Shortly after this we find an echo of these
arguments in some utterances of the papacy, such as the disapproval
of the lot by Leo IV. (p. 353), of the duel by Nicholas I. (p. 207),
and the more general condemnation by Stephen V. (p. 395), while on the
other hand we have seen (p. 382) the ordeal adopted by Stephen VII. in
the trial of his predecessor Formosus.
Whether the Holy See condemned or approved the judgment of God was a
matter of the utmost indifference to the Church at large. The universal
use of the ordeal, involving as it did the indispensable employment
of priestly ministrations, shows sufficiently that no ecclesiastic
hesitated to sanction it, and that practically it had the universal
sympathy and support of the Church. Nor was this left to be merely
a matter of inference, for the local churches had no scruple in
advocating and prescribing it in the most authoritative manner. In
799 the Council of Salzburg ordered the red-hot iron for the trial of
witches and necromancers.[1295] In 810, Ahyto, Bishop of Basle, could
suggest no other mode of determining doubtful cases of consanguinity
between husband and wife.[1296] In 853, the Synod of Soissons ordered
Burchard, Bishop of Chartres, to prove his fitness for the episcopal
office by undergoing the ordeal.[1297] Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims,
lent to it all the influence of his commanding talents and position;
the Council of Mainz in 888, and that of Tribur near Mainz in 895,
recommended it; that of Tours in 925 ordered it for the decision of a
quarrel between two priests respecting certain tithes;[1298] the synod
of the province of Mainz in 1028 authorized the hot iron in a case of
murder;[1299] that of Elne in 1065 recognized it; that of Auch in 1068
confirmed its use; a penitential of the same period in Bohemia ordered
the ordeal for those who pleaded ignorance when accused of marrying
within the prohibited degrees;[1300] Burckhardt, Bishop of Worms, whose
collection of canons enjoyed high authority, in 1023 assisted at the
Council of Selingenstadt, which directed its employment, and in his
penitential he prescribes five years’ penance for endeavoring by magic
arts to escape conviction by it—a practice which, as we have seen,
was not uncommon.[1301] The synod of Gran, in 1099, decided that the
ordeal of hot iron might be administered during Lent, except in cases
involving the shedding of blood.[1302] Moreover, we find St. Bernard
alluding approvingly to the conviction and martyrdom of heretics by
the cold-water process,[1303] of which Guibert de Nogent gives us an
instance wherein he aided the Bishop of Soissons in administering it
to two backsliders with complete success.[1304] In 1157 the red-hot
iron ordeal was prescribed by the Council of Reims for all persons
accused of belonging to the fast-growing sect of the Cathari or
Manichæans, whose progress was alarming the Church;[1305] and in 1167
two heretics at Vezelai were tried by cold water in the presence of
the Archbishop of Lyons and two bishops, when, singularly enough, they
escaped.[1306] In 1172 a learned clerk named Robert was involved in a
debate with a knight on the delicate question whether the Eucharist
became corrupted when voided from the body: he was accused as a heretic
to the Bishop of Arras, who called in the Archbishop of Reims and
numerous clerks to try him. Robert was so confident of his innocence
that he offered to undergo the hot-iron ordeal, but his guilt was
miraculously shown when burns appeared not only on the right hand that
carried the iron, but also on the left hand, on both feet, both sides
and on his chest and belly, wherefore he was promptly burned alive as
a heretic.[1307] Other cases, moreover, are related by Peter Cantor,
in which good Catholics were successfully convicted of heresy in this
manner, and one instance presents a curious view of the singular
confusion which existed in judicial logic at the time. A poor fellow
who professed the most entire orthodoxy, and against whom there was no
proof, was ordered to carry the red-hot iron. This he refused unless
the assembled bishops would prove that he could do so without incurring
mortal sin by tempting God. This they were unable to accomplish, so all
unpleasant doubts were settled by promptly having him burnt.[1308] Even
after the Lateran Council of 1215, some miracles related by Cæsarius of
Heisterbach show that the conviction of heretics by the hot iron was
regarded as a matter of course,[1309] and a penitential of a somewhat
later period complains that suspected heretics on trial had no other
means of proving their orthodoxy or their conversion to the true faith.
It also mentions a curious custom prevalent in some places that where
there was doubt as to a man having died in grace, his friends had to
prove his penitence by undergoing the cold-water ordeal before he was
admitted to Christian sepulture.[1310]
Prelates, moreover, were everywhere found granting charters containing
the privilege of conducting trials in this manner. It was sometimes
specially appropriated to members of the Church, who claimed it, under
the name of _Lex Monachorum_, as a class privilege exempting them
from being parties to the more barbarous and uncanonical wager of
battle,[1311] and in 1061 a charter of John, Bishop of Avranches, to
the Abbot of Mont S. Michel, alludes to hot water and iron as the only
mode of trying priests charged with offences of magnitude.[1312] St.
Ivo of Chartres, who denied the liability of churchmen to the ordeal,
admitted that it could be properly used on laymen, and even pronounces
its result to be beyond appeal.[1313] Pope Calixtus II. in 1119 gave
his sanction to it at the Council of Reims, and soon afterwards at
the Council of Chartres he admitted the red-hot iron to decide a
case of alleged violation of the right of asylum in a church.[1314]
About the same time the learned priest, Honorius of Autun, specifies
the benediction of the iron and water of the ordeal as part of the
legitimate functions of his order;[1315] and even Gratian, in 1151,
hesitates to condemn the whole system, preferring to consider the
canon of Stephen V. as prohibiting only the ordeals of hot water and
iron.[1316]
The Church, in fact, lent its most impressive ceremonies to enhance
the effect on the popular mind of these trials. An _Ordo_ or Ritual,
of about the year 1100, informs us that when any one accused of theft
or adultery or other crime refused to confess, the priest was to go to
the church, put on his sacred vestments, except the chasuble, and then,
holding the gospels and chrismatory, the chalice and paten and relics
of saints, he from the vestibule summoned the people, while forbidding
the accused, if guilty, and any of his accomplices to enter. At the
same time he designated the spot in the vestibule where the fire was
to be built to heat the caldron or the ploughshares, and sprinkled
them all with holy water to prevent diabolical illusions. Then the
accused entered. He was first required to forgive all offences as he
hoped for pardon; he made confession of his sins and accepted penance,
while the penitential psalms were sung customary for penitents on Ash
Wednesday; if there was suspicion as to his faith he was made to swear
on the altar his reliance on God rather than on the devil to manifest
his innocence in the ordeal. Mass was then celebrated and communion
was administered to him under the tremendous adjuration, “May the body
and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ be unto thee a proof!” After this
the priest led the people to the spot where the trial was to take
place. Prayers were uttered to God to render judgment, litanies and
psalms were sung, the material of the ordeal, whether iron or hot or
cold water, was blessed with an adjuration that it would be the means
of rendering a just verdict, and the accused was exorcised with an
adjuration to abandon the trial if he was conscious of guilt. Then the
oath was administered to him, and he took hold of the glowing iron, or
plunged his hand into the seething caldron, or was bound and cast into
the water. Nothing was omitted that would add to the effectiveness of
the prolonged ritual, and throughout it was in the hands of the priest;
the secular tribunal effaced itself and abandoned the whole conduct of
the affair to the Church.[1317]
Gradually, however, the papacy ranged itself in opposition to the
ordeal. After a silence of nearly two centuries, Alexander II., about
1070, denounced it as a popular invention, destitute of canonical
authority, and forbade its use for ecclesiastics.[1318] This was a
claim which had already in the eighth century been advanced in England
by Ecgbehrt, Archbishop of York, who piously declared that their oath
on the cross was sufficient for acquittal, and that if guilty their
punishment must be left to God.[1319] About the year 1000, St. Abbo
of Fleury revived this assertion of exemption,[1320] and a century
later St. Ivo of Chartres insisted on it.[1321] As we have seen, these
demands for clerical immunity were wholly disregarded, but they serve
as a key to the motive of the papal opposition to the ordeal which
developed itself so rapidly in the second half of the twelfth century.
The Church had long sought, with little practical result, to emancipate
the clergy from subjection to the secular law. This was one of the
leading objects of the forgers of the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals; it
had met with promising success at the time;[1322] in the confusion
of the tenth and eleventh centuries it had well-nigh been forgotten,
but now it was revived and insisted on with a persistent energy which
won the victory in the thirteenth century. When this point was gained
and ecclesiastics were relieved from ordeals and duels, the next step
was inevitably to extend the prohibition to the laity. The papal
battle was really fought for the advantage of the clergy, but the
clergy was ranged in opposition because the prospective benefit seemed
inadequate to compensate for present loss. The local churches found in
the administration of the ordeal a source of power and profit which
naturally rendered them unwilling to abandon it at the papal mandate.
Chartered privileges had accumulated around it, such as we have already
seen in the case of the judicial duel, and these privileges were shared
or held by prelates and churches and monasteries. Thus in 1148 we find
Thibaut the Great of Champagne making over to the church of St. Mary
Magdalen the exclusive right of administering the oaths required on
such occasions in the town of Chateaudun;[1323] and in 1182 the Vicomte
de Béarn conferred on the Abbey de la Seauve the revenue arising from
the marble basin used for the trial by boiling water at Gavarret.[1324]
In the statutes of King Coloman of Hungary, collected in 1099, there is
a provision prohibiting the administration of the ordeal in the smaller
churches, and reserving the privilege to the cathedral seats and other
important establishments.[1325]
According to a grant from Péregrin de Lavedan to the monastery of
Saint-Pé, in Bigorre, the fee for administering the hot-water ordeal
was five crowns, of which two were paid to the monastery, two to the
cathedral at Tarbes, and one to the priest who blessed the water and
stone.[1326] By the laws of St. Ladislas of Hungary, in 1092, the
stipend of the officiating priest for the red-hot iron was double that
which he received for the water ordeal;[1327] in Bohemia the laws of
Otto Premizlas in 1229 give the priest a fee of fourteen deniers for
the latter.[1328] How rigidly these rights were enforced is shown in
a case related by Peter Cantor in the twelfth century. A man accused
of crime was sentenced to undergo the ordeal of cold water. When
stripped and bound and seated on the edge of the tank, the prosecutor
withdrew the suit, but the official of the court refused to release the
accused until he should pay fees amounting to nine livres and a half.
A long wrangle ensued, until the defendant declared that he would pay
nothing, but would rather undergo the ordeal, and, after establishing
his innocence, would give fifty sols to the poor. He was accordingly
thrown in and sank satisfactorily, but on being drawn out was met with
a fresh claim from the officiating priest, of five sols, for blessing
the water.[1329]
As these fees were paid, sometimes on conviction and sometimes on
acquittal, there was danger that, even without direct bribery,
self-interest might affect the result. Thus by the acts of the Synod
of Lillebonne, in 1080, a conviction by the hot-iron ordeal entailed
a fine for the benefit of the bishop;[1330] and it was apparently to
prevent such influences that the Swedish code, compiled by Andreas
Archbishop of Lunden early in the thirteenth century, made the
successful party, whether the prosecutor or defendant, pay the fee
to the officiating priest—a regulation sufficiently degrading to the
sacerdotal character.[1331] But besides these pecuniary advantages,
the ordeal had a natural attraction to the clergy, as it afforded the
means of awing the laity, by rendering the priest a special instrument
of Divine justice, into whose hands every man felt that he was at any
moment liable to fall; while, to the unworthy, its attractions were
enhanced by the opportunities which it gave for the worst abuses. From
the decretals of Alexander III. we learn authoritatively that the
extortion of money from innocent persons by its instrumentality was a
notorious fact[1332]—a testimony confirmed by Ekkehardus Junior, who,
a century earlier, makes the same accusation, and moreover inveighs
bitterly against the priests who were wont to gratify the vilest
instincts in stripping women for the purpose of exposing them to the
ordeal of cold water.[1333]
With all these influences, moral and material, to give to the local
clergy a direct interest in the maintenance of the ordeal, it is no
wonder that they battled resolutely for its preservation. In this,
however, as in so many other details of ecclesiastical policy,
centralization triumphed. When the papal authority reached its
culminating point, a vigorous and sustained effort to abolish the
whole system was made by the popes who occupied the pontifical throne
from 1159 to 1227. Nothing can be more peremptory than the prohibition
uttered by Alexander III.,[1334] who sought moreover to enlist on his
side the local churches by stigmatizing as an intolerable abuse the
liability which in Sweden forced the highest prelates to submit to the
red-hot iron ordeal.[1335] About the same time we find the celebrated
Peter Cantor earnestly urging that it was a sinful tempting of God and
a most uncertain means of administering justice, which he enforces by
numerous instances of innocent persons who, within his own knowledge,
had been condemned by its means and put to death; and he declares
that any priest exorcising the iron or water, or administering the
oaths preliminary to the judicial duel, is guilty of mortal sin.[1336]
Somewhat earlier than this, Ekkehard Bishop of Munster took the same
ground when he refused to his steward Richmar permission to undergo the
red-hot iron ordeal in order to convert the Jew, Hermann of Cologne;
it would be, he said, a tempting of God.[1337] A different reason was
given when Albero, a priest of Mercke near Cologne, offered to pass
through fire to prove the orthodoxy of his teaching that the sacraments
were vitiated in the hands of sinful priests, and his request was
refused on the ground that skilful sorcery might thus lead to the
success of a flagrant heresy.[1338] In 1181, Lucius III. pronounced
null and void the acquittal of a priest charged with homicide, who had
undergone the water ordeal, and ordered him to prove his innocence with
compurgators, giving as a reason that all such “peregrina judicia”
were prohibited.[1339] Even more severe was the blow administered by
Innocent III. early in the thirteenth century. At Albenga, near Genoa,
a man suspected of theft offered to prove his innocence by the red-hot
iron, and agreed to be hanged if he should fail. The ordeal took place
in the presence of the bishop and judge; the man’s hand was burnt and
after some consultation the bishop ordered him to be hanged. When
Innocent heard of this he promptly had the bishop deprived of his see
and a successor elected; his decision in this case was carried into
the canon law as a precedent to be followed.[1340] In 1210, moreover,
when Bishop Henry of Strassburg was vigorously persecuting heresy and
convicting heretics by the ordeal, one of them named Reinhold hurried
to Rome and returned with a letter from Innocent forbidding it for the
future; ordeals might be adjudged, he said, by the secular tribunals,
but they were not admissible in ecclesiastical judgments.[1341] Still
more effective was his action when, under his impulsion, the Fourth
Council of Lateran, in 1215, formally forbade the employment of any
ecclesiastical ceremonies in such trials.[1342] As the moral influence
of the ordeal depended entirely upon its religious associations, a
strict observance of this canon must speedily have swept the whole
system into oblivion. Yet shortly after this we find the inquisitor
Conrad of Marburg employing in Germany the red-hot iron as a means of
condemning his unfortunate victims by wholesale, and the chronicler
relates that, whether innocent or guilty, few escaped the test.[1343]
The canon of Lateran, however, was actively followed up by the papal
legates, and the system may consequently be considered to have fairly
entered on its decline.
So far as the Church was concerned its condemnation was irrevocable.
By this time the papacy had become the supreme and unquestioned
legislator. The compilation of papal decrees known as the Decretals
of Gregory IX., issued in 1234, was everywhere accepted as the “new
law” of binding force, and in it the compiler, St. Ramon de Peñafort,
had sedulously inserted the prohibitions so repeatedly issued during
the preceding three-quarters of a century. These prohibitions were no
longer construed as limited to ecclesiastics; the whole system was
condemned. St. Ramon himself in his _Summa_, which had immense and
lasting authority, had no hesitation in denouncing all ordeals as an
accursed invention of the devil.[1344] His contemporary, Alexander
Hales, whose reputation as a theologian stood unrivalled, after
presenting the arguments on both sides, concludes that they are wholly
to be rejected.[1345] Soon afterwards Cardinal Henry of Susa, the
leading canonist of his day, gave a severer blow by proving that as
ordeals are illegal all sentences rendered by their means are null and
void.[1346] Still the practice was hard to suppress, for at the end of
the century we find John of Freiburg denouncing it as forbidden and
accursed; bishops and abbots permitting ordeals in their courts are
guilty of mortal sin, and preachers should denounce them from their
pulpits with all due modesty.[1347] This shows that the spiritual
lords were still deaf to the voice of the papacy, but the principle
was settled and in 1317 Astesanus, whose authority was of the highest,
treats the whole system of duels and ordeals as mere appeals to chance,
having no warrant in divine law and forbidden by the Church.[1348] This
attitude was consistently preserved, and Gregory XI. in 1374, when
condemning the Sachsenspiegel, enumerated, among other objectionable
features, its provisions of this nature as contrary to the canon law
and a tempting of God.[1349]