By the ninth century, a similar ceremony was being used to resolve serious accusations in churches across Europe. While a fire burned in the vestibule, mass would be celebrated and the priest, clutching a Bible, would lead a line of cross-bearing and censer-swinging clerics towards the kettle. To the sound of psalms and the scent of myrrh, the water would then be blessed in the name of the Trinity, Resurrection, and Armageddon, and God would be implored to illuminate that which had been secret. Onlookers would meanwhile pray for the accused’s vindication or destruction according to taste, and he or she would then try to remove a stone from the bubbling waters. The resulting wound would be bandaged and three days later, the priest would remove the dressing and interpret the blister. If he declared it healed, all well and good. But if he pronounced it festering, guilt would be established, and exile or execution would be added to the woes of the accused.
The ordeal of fire switched elements but otherwise followed much the same pattern, requiring defendants to test their flesh against flame and then spend three days praying for a miracle, a merciful priest, or a combination of the two. Glowing iron bars were usually used, but during the eleventh century the mother of Edward the Confessor, Emma of Normandy, was reportedly made to walk barefoot over nine red-hot ploughshares in order to meet charges of an adulterous relationship with the Bishop of Winchester. (If Church chroniclers are to be believed, which of course they are not, she was so manifestly innocent that she had already strolled obliviously across the sizzling blades by the time she asked to begin.) A crusading peasant called Peter Bartholomew underwent an even more spectacular form of trial by fire in 1098. While wandering through the rubble of a ruined church in Syria, he identified an iron pole as the lance with which Jesus had been pierced on the cross. Although similar assertions would put countless others on the fast track to canonization, a faction of fellow soldiers alleged, for reasons unknown, that he was lying. If not, they contended, he would make good his claim by passing through two lines of blazing olive branches. He apparently jumped at the chance to prove his piety, pole in hand, but the story then becomes a little murky. According to Raymond of Agiles, a fierce supporter of Peter’s bona fides, he ambled between walls of flame that were a foot apart and forty feet high, pausing briefly only to converse with the Lord inside the inferno, before emerging unscathed – at which point a mob of admirers excitedly broke his spine. A second account was considerably more sceptical. A third condemned Peter as an out-and-out fraud. Charity, if nothing else, makes it more pleasant to accept Raymond’s recollection, but since even he noted that Peter died twelve days later (‘on the hour set by God’), it probably makes little difference either way.
Several other techniques were used to attract God’s attention. The ordeal of cold water involved immersing bound suspects in exorcized streams or wells, where priests would prod them with poles to see whether they sank or swam. On the strength of a theory that water was so pure that it repelled sin, anyone who floated was convicted; those who sank convincingly enough were vindicated and, with luck, resuscitated. Another type of ordeal, said to be especially popular among the Anglo-Saxons, was the trial by morsel, which required suspects to swear to their innocence and then swallow a piece of blessed bread and cheese without choking to death. It sounds like a procedure that would require a miracle to convict rather than to acquit, but no records survive to confirm or question its effectiveness. One incident from the eleventh century suggests, however, that there were at least some medievalists who regarded it as reliable. The tale concerns the Earl Godwin of Wessex, an eleventh-century maker and breaker of monarchs, who is said to have got up to no good in 1036 while playing host to one Prince Alfred, a young pretender to England’s hotly contested throne. Chroniclers record that Godwin began the evening pleasantly enough, entertaining Alfred at his castle and promising to support his claims, but ended it considerably less cordially by handing him over to his mortal rival, Harold Harefoot, whose henchmen extracted his eyeballs and let him bleed to death. Godwin soon gathered together the requisite number of cronies to swear to his innocence, but Edward the Confessor harboured a lurking doubt and took the opportunity at an Easter banquet seventeen years later to repeat the accusation of murder. Godwin seized a chunk of bread and raised it to the heavens. ‘May God cause this morsel to choke me,’ he bellowed, ‘if I am guilty in thought or deed.’ The chroniclers – none of whom, admittedly, had much time for Godwin – record that he chewed, trembled, and dropped dead.
The notion of God as umpire attained its purest expression in trial by combat. The ritual required plaintiff and defendant to prove that He would take their side in a fight, and after weapons were blessed – to neutralize blade-blunting spells and the like – victory would go to whoever reduced the other to submission or death. There were subtle variations. Women, priests, and cripples generally had to hire professional fighters. German jurisdictions often found other ways to level the odds: a man might be buried waist-deep and armed with a mace, for example, and his female opponent allowed to roam free but given only a rock in a sack. The residents of East Friesland allowed accused murderers to shift the charge onto a third party and prove their innocence by defeating him rather than their accuser. The choices were greatest of all for a defendant in twelfth-century England and France. He could turn the accusation onto innocent bystanders, challenge his own witnesses or, for a few gloriously violent years, appeal a verdict by battling those who had delivered it.
Compurgation and trial by ordeal had little to commend them by modern standards. Although the more blood-curdling ceremonies presumably terrified some guilty people into confessing, only the laws of probability offered any guarantee of occasional efficiency. In an age committed to the notion that a just God was perpetually tinkering with His handiwork, it must however have always been considerably easier to assume the rituals’ effectiveness than to imagine why they might not work. Scepticism was clearly abroad as early as 809, when Charlemagne felt it necessary to bolster ordeals with a law commanding his subjects to believe in them; but even the doubts were generally irrational. Pope Eugene II expressed concerns about perjury during the 820s but he was more worried for the souls of witnesses than the reliability of their evidence – and resolved his misgivings by ordering that defendants undergo the ordeal of cold water instead. Fifty years later, Pope Nicholas I banned trial by combat but he too was no more than suspicious of its value: he replaced it with the ordeal of boiling water, and noted that David’s defeat of Goliath proved that judicial duels might sometimes work.
The mood began to change with the turn of the millennium. As the solstice of AD 1000 came and went with no sign of Armageddon, widespread relief was followed by a sense of rebirth across southern and western Europe. Within less than three years, according to the eleventh-century chronicle of the monk Rudolfus Glaber, men everywhere ‘began to reconstruct churches…It was as if the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches.’ The physical renewal was complemented by an intellectual revival no less palpable. For the wind that had once moved men like Aeschylus and Protagoras, the belief in reason that had been so long stagnant in Europe, started once again to blow.
Muslim scholars in Córdoba and Persia contributed considerably to the new atmosphere, thanks to their possession of Greek texts that had been lost to Latin Europe for centuries, but so too did the rediscovery in around 1170 of a document that was quintessentially European. And the latter work would ensure that lawyers were at the vanguard of the intellectual revival. For a brightly coloured envelope emerged in Pisa – found, according to legend, by a soldier as he pottered through the ruins of Amalfi – and it contained the core of the vast legal code that the Emperor Justinian had enacted during the dying days of the Western Empire.
The rediscovery of the Digest coincided with a major clash between the papacy and Germany’s imperial throne, and at a time when no source of authority was quite as compelling as tradition, its impact was immense. Clerics were soon flocking to Italy to trawl its text, and as they did so the first great law school to appear in Europe since the days of the Empire coalesced in Bologna. Students were soon producing inventive, ingenious, and mutually contradictory theses aplenty, but when Justinian’s laws were matched against contemporary practice, one fact was stark. They contained not a jot of support for trials by ordeal. The work of