Other kinds of ordeal were practiced in particular circumstances in different parts of Europe. In the ordeal of the bier, a supposed' murderer was required to touch the body of the murdered person, and pronounced guilty if the blood flowed from his wounds. The ordeal of the eucharist was in use among the clergy: the accused party took the sacrament in attestation of innocence, it being believed that, if guilty, he Would be immediately visited with divine punishment for the sacrilege. A. somewhat similar ordeal was that of the corsned, or consecrated bread and cheese: if the accused swallowed it freely, lie was pronounced innocent; if it stuck in his throat, he was presumed to be guilty. Godwin earl of Kent, in the reign of Edward the confessor, when accused of the murder of the king's brother, is said to have appealed to the ordeal of the corsned, and choked by it. An early form of ordeal, abolished by Louis he debonnaire in 816, w'as that of the cross: the accuser and accused stood upright before a cross, and he who first fell, or shifted his position, was pronounced guilty. It was done away with, as being irreverent towards the mystery of the cross. Besides these, there was the ordeal by lot, dependent on the throw of a pair of dice, one marked with a cross, the other plain.
Trial by ordeal at first carried with it the sanction of the priests, as well tis of the civil power, though the clergy in the course of time came to discountenance it. In
England it seems to have been continued till the middle of the thirteenth century. On I he continent it was, generally speaking, abolished rather earlier, although as late as 1498 we find the truth of Savonarola's doctrine put to the test, by a challenge between one of his disciples and a FrancisCan friar, to walk through a burning pile. In Scotland, in 1180, We find David I. enacting, in one of the assemblies of the frank tenantry of the kingdom, which were the germ of parliaments, that no one was to hold an ordinary court of justice, or a court of ordeal, whether of battle, iron, or water, except in presence of the sheriff or one of his sergeants; though if that official failed to attend after being duly, summoned, the court miggat be held in his absence. The first step toward the,abolitibri of this form of trial in Saxon and Celtic countries, seems to have been the substitution of compnrgation by witnesses for compnrgation by ordeal. The near relatives of an accused party were expected to come forward io swear to his innocence. The number of com purgators varied, according to the importance of the case; and judgment went against the party whose kin refused to come forward, or who failed to obtain the necessary number of compurgators: To repel an accusation, it was often held necessary to have double the number of co;npurgfaors who supported it, till at length the most numerous body of compurgators carried the day. ,