Refusal to obey the summons of a court entailed outlawry. The oath of the accused was still received, but it gradually lost its primitive value, and came to be regarded simply as that of a witness. The importance of the ordeal increased with the growing influence of the Church. This remark, however, does not apply to the duel, which was classed among the ordeals, and which, derived from pagan times, still survives. The abuse and fallacy of such methods of judgment were recognized at an early period, but the numerous trials for witchcraft, which reached their culmination as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, show how slowly reason makes its way.
Ordcals.—Among the most usual ordeals was that of water, based upon the notion that this pure element would cast out a guilty person. If the suspected person did not sink in it, he was adjudged guilty; if he sank, his innocence was established.' In the ordeal by fire the accused established his innocence by touching white-hot iron. In the bier ordeal the suspected person was required to make an oath and to touch the body of the murdered man, which it was thought would bleed if the accused were guilty.
Torture was inflicted at an early period on suspected persons, and its use increased as the old mode of trial fell into desuetude and legal inves tigations became inquisitorial. In the latter process punishment could follow only upon a confession of crime; but it is well known from the witchcraft cases that innocent persons subjected to the pain of torture confessed crimes of which they were not guilty. The methods of torture were manifold, the lighter grades being inflicted by means of rods, whips, thumbscrews, and the so-called "Spanish boot." In more severe methods the body was racked by being suspended by the hands while heavy stones were attached to the feet (p. 52, fig. 4), or, again, the flesh was pinched with red-hot tongs or seared with melted pitch. Figure 3 shows the pan used for melting the pitch, which, with other implements of torture and punishment, is preserved in the museum of Nuremberg. Sometimes the body of the victim stretched upon the rack was further mutilated by a roller armed with spikes, the so-called gespickter Lase or "larded hare" (fig. 6), which was drawn back and forth over the bleeding flesh. Figure exhibits a torture-chamber as preserved to a recent date in a castle near Nuremberg. Figure II depicts an inquisition by torture as copied from a wood-cut of the sixteenth century.
Punishments were severe and, according to our .ideas, extremely cruel. Minor misdemeanors were punished by durance, the hardship of which was increased by cuffs and irons (fig. 5) or by the stocks (fig. 2), in which the prisoner, sometimes in company with others, was fastened by hands and feet. Disturbers of the peace were placed in the pillory, the neck being inserted in the larger and the wrists in the smaller openings of an instru ment called "the violin " (Geige, fig. 9). When two quarrelsome persons were to be punished, they were fastened to a longer instrument (fig-. 8) and placed upon a high platform, where they might continue their abuse of each other for the entertainment of the public. Sometimes masks with a trumpet attachment to increase the sound were placed upon the offenders. The specimen shown in figure io bears the arms of Nuremberg, indi cating its use by that city as an instrument of punishment. In the increasing scale of inflictions we soon find beheading, hanging, break ing on the wheel, drowning, and burying alive, which were intensified by previous whipping, mutilation, pinching with heated tongs, etc. Alliance with the devil, witchcraft, etc. were punished by burning, and this mode of punishment was also inflicted for heresy; in Germany, however, only in exceptional instances.
Many of the so-called " felons' books " have been preserved, contain ing entries in the form of a daily journal, in which the executioners kept an account of the performance of their functions, and which seem to reek with the odor of blood and the air of dungeons; and yet, notwithstanding all this, we should not be justified in imputing to our ancestors the trait of cruelty, and it would indicate a lack of historical judgment to pronounce their penal system barbarous. Underneath the coarse husk lies a sound kernel. Society earnestly sought to rid the world of evil, believed that it had discovered in laws and punishments an efficient means to this end, and, because of this very belief, rigidly applied them. Viewed from our advanced standpoint, the trials for witchcraft seem like bloodthirsty mad ness. But if we place ourselves on the level of those ages, which really believed in such supernatural evil influences, our respect for the energy with which they opposed them will not be less than our pity for the error of their belief.