Trial by Ordeal: Most Várad Cases With a Result Were Cleared

How did the hot-iron ordeal work at Várad?

A case began with a charge before a judge, often a count or his deputy. The judge sent the parties to Várad with his officer, whom the register calls a pristaldus, and the officer later reported what had happened (Exhibit A, no. 9). In a word search of the entries, theft is the charge named most often. Others include violence, killing, poisoning or sorcery, arson, and quarrels over whether a person was free.

The test came after a fast. One entry says a man came to carry the iron transacto triduano jejunio, sicut mos est, “after the three-day fast, as is the custom” (Exhibit A, no. 275; translated by Hoax and Hindsight). The register as printed in 1550 ends with the prayers said over the iron. They ask that the accused, if innocent, “may appear unharmed” after taking it in his hand (Exhibit A, p. 149; translated by Hoax and Hindsight).

Then came two questions. “Brother, are you guiltless of this crime of which you are accused?” The answer was “I am guiltless.” The second question was a single word, “Clean?”, and the reply “I am clean” (Exhibit A, p. 151; translated by Hoax and Hindsight). The register’s own words for a good result echo that answer: iustificatus, made just, or mundatus, made clean.

After the iron was carried, the hand was sealed with the chapter’s seal and opened later for the canons to inspect. The seal mattered. In one entry the canons refused to inspect a hand because the seal was not intact, and in another three men were held to be in the wrong because their hands bore a false seal in place of the chapter’s (Exhibit A, nos. 50 and 280). The register never describes a wound or says how a burn was judged; it records only the word, cleared or combustus, burned.

Illustration

An illustration, not a record: a carrier waiting for his sealed hand to be opened. The Várad register gives only the result of that inspection, cleared or burned, never a description of the hand.

Which ordeals did the Church stop blessing in 1215?

The Fourth Lateran Council met at Rome in 1215 under Pope Innocent III. Its canon 18 deals with clergy and bloodshed: no cleric is to pronounce a sentence of blood or take part where one is carried out. It then adds that no one may “bestow any rite of blessing or consecration on a purgation by boiling or cold water or by the hot iron” (Exhibit B, col. 1007; translated by Hoax and Hindsight).

That one clause names the three ordeals the council had in mind: boiling water, cold water and the hot iron. In its own words, the canon forbids the clergy to bless an ordeal. It does not say that lay courts must stop using one, a point a scholar named Patetta made against the usual reading, as James Bradley Thayer reported in 1898 (Exhibit C, p. 37, note).

Ordeal by cold water in a twelfth-century ritual book of Lambach Abbey, as identified on the image’s source page, photographed from a plate in a 2006 book. The drawing is shown without the Latin text below it on the manuscript page.

What does the Várad register count?

Each of the 389 entries was read and put in one of five groups; the unit is the entry, not the person. If the iron was carried and every carrier with a written result was cleared, the entry counts as cleared; if every one was burned, convicted, or fled into the church saying he was burned, it counts as burned. Entries with several carriers and both results count as split. Entries where the iron was carried but no result was written, or where no one carried it, are kept apart.

In the Várad register, 131 of the 209 hot-iron cases with a written result end with every carrier cleared. Another 62 end with every carrier burned or convicted, and 16 are split. In those 16 split cases the register names 46 people as cleared and 26 as burned. The other 180 entries have no written result: 168 end before anyone carries the iron, and in 12 the iron was carried but no result was entered.

All 389 entries of the 1903 edition, and the 209 with a written result split three ways. Counted entry by entry from the Latin; the reasons for each borderline call are in the table. Drawn from the table published with this page.

The Várad register, one row per entry with its outcome (CSV) (where the data comes from) Data: Regestrum Varadinense, ed. J. Karácsonyi and S. Borovszky (Budapest, 1903)

Entries stop short of the iron for several reasons. Parties agree on a payment at Várad, an accuser admits a false charge, a side fails to come on the set day, or someone confesses (Exhibit A, nos. 2, 21, 44 and 194). The count was made two ways, and both give the same totals.

Who carried the iron?

Sometimes someone else carried the iron for the accused. In one entry a man carried it for his lord and was cleared; in another a father carried it for his daughter and was burned; in a third a son was ordered to carry it for his mother and was cleared (Exhibit A, nos. 10, 197 and 215). Some entries record one man carrying for a whole group, such as his fellow villagers (Exhibit A, nos. 198 and 374).

Women appear as carriers too. A woman named Benedicta, charged with poisoning or sorcery, was written down as burned, while Cusid carried the iron to show she was no poisoner and was cleared (Exhibit A, nos. 12 and 156). One man, at the moment he should have carried the iron, took the Host from his mouth into his hand, and was judged guilty for it (Exhibit A, no. 3).

Dieric Bouts, Justice of Emperor Otto III: Ordeal by Fire, painted in 1471–75 and now in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. It shows a legend, not a record: a countess kneels before the emperor holding the glowing iron of the title.

Did the ordeal stop after 1215?

Not at Várad, if the 1903 dating holds. Of the 221 entries in which the iron was carried, 132 are dated after 1215, and the last ones fall in 1234 (Exhibit A, nos. 374, 380 and 381). The chart sets the cases with a result against the year of the council.

Hot-iron cases with a written result in each year that has entries, as dated in the 1903 edition. The dashed line marks the 1215 council. Drawn from the table published with this page.

England moved faster, by Thayer’s account. “I find no case of trial by ordeal in our printed records later than Trinity Term of the 15 John (1214),” he wrote, and he cited writs of Henry III of 1218–19 telling the judges how to try cases now that the Roman Church had forbidden the ordeal of fire and water (Exhibit C, p. 37). In his reading the ordeal “gave way, after the Lateran Council decree, to trial by jury” (Exhibit C, p. 39). Another page takes up the jury that replaced the ordeal, set against DNA in a later identity case.

The change left a gap for people who would not accept a jury. Thayer conjectured that the prison forte et dure of a 1275 statute for such prisoners should be read against the 1219 order (Exhibit C, p. 79), the same procedure behind the page on Giles Corey and the penalty for refusing a jury.

What can’t the register show?

It cannot show guilt or innocence. The canons judged a hand. The state of a hand after the iron says nothing about what its owner did, so a clearing in the book records how the hand was judged, not what the accused had done. The register also speaks for the chapter that ran the tests, and it has no entry written by an accused person.

The book has a history of its own, shown in the timeline below. It is known here through the 1550 printing, which the 1903 editors reprinted type for type and then rearranged by date (Exhibit A, pp. 152, 155 and 308). They wrote that some scholars held the date of single entries could not be fixed at all, which is why every year on this page carries the editors’ dating (Exhibit A, p. III). Nor can the book say whether every ordeal at Várad was written down.

Eight dated events from the register’s opening year to its 1903 edition, evenly spaced rather than to scale. Filled circles are events at Várad. Drawn from the table published with this page (Exhibits A to C).

The timeline, one row per event with its source (CSV) (where the data comes from) Data: Regestrum Varadinense (Budapest, 1903); J. D. Mansi, vol. 22; James Bradley Thayer (1898)

Older readers disagreed about what an ordeal was for. William Stubbs held that where an ordeal followed a jury’s accusation, it “could only be applied to those who were to all intents and purposes proved to be guilty”; Thayer answered that “the ordeal was simply a mode of trial; or, as they phrased it in those days, of clearing one’s self of a charge” (Exhibit C, p. 39, quoting Stubbs). The writer of the Mirror, a law book Maitland conjectured was written between 1285 and 1290, regretted its passing, and Thayer gives the passage in English: “It is an abuse,” it says, “that proofs and purgations are not made by the miracle of God where no other proof can be had” (Exhibit C, p. 38). Reading a sign as proof did not end with the iron either, as the Salem witch trials of 1692, where a suspect’s touch was read as a sign show.

Why so many carriers were written down as cleared is a question for historians. Robert Bartlett’s Trial by Fire and Water (1986) and Peter Leeson’s article “Ordeals” (2012) are modern studies of it, read here only as bibliographic entries, so this page does not report their arguments (Exhibits D and E). In England, Thayer noted, a man who came safely through the ordeal could still be required under the Assize of Clarendon to leave the realm (Exhibit C, p. 38).