ABSTRACT
The trial by ordeal in early medieval Europe, the Old English ordal or Latin iudicium dei, has been documented fairly well by now in most regards.1 Paul R. Hyams has analysed the rationale for the ordeal in the context of the early medieval thought-world with particular relation to its legacy in English common law during the High Middle Ages.2 Patrick Wormald wrote on the ordeal in passing in his magisterial study The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, though his penetrating thoughts were generally directed more to the understanding of the legal documents of the Anglo-Saxon period as ‘an index of governing mentalities’ than to the workings of the law as an aspect of social history.3 In that latter respect, Robert Bartlett has provided a wealth of information, drawn chiefly from the Continent, with a bearing on the conduct of the two most common and excruciating forms of the rite, the trial by hot iron (what in Old English was called the isern-ordal) and the trial by boiling water (in Old English, the wæter-ordal), with secondary attention to the elaborate ordeal by cold water by which, in special cases, the accused was physically immersed so as to determine his innocence or guilt.4 Bartlett has also given an account of the historical process by which the trial
1 For basic texts, see Liebermann, Gesetze, 1, 386-7 (Ordal) and 401-29 (Iudicium dei, Rituale); for discussion, see ibid. 2, 601-4 (s.v. Ordal); cf. Attenborough, Laws, 170-73 (Dom be hatan ísene and wætre); for discussion, 187-9. The modern English translations of ordeal texts published by G.W. Rightmire, The Law of England at the Norman Conquest (Columbus, OH, 1932), 45-54, are helpful but incomplete. A new multilingual edition of this set of legal documents (in Latin and Old English, with complete modern English translations), undertaken either independently or in conjunction with a new edition of the whole set of Anglo-Saxon laws, remains one of the desiderata of Anglo-Saxon studies.
