the accused person, make him walk barefooted over them. If he stepped
regularly in the vacant spaces, avoiding the fire, he was adjudged
innocent; if he burned himself, he was declared guilty. As none but the
clergy interfered with the arrangement of the ploughshares, they could
always calculate beforehand the result of the ordeal. To find a person
guilty, they had only to place them at irregular distances, and the
accused was sure to tread upon one of them. When Emma, the wife of King
Ethelred, and mother of Edward the Confessor, was accused of a guilty
familiarity with Alwyn Bishop of Winchester, she cleared her character in
this manner. The reputation, not only of their order, but of a queen,
being at stake, a verdict of guilty was not to be apprehended from any
ploughshares which priests had the heating of. This ordeal was called the
_Judicium Dei_, and sometimes the _Vulgaris Purgatio_, and might also be
tried by several other methods. One was to hold in the hand, unhurt, a
piece of red-hot iron, of the weight of one, two, or three pounds. When we
read not only that men with hard hands, but women of softer and more
delicate skin, could do this with impunity, we must be convinced that the
hands were previously rubbed with some preservative, or that the
apparently hot iron was merely cold iron painted red. Another mode was to
plunge the naked arm into a caldron of boiling water. The priests then
enveloped it in several folds of linen and flannel, and kept the patient
confined within the church, and under their exclusive care, for three
days. If, at the end of that time, the arm appeared without a scar, the
innocence of the accused person was firmly established.[52]

[52] Very similar to this is the fire-ordeal of the modern
Hindoos, which is thus described in Forbes's _Oriental
Memoirs_, vol. i. c. xi.:--"When a man, accused of a capital
crime, chooses to undergo the ordeal trial, he is closely
confined for several days; his right hand and arm are covered
with thick wax-cloth, tied up and sealed, in the presence of
proper officers, to prevent deceit. In the English districts
the covering was always sealed with the Company's arms, and
the prisoner placed under an European guard. At the time
fixed for the ordeal, a caldron of oil is placed over a fire;
when it boils, a piece of money is dropped into the vessel;
the p