many must certainly have been guilty. The
innocency of some who suffered could never be known with certainty.
Others by accident might have escaped; and this apparently miraculous
escape had great weight in confirming the authority of this trial. How
long did we continue in punishing innocent people for witchcraft, though
experience might, to thinking persons, have frequently discovered the
injustice of that proceeding! whilst to the generality a thousand
equivocal appearances, confessions from fear or weakness, in fine, the
torrent of popular prejudice rolled down through so many ages, conspired
to support the delusion.

[Sidenote: Compurgation.]

To avoid as much as possible this severe mode of trial, and at the same
time to leave no inlet for perjury, another method of clearing was
devised. The party accused of any crime, or charged in a civil
complaint, appeared in court with some of his neighbors, who were called
his Compurgators; and when on oath he denied the charge, they swore that
they believed his oath to be true.[65] These compurgators were at first
to be three; afterwards five were required; in process of time twelve
became necessary.[66] As a man might be charged by the opinion of the
country, so he might also be discharged by it: twelve men were necessary
to find him guilty, twelve might have acquitted him. If opinion supports
all government, it not only supported in the general sense, but it
directed every minute part in the Saxon polity. A man who did not seem
to have the good opinion of those among whom he lived was judged to be
guilty, or at least capable of being guilty, of every crime. It was upon
this principle that a man who could not find the security of some
tithing or friborg for his behavior,[67] he that was upon account of
this universal desertion called Friendless Man, was by our ancestors
condemned to death,--a punishment which the lenity of the English laws
in that time scarcely inflicted for any crime, however clearly proved: a
circumstance which strongly marks the genius of the Saxon government.

[Sidenote: Trial by the Country.]

On the same principle from which the trial by the oath of compurgators
was derived, was derived also the Trial by the Country, which was the
method of taking the sense of the neighborhood on any dubious fact. If
the matter was of great importance, it was put in the full Shiremote;
and if the general voice acquitted or condemned, decided for one party
or the