congregation of St. Maur, founded in 1618, was a congregation of Benedictines, and to them we owe the editing of many most valuable historical sources.
The French Revolution almost killed the order of Benedict, and it is now kept alive only in Austria and Italy. The monks are still famous for their classical learning.
No. II., the formulas for holding ordeals,[1] are prayers, exhortations, exorcisms, etc., used by the priests in carrying out the so-called "judgments of God." Although these formulas, as here given, are first found in manuscripts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they belong undoubtedly to Carolingian times.
Ordeals were already known to the Greeks, as may be seen from v. 264 of the "Antigone." The early Germans had various forms of obtaining judgments by the use of fire. One was for the accused to hold his hand in the flame for a certain time; another, for him to walk through a, fire clad in a single garment. Again, one might walk nine steps with a red-hot iron in the hand, or go barefoot over nine heated ploughshares. Richardis, the wife of Charles the Fat; Kunigunde, the wife of emperor Henry II.; not to speak of Emma, the mother of Edward the Confessor, underwent this last form of the ordeal.
In the hot water ordeal the accused was compelled to put his hand in a boiling cauldron of water and extract a stone or a ring. Another, and very common form of trying by water, was to throw the accused into a pool or tank of cold water, and see whether he sank or floated. The technical expression for this tank was "fossa"; Ducange's translation of which—a place to drown women in—does great injustice to the chivalry of our ancestors. Almost every abbot had a "furca et fossa," and the number of
- ↑ An excellent article on ordeals is that written by Wilda in Ersch and Gruber's " Allgemeine Encyclopsedie der Wissenschaften und Kiinste," under "Ordalien."
