The persistency of popular belief in this method of ascertaining guilt or innocence is seen as recently as 1811, when a Neapolitan noble, suspecting the chastity of his daughter, exposed her to the ordeal of fire, from which she barely escaped with her life.[999]
The cold-water ordeal (_judicium aquæ frigidæ_) differed from most of its congeners in requiring a miracle to convict the accused, as in the natural order of things he escaped. The preliminary solemnities, fasting, prayer, and religious rites, were similar to those already described; holy water sometimes was given to the accused to drink; the reservoir of water, or pond, was then exorcised with formulas exhibiting the same combination of faith and impiety, and the accused, bound with cords, was slowly lowered into it with a rope, to prevent fraud if guilty, and to save him from drowning if innocent.[1000] According to Anglo-Saxon rule, the length of rope allowed under water was an ell and a half;[1001] in one ritual it is directed that a knot be made in the rope at a distance of a long hair from the body of the accused, and if he sinks so as to bring the knot down to the surface of the water, he is cleared;[1002] but in process of time nice questions arose as to the precise amount of submergence requisite for acquittal. Towards the close of the twelfth century we find that some learned doctors insisted that sinking to the very bottom of the water was indispensable; others decided that if the whole person were submerged it was sufficient; while others again reasoned that as the hair was an accident or excrement of the body, it had the privilege of floating without convicting its owner, if the rest of the body was satisfactorily covered.[1003]
The basis of this ordeal was the belief, handed down from the primitive Aryans, that the pure element would not receive into its bosom any one stained with the crime of a false oath, another form of which is seen in the ancient superstition that the earth would eject the corpse of a criminal, and not allow it to remain quietly interred. The manner in which the church reconciled it to orthodoxy is clearly set forth by Hincmar: “He who seeks to conceal the truth by a lie will not sink in the waters over which the voice of the Lord hath thundered; for the pure nature of water recognizes as impure, and rejects as incompatible, human nature which, released from falsehood by the waters of baptism, becomes again infected with untruth.”[1004] The baptism in the Jordan, the passage of the Red Sea, and the crowning judgment of the Deluge, were freely adduced in support of this theory, though these latter were in direct contradiction to it; and the most figurative language was boldly employed to give some show of probability to the results expected. Thus, in the elaborate formula which passes under the name of St. Dunstan, the prayer offered over the water metaphorically adjures the Supreme Being—“Let not the water receive the body of him who, released from the weight of goodness, is upborne by the wind of iniquity!”[1005]