After the hand had been plunged in the seething caldron, it was carefully enveloped in a cloth, sealed with the signet of the judge, and three days afterwards it was unwrapped, when the guilt or innocence of the party was announced by the condition of the member.[887] By way of extra precaution, in some rituals it is ordered that during this interval holy water and blessed salt be mingled in all the food and drink of the patient—presumably to avert diabolic interference with the result.[888]
The judicial use of this ordeal is shown in a charter of the monastery of Sobrada in Galicia, when, about 987, the Bishop of Lugo claimed of it for his church the manor of Villarplano. After a vain effort to decide the question by evidence, the representatives of the monastery took a solemn oath as to its rights and offered to confirm it by the _pæna caldaria_. In the church of San Juliano some fifty or sixty notables from both sides assembled; a monk named Salamiro was conducted to the boiling caldron by a person representing each claimant, and there he drew forth ten stones from the bubbling water. His arm was sealed up and three or four days later was exhibited uninjured to the assembly. The proof was conclusive and the Bishop of Lugo abandoned his claim.[889]
The justification of this mode of procedure by its most able defender, Hincmar of Reims, is similar in spirit to the above form of adjuration. King Lothair, great-grandson of Charlemagne, desiring to get rid of his wife, Teutberga, accused her of the foulest incest, and forced her to a confession, which she afterwards recanted, proving her innocence by undergoing the ordeal of hot water by proxy. Lothair, nevertheless, married his concubine Waldrada, and for ten years the whole of Europe was occupied with the degrading details of the quarrel, council after council assembling to consider the subject, and the thunders of Rome being freely employed. Hincmar, the most conspicuous ecclesiastic of his day, stood boldly forth in defence of the unhappy queen, and in his treatise “De Divortio Lotharii et Teutbergæ,” although no one at the time seriously thought of impugning the authority of ordeals in general, it suited his purpose to insist upon their claims to infallibility. His line of argument shows how thoroughly the pagan custom had become Christianized, and how easily the churchman could find reasons for attributing to God the interposition which his ancestors had ascribed to Mithra, or to Agni, or to Thor. “Because in boiling water the guilty are scalded and the innocent are unhurt, because Lot escaped unharmed from the fire of Sodom, and the future fire which will precede the terrible Judge will be harmless to the Saints, and will burn the wicked as in the Babylonian furnace of old.”[890]