_The trial by ordeal_ was of various kinds. In one ordeal the accused was required to take hot iron in his hand; in another to walk blindfold among red-hot ploughshares; in another to thrust his arm into boiling water; in another to be thrown, with his hands and feet bound, into cold water; in another to swallow the _morsel of execration_; in the confidence that his guilt or innocence would be miraculously made known. This mode of trial was nearly extinct at the time of Magna Carta, and it is not likely that it was included in "_legem terræ_," as that term is used in that instrument. This idea is corroborated by the fact that the trial by ordeal was specially prohibited only four years after Magna Carta, "by act of Parliament in 3 Henry III., according to Sir Edward Coke, or rather by an order of the king in council."--_3 Blackstone_ 345, _note_.
I apprehend that this trial was never forced upon accused persons, but was only allowed to them, _as an appeal to God_, from the judgment of a jury.[33]
_The trial by compurgators_ was one in which, if the accused could bring twelve of his neighbors, who would make oath that they believed him innocent, he was held to be so. It is probable that this trial was really the trial by jury, or was allowed as an appeal from a jury. It is wholly improbable that two different modes of trial, so nearly resembling each other as this and the trial by jury do, should prevail at the same time, and among a rude people, whose judicial proceedings would naturally be of the simplest kind. But if this trial really were any other than the trial by jury, it must have been nearly or quite extinct at the time of Magna Carta; and there is no probability that it was included in "_legem terræ_."]
[Footnote 28: Coke attempts to show that there is a distinction between amercements and fines--admitting that amercements must be fixed by one's peers, but claiming that fines may be fixed by the government. (_2 Inst._ 27, _8 Coke's Reports_ 38.) But there seems to have been no ground whatever for supposing that any such distinction existed at the time of Magna Carta. If there were any such distinction in the time of Coke, it had doubtless grown up within the four centuries that had elapsed since Magna Carta, and is to be set down as one of the numberless inventions of government for getting rid of the restraints of Magna Carta, and for taking men out of the protection of their peers, and subjecting them to such punishments as the government chooses to inflict.