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Creature of Sanctified Bread was adjured, in terms terrible enough to make the sinner quake, to stick in the guilty throat, and cause the guilty jaws to be clenched and locked up. If in spite of all it went softly down, who dared to refuse belief in the man's innocence? It was chiefly for the clergy, and from every point of view must have been the most agreeable of the three, though a legend as untrustworthy as that of Emma ascribes to it the death of Earl Godwin, father of Harold. As he sat at meat with Edward the Confessor, the king brought up an old scandal about his brother's murder,
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May God cause this morsel to choke me, passionately exclaimed the earl,
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Edward blessed the bread; Godwin made an effort to swallow, choked and died.
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Take away that dog, said the monarch in what would seem an outburst of savage glee. This was on April 15th, 1053, thirteen years before the Conquest. Godwin in truth died of a fit. It soon was the policy of the monkish chroniclers to write down the national party of which he had been the head, a fact which explains the fable were it worth serious examination. More interesting to note the survival of the rite in the still current rustic formula,
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May this bit choke me if I lie! If the ordeal proved a man guilty, the punishment was fine, death or outlawry, but even if he escaped, the Assize of Clarendon (1164) ordered that, in certain cases, he should abjure the realm. By that time compurgation was gone; in 1215 the Lateran Council issued a solemn decree against Trial by Ordeal; and soon after it had vanished from English law. There is a curious reference to it in the State Trials as late as 1679. John Govan, a Jesuit priest, was indicted in that year at the Old Bailey for an alleged share in the Popish Plot. With some hesitation he claimed the right of Trial by Ordeal as an ecclesiastical privilege of a thousand years' standing, but Scroggs and North peremptorily refused to listen to his plea.
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We have no such law now, said the latter. Sir James Stephen assures us that the formula,
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By God and by my country,
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are seen
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as Gloucester draws near the bier. And according to one of the picturesque legends of English history, when Richard the Lion-Heart encountered at Fontevrault his father's body, the blood gushed from the nostrils of the dead king, a proceeding which, as Richard's offence was at the worst but unkindness, showed a somewhat excessive sensibility on the part of the royal clay. The oddest and latest case of all is from Scotland. In 1688 Philip Stanfield was tried for parricide at Edinburgh; one count of the indictment stated how his father's body had bled at his sacrilegious touch. The Lord Advocate, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, the
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Bluidy Mackenzie