ng's law." It administered the old customary English
codes, and carried on its business by the old procedure. There came to it
the lords of the manors with their stewards, the abbots and priors of the
county with their officers, the legal men of the hundreds who were
qualified by holding property or by social freedom, and from every
township the parish priest, with the reeve and four men, the smiths,
farmers, millers, carpenters, who had been chosen in the little community
to represent their neighbours; and along with them stood the pledges, the
witnesses, the finders of dead bodies, men suspected of crime. The court
was, in fact, a great public meeting of the whole county; there was no
rank or order which did not send some of its number to swell the confused
crowd that stood round the sheriff. The criminal was generally put on his
trial by accusation of an injured neighbour, who, accompanied by his
friends, swore that he did not bring his charge for hatred, or for envy,
or for unlawful lust of gain. The defendant claimed the testimony of his
lord, and further proved his innocence by a simple or threefold
compurgation--that is, by the oath of a certain number of freemen among
his neighbours, whose property gave them the required value in the eye of
the law, and who swore together as "compurgators" that they believed his
oath of denial to be "clean and unperjured." The faith of the compurgator
was measured by his landed property, and the value of the joint-oath which
was required depended on a most intricate and baffling set of arithmetical
calculations, and differed according to the kind of crime, the rank of the
criminal, and the amount of property which was in dispute, besides other
differences dependent on local customs. Witnesses might also be called
from among neighbours who held property and were acquainted with the facts
to which they would "dare" to swear. The final judgment was given by
acclamation of the "suitors" of the court--that is, by the owners of
property and the elected men of the hundreds or townships; in other words,
by the public opinion of the neighbourhood. If the accused man were of bad
character by common report, or if he could find no friends to swear in his
behalf, "the oath burst," and there remained for him only the ordeal or
trial by battle, which he might accept or refuse at his own peril. In the
simple ordeal he dipped his hand in boiling water to the wrist, or carried
a bar of redhot iron t