The Ordeal
The hot iron, the swimming of witches, and the lie detector.
In the Texts
The judgment of God by hot iron, boiling water, and cold water is in the Carolingian laws and the rituals of the Church until the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) forbade the clergy to bless it; the swimming of witches, bound and thrown in to see whether the water refused them, survived into the seventeenth century and Hopkins used it in 1645. The corsned, the blessed bread the guilty choke on, is in the Anglo-Saxon laws, and the blessed bread of the Materia Medica carries the memory.
What Medicine Makes of It
Bartlett (1986) wrote the history; Leeson (2012) read the records and found the iron exonerated most who faced it, because the guilty, believing, confessed or settled, and the priest, knowing who had chosen the ordeal, could manage the iron. The swimming tests body fat and lung volume, and women float. The corsned works on the dry mouth of fear, as the Indian rice test does and as the polygraph’s skin conductance does; the National Research Council (2003) found the polygraph better than chance and far from reliable.
The Evidence
- Bartlett (1986) traces the ordeals of hot iron, boiling water, and cold water from the sixth century to their ban at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which forbade priests to bless them, after which they vanished within a generation in most of Europe and survived in the swimming of witches.
- Leeson (2012) analysed the records: the hot-iron ordeal exonerated the great majority who underwent it, which he explains by the defendant’s belief, since the guilty confessed or settled rather than face God’s judgment, and the priest, knowing who had chosen the ordeal, could manage the iron.
- The swimming of witches rested on water’s refusal of the baptised sinner; the bound body floats or sinks by its fat and lung volume, and women, with more fat, float more; Hopkins used it in 1645 against the law and King James had argued for it in Daemonologie (1597).
- The corsned, the ordeal of the blessed bread, which the guilty would choke on, is in the Anglo-Saxon laws of Æthelred; the dry mouth of fear does make swallowing hard, which is the same physiology the Indian rice test and the polygraph’s skin conductance use.
- The National Research Council’s review of the polygraph (2003) found it better than chance and far from reliable, and inadmissible in most courts: the modern ordeal, which measures fear and reads it as guilt.
Where They Part
The ordeal claimed to read guilt by God’s hand; the reading finds it read belief and fear, which correlate with guilt and are not the same. The polygraph is the ordeal with electrodes, and the courts that bar it have the Lateran Council’s reasons.
In the Materia Medica
Sources
- Bartlett, R. (1986). Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal. Oxford.
- Leeson, P. T. (2012). “Ordeals.” Journal of Law and Economics 55.
- National Research Council (2003). The Polygraph and Lie Detection. National Academies Press.
Historical and interpretive; not medical advice.