to heal, and when he received absolution there was no trace left of the burn. Then the priest called attention to him, pronouncing him innocent, and on the evidence of his uninjured hand he was discharged. At Strassburg there were eighty obstinate ones, whose heresy was proved by the ordeal. They were all burned the same day in a ditch beyond the walls, and in the sixteenth century the hollow was still known to the citizens as the Ketzergrube. The property of the condemned was duly confiscated and was divided between the magistrates and those who had labored so successfully in vindicating the faith.[354] It is not to be supposed that Strassburg was a solitary centre of heresy, and that this was the only case of contemporary persecution. Fragmentary allusions to the detection and punishment of misbelief in other places during the next few years show that the population of the Rhinelands was deeply infected, and that when the ignorance and sloth of the clergy permitted detection, heretics were ruthlessly exterminated. The event at Strassburg, however, happens to have been reported with a fulness of detail which invests it with peculiar importance as revealing the methods of the episcopal inquisition of the period, and the nature of existing religious dissidence.[355] The Cathari appear to have virtually disappeared from Germany, where their foothold, at best, had been precarious. German soil seems to have been unpropitious to this essentially Southern growth. On the other hand, Waldenses were numerous, together with sectaries known as Ortlibenses or Ordibarii.