As the story goes, Duke Godwin was dining with his royal son-in-law Edward the Confessor—for the latter had then married his daughter Editha—and whether premeditated or not, the King repeated the accusation that his brother Alfred had met his death at the hands of Duke Godwin. To vindicate himself old Godwin then invoked the ordeal of the corsned and seizing a morsel of bread he dramatically exclaimed: “May God cause this bread to choke me if I am guilty in thought or in deed of this crime.” Then the King took the bread and blessed it, and, whether he poisoned it or not, when Godwin put it in his mouth and swallowed it, he was suffocated by it and fell down dead.[62] In this age of scepticism it is hard to accept this superstitious explanation for the end of old Duke Godwin, but the secret of his death is more reasonably accounted for, on the theory of Boccascio’s story of Calen Drino, where the expected miracle was brought about by the secret mixture of aloes in the bread of the corsned, for, as Lea suggests, Edward the Confessor, both because of his dislike for his father-in-law, and his desire to cast off the tutelage in which he was held, in order to further his self interest and rid himself of a hated enemy, would no doubt have secretly mixed poison with the corsned used in this ordeal and then caused the story to be circulated among the superstitious subjects, to account for the Duke’s sudden demise.[63] We find that the ordeal was utilized in France, in the tenth century in the notable case of Teutberga, the wife of King Lothair, great-grandson of Charlemagne. Desiring to rid himself of his wife, this degenerate grandson of a worthy grand-sire, accused her of incest and forced her to a confession. She afterwards recanted and denied the truth of her confession and offered to establish her innocence by the ordeal of hot water, by proxy.[64] Hincmar, the most distinguished divine of this period championed the cause of the unfortunate queen and wrote a dissertation upon the infallibility of the test of the ordeals, because they had the guidance of the Divine Wisdom, effectually convincing himself and a large number of the French subjects of the correctness of the judgment by this ordeal, especially when King Lothair so far estopped himself from claiming that he had not desired to get rid of his wife, by espousing his concubine, Waldrada, whom he had, in fact, preferred to the wife he had discredited by the criminal charge against her.[65] Illustrating the prevalence with which the pagan practice of ordeal had taken possession of the minds of the churchmen of the ninth century, Lea quotes the argument of Hincmar, in his interesting work, “Superstition and Force,”[66] as follows: