The Inquisitor Sprenger cites the case of a witch, tried before the Count of Furstenberg, in 1484. The accused invoked the test of the red-hot iron and the Inquisitor attributed his acquiescence to his youth and inexperience and the fact that he was not acquainted with the methods of the Devil, to further the cause of the sorcerers. Although sentenced to carry the hot iron only six paces, the supposed witch carried it six paces and offered to hold it still longer, if required, as she displayed her hand wholly uninjured. The Count was thus compelled to render a judgment of not guilty against the accused person and at the time Sprenger wrote, in 1487, he reported that she still lived “to the scandal of the faithful.”[70] The superstition connected with the trial by ordeal, as a means of detecting the guilt or innocence of the participants of the foul crimes of the middle ages, early took a firm hold of the popular imagination and we find repeated references to the ordeal, in the dramatic and popular literature of the different countries where this mode of trial obtained. The heroic Iceland song of the Elder Edda, supposed to have been composed between the sixth and eighth centuries, utilizes the ordeal as a means of bringing to justice the false witness borne by the accuser, the Concubine Herkia, in her charge of adultery against Gudrun, the wife of Atli.[71] First describing the test, resulting in the innocence of Gudrun, and then the proof of the guilt of her accuser, the poem proceeds: “She to the bottom plunged her snow-white hand, And up she drew the precious stones, ‘See now, ye men, I am proved guiltless, In holy wise, boil the vessel as it may.’ Laughed then Atli’s heart within his breast When he unscath’d beheld, the hand of Gudrun.” “‘Now must Herkia to the cauldron go, She who Gudrun had hoped to injure.’ No one has misery seen, who saw not that, How the hand there of Herkia was hurt. They then the woman led to a foul slough. So were Gudrun’s wrongs avenged.” The ordeal of the bier was exemplified in the current literature of the age of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, for the histories of that King report that when he met the funeral procession of his father Henry II., at Fontevraud, the blood spurted from the nose of the deceased, because of the treason and rebellion of which his son had been guilty.[72] Shakespeare utilizes this story of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, in the funeral scene, in Richard III., where Lady Anne, when interrupted in her grief at the bier of Henry VI., is made to say to the by-standers: “O gentlemen, see, see: dead Henry’s wounds Open their congeal’d mouths, and bleed afresh.”[73] In Sir Walter Scott’s “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border” we also find a reference to this ordeal of the bier, when, in the ballad of Earl Richard, this author established the innocence of the maid, by this test: