“‘Put na the wite on me,’ she said; ‘It was my may Katherine.’ Then they hae cut baith fern and thorn, To burn that maiden in. It wadna take upon her cheik, Nor yet upon her chin; Nor yet upon her yellow hair, To cleanse that deadly sin. The maiden touched that clay-cauld corpse, A drap it never bled; The ladye laid her hand on him, And soon the ground was red.” And thus Scott uses the ordeal of the bier to establish that the accuser was herself the guilty person[74] and the Bard of Avon and the Elder Edda utilize this ordeal and that of the boiling water, to demonstrate the infallibility of this Divine test, when applied, to ascertain the guilt or innocence of one accused of such crimes as may legitimately be the subject of this character of proceeding, known to the ancient law as one of the Judgments of God. The ordeal was entirely a judicial proceeding, regularly used, in an early day, for the trial of criminal cases, before the civil and ecclesiastical courts. The accused had no alternative but to undergo the trial by ordeal, for when ordered to submit to it, the order had the force and effect of a regular judgment of the court.[75] A failure to comply with the order of the court to undergo a trial by ordeal, was treated as a contempt of court, and under the early English law, the accused who refused to submit to such a test, was outlawed and his property was confiscated, the same as if he had been adjudged guilty of the offense, for in refusing a compliance with the mandate of the law, he placed himself beyond the pale of the law and later could not claim the right to a lawful trial.[76] The Anglo-Saxon codes allowed no alternative but contained direct and specific provisions for the trial by ordeal, in all its different phases.[77] The circumstances and conditions under which ordeal was employed, in the trial of the various felonies known to the early Saxon laws, varies, necessarily, with the customs and legislation of the different rulers, and sometimes we find that the right of selection obtained, between this and other modes of compurgation, or between the different forms of ordeal.[78]