It is true that in Alfred’s time there were trials by jury, and it seems that trial by ordeal may have been re-established, after trial by jury, in doubtful cases, as a refuge or solution of an otherwise doughty problem for the barbarian mind to solve.[34] Pursuance to the terms of a certain league, made between Edward the Elder and Guthrun, the Dane, ordeals were forbidden upon festivals or fasting days[35] and the same provision was inserted in the constitution made by the synod held at Eanham, under King Ethelred.[36] The laws of Canute and Edward the Confessor also contained provisions forbidding trials by ordeal upon festivals or fasting days, for we read that the _judicium Dei_, upon these auspicious occasions, was to be postponed, until the affairs of mortals could be better arranged for its reception, by the following provision:[37] “We forbid ordeals and oaths” (the name law trials at that time were called) “on feast days and ember days, and from the advent of our Lord till the eighth day after twelfth be past; and from Septuagesima till fifteen nights after Easter. And the sages have ordained that St. Edward’s day shall be festival all England on the fifteenth cal. of April, and St. Dunstan’s, on the fourteenth cal. of June; and that all Christians, as right it is, should keep them hallowed and in peace.” In the simple ordeal, of the Anglo-Saxons, the hot iron weighed one pound and in the triple ordeal, it was to weigh three pounds. The triple ordeal was used in the crimes of arson and murder, treason and forgery.[38] In the laws of Edward the Elder, perhaps the earliest reference in Anglo-Saxon laws, to the ordeal, it was provided that perjured persons, or those once convicted should not thereafter be deemed oath-worthy, but on their accusation, should be hurried to the ordeal,[39] and similar provisions are to be found in the laws of Ethelred, Cnut and Henry I.[40] Trial by ordeal at first carried with it the sanction of the priest, as well as the civil power and the clergy continued to approve and interject the spiritual portion of the proceeding, until the early portion of the thirteenth century.[41] Under the law of William the Conqueror, the conduct of the ordeal, as a known ecclesiastical procedure, was declared to be the business of the bishop, but the civil and spiritual powers were to co-operate harmoniously, in the trial by ordeal, the court of the hundred making the original order by which a man was sent to the ordeal of fire or water, but the bishop presided at the ceremony and regulated the course of the proceeding, in accordance with the solemn religious ceremony, whereby the element used was blessed and the Divine Wisdom of Omnipotence was invoked to the conclusion of the whole proceeding.[42]