The Normans were attached to the procedure, elsewhere discussed, as the _trial by battle_ and they did not relish a procedure which seemed to them to be a mere superstitious formality, fit only for women and old or maimed men. However, ever since the reign of Ina, the Saxons had been accustomed to the ordeal and the laws of Ina and later monarchs continued in effect, and the accused person was entitled to select the ordeal of hot iron, or that of hot water and to undergo, under the supervision of the priest or bishop, a trial, to determine his guilt or innocence of the offense charged.[43] In the year 1166, in the Assize of Clarendon, and again in the year 1176, in the Assize of Northampton, Henry II. provided for a public mode of accusation for the capital felonies and trial by ordeal was the method of procedure fixed to determine the guilt or innocence of the person charged.[44] Prior to the thirteenth century perjury was so common and it was so impossible to avoid the effects of a false oath, by the proceedings of men, that the Laws of Henry provided that “No one is to be convicted of a capital crime by testimony.”[45] Mere human testimony was not enough to send a man to the gallows, but one accused of a capital offense was to be entitled to one of the old-world sacred processes, wherein the _judicium Dei_, was supposed to take the place of the false standards, too often erected by ordinary mortals. The ordeal was then so far “the law of the land” that one accused of a capital offense, who refused the ordeal, could be executed, as an outlaw, because he had thus defied the law of the realm. But one who had not been accorded this “law of the land,” based upon the sacred and Divine belief in the infallibility of the test of ordeal, could not legally be condemned, as trial by jury or by the oaths of witnesses was not yet an accredited method of procedure in cases of capital offense.[46] Glanville tells us that in his time, about the year 1187, an accused person, who was so far disabled by mayhem that he could not test his guilt or innocence by the ordeal of battle, was entitled to the ordeal of fire or water, to determine his guilt or innocence, this author of the first law book observing:[47] “In such case, the Accused is obliged to purge himself by the Ordeal, that is, by the hot Iron, if he be a free Man—by water, if he be a Rustic.” This corresponds with the statement elsewhere made, that in the early use of this trial, the hot iron ordeal, was confined to the nobility, or patricians, while the water ordeal was generally used among the common people, accused of minor offenses or other than the capital felonies.[48]