Compurgation by witnesses was substituted, in England in the early part of the thirteenth century, for the former mode of compurgation by ordeal and the latter became an obsolete procedure in England, until revived in the crime of witchcraft, by James I., where it was quite generally used, to determine the guilt or innocence of persons accused of sorcery, because of the absence of any other test to apply, to determine their guilt or innocence.[56] This superstitious monarch maintained that trial by ordeal was an infallible test in cases of witchcraft, because the pure elements of fire and water would not receive those who had renounced the sacred privileges of their baptism and by his authority and example thousands of cases of cruelty and oppression resulted, in the use of the ordeal, as applied to cases of sorcery, during the craze of that delusion, in Europe,[57] but otherwise, the trial by ordeal passed into history, along with the many other cruel institutions of a past age. The ordeal was frequently used, in ancient Europe, to establish the paternity of children or the chastity of women, the success or failure of the test being generally accepted as the judgment of God. In 887 Charles-le-Gros accused his wife, the Empress Richarda, of adultery with Bishop Liutward, and she offered to prove her innocence by the judicial combat, or the ordeal of the red-hot iron.[58] St. Cunigundi, referred to as the “virgin-wife” of the Emperor St. Henry II., is also reported to have eagerly appealed to the judgment of God, to establish her innocence of the baseless charge of infidelity, preferred against her by her jealous lord, and in vindication of her honor, to have successfully trod, unharmed, the red-hot plow-shares.[59] In the eleventh century, the unholy purpose of Edward the Confessor—who was himself too ascetic to make his own wife, Editha, the partner of his bed[60]—in his desire to accomplish the death of his own Mother, Queen Emma, because of her partiality to his half brother, Hardicanute—the son of Canute,—was frustrated by the Queen invoking this judgment of God, through the ordeal of the red-hot iron, to establish her innocence of the charge of adultery with Alwyn, the Bishop of Winchester. The Queen triumphantly purged both herself and the Bishop, by the help of St. Sowthin, by walking bare-footed over nine red-hot plow-shares and out of gratitude for this vindication, the Queen and the Bishop each gave nine manors to the Church of Winchester in memory of the nine plow-shares, and it is reported that the King, for preferring the false charge against them, was corrected with stripes.[61] The Confessor was more successful in ridding himself of his father-in-law, however, and the interesting case of Godwin, Duke of Kent, father of Harold and sometimes called the “King maker of England,” during the reign of Edward the Confessor, also illustrates the superstitious belief in the corsned ordeal.