This form of trial was in use among all the races in whose legislation the _purgatio vulgaris_ found place. It is the only mode alluded to in the Salic Law, from the primitive text to the amended code of Charlemagne.[892] The same may be said of the Wisigoths, as we have already seen; while the codes of the Frisians, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Lombards, all refer cases to its decision.[893] In Iceland, it was employed from the earliest times;[894] in the primitive jurisprudence of Russia its use was enjoined in cases of minor importance,[895] and it continued in vogue throughout Europe until the general discredit attached to this mode of judgment led to the gradual abandonment of the ordeal as a legal process. It is among the forms enumerated in the sweeping condemnation of the whole system, in 1215, by Innocent III. in the Fourth Council of Lateran; but even subsequently we find it prescribed in certain cases by the municipal laws in force throughout the whole of Northern and Southern Germany,[896] and as late as 1282 it is specified in a charter of Gaston of Béarn, conferring on a church the privilege of holding ordeals.[897] At a later date, indeed, it was sometimes administered in a different and more serious form, the accused being expected to swallow the boiling water. I have met with no instances recorded of this, but repeated allusions to it by Rickius show that it could not have been unusual.[898] Another variant is seen in the case of a monk who had brought the body of St. Helena to his convent and was forced to prove its genuineness by complete immersion in boiling water—a trial which he endured successfully.[899]