At first, its revival promised to be but temporary. Only a few years after its introduction it was condemned by Louis le Débonnaire at the Council of Worms, in 829; its use was strictly prohibited, and the _missi dominici_ were instructed to see that the order was carried into effect, regulations which were repeated by the Emperor Lothair, son of Louis.[1011] These interdictions were of little avail. The ordeal found favor with popular superstition, and Hincmar contents himself with remarking that the imperial prohibition was not confirmed by the canons of authoritative councils.[1012] The trial by cold water spread rapidly throughout Europe, and by all the continental races it was placed on an equal footing with the other forms of ordeal. Among the Anglo-Saxons, indeed, its employment has been called in question by some modern writers; but the Dooms of Ethelstan sufficiently manifest its existence in England before the Conquest, while as late as the close of the twelfth century its use would seem to have been almost universal. The assizes of Clarendon in 1166, confirmed at Northampton in 1176, direct an inquest to be held in each shire, and all who are indicted for murder, robbery, harboring of malefactors, and other felonies are to be at once, without further trial, passed through the water ordeal to determine their guilt or innocence.[1013] As we have seen in the case of the iron ordeal, those of water, both cold and hot, were variously described as patrician or plebeian in different times and places. Thus Hincmar, in the ninth century, alludes to the water ordeals as applicable to persons of servile condition;[1014] a constitution of the Emperor St. Henry II., about A. D. 1000, in the Lombard law, has a similar bearing;[1015] in the eleventh century an Alsatian document,[1016] in the twelfth Glanville’s treatise on the laws of England,[1017] and in the thirteenth the laws of Scotland[1018] all assume the same position. This, however, was an innovation; for in the earliest codes there was no such distinction, a provision in the Salic law prescribing the _æneum_, or hot-water ordeal, even for the Antrustions, who constituted the most favored class in the state.[1019] Nor even in later times was the rule by any means absolute. In the tenth century, Sanche, Duke of Gascony, desirous of founding the monastery of Saint Sever, claimed some land which was necessary for the purpose, and being resisted by the possessor, the title was decided by reference to the cold-water ordeal.[1020] In 1027, Welf II., Count of Altorf, ancestor of the great houses of Guelf in Italy and England, having taken part in the revolt of Conrad the Younger and Ernest of Suabia, was forced by the Emperor Conrad the Salic to prove his innocence in this manner.[1021] About the same period Othlonus relates an incident in which a man of noble birth accused of theft submitted himself to the cold-water ordeal as a matter