“O gentlemen,see, see! dead Henry’s wounds Open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh!” And in the ballad of “Earl Richard”— “Put na the wite on me, she said, It was my may Catherine. Then they hae cut baith fern and thorn, To burn that maiden in. “It wadna take upon her cheik, Nor yet upon her chin, Nor yet upon her yellow hair To cleanse that deadly sin. “The maiden touched that clay-cauld corpse, A drap it never bled. The ladye laid her hand on him, And soon the ground was red.”[1141] This indicates that the belief was equally prevalent in Scotland. Indeed King James VI. gave it the stamp of his royal authority,[1142] and cases on record there show that it was occasionally received as judicial evidence, and even sometimes prescribed as an ordeal for detection. Thus in 1611, doubts arising as to the mode by which a person had met his death, the vicinage was summoned, as we are told according to custom, to touch the body which had been exhumed for the purpose. The murderer, whose rank relieved him of suspicion, kept away, but his little daughter, attracted by curiosity, approached the corpse, when it began to bleed and the crime was proved.[1143] One of the most noted cases in which crime was detected in this manner was that of Philip Standsfield, tried in 1688 for the murder of his father, Sir James Standsfield of New Milne. In this the indictment sets forth that after the body had been found in a pond and an autopsy had been performed by a surgeon, “James Row, merchant, having lifted the left side of Sir James, his head and shoulder, and the said Philip the right side, his father’s body, though carefully cleaned, as said is, did (according to God’s usual mode of discovering murders), blood afresh upon him and defiled all his hands, which struck him with such a terror that he immediately let his father’s head and body fall with violence and fled from the body and in consternation and confusion cryed Lord have mercy upon me! and bowed himself down over a seat in the church (where the corp were inspected), wiping his father’s innocent blood off his own murdering hands upon his cloaths.” When such was the spirit of the prosecution it need not surprise us that though the defence showed that in the autopsy an incision had been made in the neck, where there was a large accumulation of extravasated blood, and though high authorities were quoted to prove that such bleeding was not evidence sufficient even to justify torture, Philip Standsfield was condemned and executed in spite of the insufficiency of circumstantial evidence.[1144] A similar incident is recorded in the indictment of Christian Wilson, tried for witchcraft at Edinburgh in 1661.[1145] These cases are typical, inasmuch as they illustrate the two forms, the existence of which differentiates this from other ordeals. Sometimes, as in others, suspects were brought, under judicial order, to view or touch the body.