This was not a belief likely to be allowed to die out for lack of nourishment. When, in the tenth century, Adaulfus, Bishop of Compostella, was accused of a nameless crime, and was sentenced by the hasty judgment of the king to be gored to death by a wild bull, he had taken the precaution, before appearing at the trial, to devoutly celebrate mass in his full pontificals. The bull, maddened with dogs and trumpets, rushed furiously at the holy man; then, suddenly pausing, advanced gently towards him and placed its horns in his hands, nor could any efforts of the assistants provoke it to attack him. The king and his courtiers, awed by this divine interposition in favor of innocence, threw themselves at the feet of the saint, who pardoned them and retired to the wildest region of the Asturias, where he passed the rest of his days as an anchorite. He left his chasuble behind him, however, and this garment thenceforth possessed the miraculous power that, when worn by any one taking an oath, it could not be removed if he committed perjury.[1176] In other cases the shrines of saints convicted the perjurer by throwing him down in an epileptic fit, or by fixing him rigid and motionless at the moment of his invoking them to witness his false oath.[1177] The monks of Abingdon boasted a black cross made from the nails of the crucifixion, said to have been given them by the Emperor Constantine, a false oath on which was sure to cost the malefactor his life; and the worthy chronicler assures us that the instances in which its miraculous power had been triumphantly exhibited were too numerous to be specified.[1178] At the priory of Die, dependent on the great Benedictine abbey of Fleury, there was preserved an arm-bone of St. Maur, which was possessed of somewhat similar properties. On one occasion a steward of the priory named Joscelin was accused of embezzlement, and offered to rebut the evidence against him by an oath taken on the arm of St. Maur. Rejoiced at passing through the test triumphantly, he removed his hand from the relic, and stroking his long beard with it he exclaimed, “By this beard, the oath I swore was true!” when suddenly the beard came off in his hand, and his chin, thenceforth hairless, was the evidence alike of his guilt and his perjury, so that he and his descendants were at once proclaimed ineligible to the stewardship.[1179] Less serious in its consequences was a false oath taken by a peasant on the altar of St. Martial of Limoges. The offender was deprived of speech, and could only bellow like an ox until he had prayed over the tomb of the saint, and his throat had received the sign of the cross from a priest.[1180] Even at the present day the jaw-bone of St. Patrick is preserved near Belfast, and is used extra-judicially as an ordeal, in the full conviction that the slightest variation from the truth will bring instantaneous punishment on the perjurer,[1181] and in Sardinia a similar oath on relics is believed when false to