fairly illustrated by a case recounted by Aimoin as occurring under Chilperic I. in the latter half of the sixth century. A wife suspected by her husband offered the oath of purgation on the altar of St. Denis with her relatives, who were persuaded of her innocence; the husband not yet satisfied, accused the compurgators of perjury, and the fierce passions of both parties becoming excited, weapons were speedily drawn, and the sanctity of the venerable church was profaned with blood.[82] It was manifestly impossible, however, to enforce the rule of kinship in all cases, for the number of compurgators varied in the different codes, and in all of them a great number were required when the matter at stake was large, or the crime or criminal important. Thus when Chilperic I. was assassinated in 584, doubts were entertained as to the legitimacy of his son Clotair, an infant of four months—doubts which neither the character of Queen Fredegonda nor the manner of Chilperic’s death had any tendency to lessen—and Gontran, brother of the murdered king, did not hesitate to express his belief that the royal child’s paternity was traceable to some one of the minions of the court, a belief doubtless stimulated by the promise it afforded him of another crown. Fredegonda, however, repaired her somewhat questionable reputation and secured the throne to her offspring, by appearing at the altar with three bishops and three hundred nobles, who all swore with her as to the legitimacy of the little prince, and no further doubts were ventured on the delicate subject.[83] A similar case occurred in Germany in 899, when Queen Uta cleared herself of an accusation of infidelity, by taking a purgatorial oath with eighty-two nobles.[84] So in 824, a dispute between Hubert, Bishop of Worcester, and the Abbey of Berkeley, concerning the monastery of Westbury, was settled by the oath of the bishop, supported by those of fifty mass-priests, ten deacons, and a hundred and fifty other ecclesiastics.[85] These were, perhaps, exceptional instances, but in Wales the law required, as a regular matter, enormous numbers of compurgators in many cases. Privity to homicide, for instance, was divided into three triads, or nine classes of various degrees of guilt. Of these, the first triad called for one hundred raith-men to establish the denial; the second triad, 200, and the third, 300;[86] while, to rebut an accusation of killing with savage violence or poisoning, the enormous number of six hundred compurgators was considered necessary.[87] Even these armies of oath-takers did not widen the circle from which selection was allowed, for the law absolutely specifies that “the oaths of three hundred men of a kindred are required to deny murder, blood, and wound,”[88] and the possibility of finding them is only explicable by the system of tribes or clans in which all were legally related one to another. This is illustrated by