The ordeal was thoroughly and completely a judicial process, ordained by the law for certain cases, and carried out by the tribunals as a regular form of ordinary procedure. From the earliest times, the accused who was ordered to undergo the trial was compelled to submit to it, as to any other decree of court. Thus, by the Salic law, a recusant was summoned to the royal court; and if still contumacious, he was outlawed and his property confiscated, as was customary in all cases of contempt.[1208] The directions of the codes, as we have seen, are generally precise, and admit of no alternative.[1209] Occasionally, however, a privilege of selection was afforded between this and other modes of compurgation, and also between the various forms of ordeal.[1210] There was, however, a remarkable exception to this enforcement of the ordeal in a provision existing in some codes by which a man condemned to it could buy himself off by compounding with his adversary. This mode of adjustment was not extensively introduced, but it nevertheless existed among the Anglo-Saxons,[1211] while among the Franks it was a settled custom, permitted by all the texts of the Salic law, from the earliest to the latest.[1212] By this a person condemned by the court to undergo the ordeal could, by a transaction with the aggrieved party, purchase the privilege of clearing himself by canonical purgation, and thus escape the severer trial. He was bound to pay his accuser only a portion of the fine which he would incur if proved guilty—a portion varying with different offences from one-fourth to one-sixth of the _wer-gild_. The interests of the tribunal were guarded by a clause which compelled him to pay to the _grafio_, or judge, the full _fredum_, or public fine, if his conscience impelled him to submit to an arrangement for more than the legal percentage. Even as late as 1229, by the Bohemian laws of Ottokar Premislas the accused could escape the ordeal by paying seven deniers to the seigneur.[1213]