theft was exposed to the red-hot iron unless his master would release him by an oath.[1239] Occasionally it was also resorted to when the accused was outsworn after having endeavored to defend himself by his oath or by conjurators. Thus a canon of the Council of Tribur in 895 declares that if a man is so generally suspected that he is outsworn in compurgation, he must either confess or submit to the hot-iron ordeal.[1240] Popular belief evidently might give to the accuser a larger number of men willing to associate themselves in the oath of accusation than the defendant could find to join him in rebutting it, and yet his guilt might not as yet be clear. In such cases, the ordeal was a most convenient resort. These regulations give to the ordeal decidedly the aspect of punishment, as it was thus inflicted on those whose guilt was so generally credited that they could not find comrades to stand up with them at the altar as partakers in their oath of denial; and this is not the only circumstance which leads us to believe that it was frequently so regarded. This notion is visible in the ancient Indian law, where, as we have seen, certain of the ordeals—those of red-hot iron, poison, and the balance—could not be employed unless the matter at stake were equivalent to the value of a thousand pieces of silver, or involved an offence against the king;[1241] and it reappears in Europe in the graduated scale of single and triple ordeals for offences of different magnitudes. Such a scheme is so totally at variance with the theory of miraculous interposition to protect innocence and punish guilt, that we can only look upon it as a mode of inflicting graduated punishments in doubtful cases, thus holding up a certain penalty _in terrorem_ over those who would otherwise hope to escape by the secrecy of their crime—no doubt with a comforting conviction, like that of Legate Arnaud at the sack of Béziers, that God would know his own. This same principle is visible in a provision of the charter of Loudun, granted by Louis le Gros in 1128, by which an assault committed outside of the liberties of the commune could be disproved by a simple sacramental oath; but if within the limits of the commune, the accused was obliged to undergo the ordeal.[1242] In another shape we see it in the customs of Tournay, granted by Philip Augustus in 1187, where a person accused of assault with sharpened weapons, if there were no witnesses, was allowed to purge himself with six conjurators if the affair occurred in the daytime, but if at night, was obliged to undergo the water ordeal.[1243] Further illustration is afforded by the principle, interwoven in various codes, by which a first crime was defensible by conjurators, or other means, while the _tiht-bysig_ man, the _homo infamatus_, one of evil repute, whose character had been previously compromised, was denied this privilege, and was forced at once to the hot iron or the water. Thus, among the Anglo-Saxons, in the earliest