This case illustrates the fact that in the vulgar ordeals as well as in the duel champions were sometimes allowed. To how great an extent this was permitted it would now be difficult to assert. It is not specially alluded to in any body of laws, but numerous examples of it have been incidentally given above, and in some of the _ordines_ it is assumed as a matter of course. In one for the cold-water ordeal the substitutes are described as children who are made to fast for forty days in advance, and carefully watched and washed to prevent any illusions of the devil.[1262] In the ordeal of the cross, however, it was a recognized privilege of the old or infirm to put forward a substitute, and when communities or churches were pleaders a champion was of course a necessity. A still greater relaxation, occasionally permitted but not approved by the Church, was the practice of writing the name of the accused on paper or some other substance and submitting this to the ordeal in place of the individual himself.[1263] Perhaps the most illogical use of a champion in an ordeal is one suggested by Hincmar of Reims in 860, that a satisfactory person should undergo it in order to determine whether the secret motive alleged by another person for not living with his wife were true or not.[1264] CHAPTER XVI. CONFIDENCE REPOSED IN THE ORDEAL. The degree of confidence really inspired by the results of the ordeal is a somewhat curious subject of speculation on which definite opinions are not easily reached. Judicially, the trial was, for the most part, conclusive; he who had duly sunk under water, walked unharmed among the burning shares, or withdrawn an unblistered hand from a caldron of legal temperature, stood forth among his fellows as innocent. So, even now, the verdict of a few fools or knaves in a jury-box may discharge a criminal, against the plainest dictates of common sense, but in neither case would the sentiments of the community be probably changed by the result. The reverential feelings which alone could impart faith in the system seem scarcely compatible with the practice of compounding for ordeals, which, as we have seen above (p. 384), was occasionally permitted.