St. Ivo of Chartres, though he had no scruple in recommending and enjoining the ordeal for laymen, and, on one occasion at least, pronounced its decisions as beyond appeal, yet has placed on record his conviction of its insufficiency, and his experience that the mysterious judgment of God not infrequently allowed in this manner the guilty to escape and the innocent to be punished.[1270] A case related by Peter Cantor in the twelfth century shows how recklessly it often was abused as a relief to careless judges in doubtful cases. Two Englishmen were returning in company from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, when one of them wandered off to the shrine of St. Jago de Compostella, and the other went directly home. The kindred of the absent one accused the latter of murdering his companion; as no evidence was procurable on either side, he was hurried to the ordeal, convicted, and executed, shortly after which the missing man came back in safety.[1271] The manifest injustice of the decisions thus rendered by the ordeal put a severe strain on the faith of believers, and led them to the most ingenious sophistry for an explanation. When, in 1127, the sacrilegious murder of Charles the Good, Count of Flanders, sent a thrill of horror throughout Europe, Lambert of Redenberg, whose participation in the crime was notorious, succeeded in clearing himself by the hot iron. Shortly afterwards he undertook the siege of Ostbourg, which he prosecuted with great cruelty, when he was killed in a sally of the besieged. The pious Galbert assumes that Lambert, notwithstanding his guilt, escaped at the ordeal in consequence of his humility and repentance, and philosophically adds: “Thus it is that in battle the unjust man is killed, although in the ordeal of water or of fire he may escape, if truly repentant.”[1272] The same doctrine was enunciated under John Cantacuzenes, in the middle of the fourteenth century, by a bishop of Didymoteichos in Thrace. A frail fair one being violently suspected by her husband, the ordeal of hot iron was demanded by him. In this strait she applied to the good bishop, and he, being convinced of her repentance and intention to sin no more, assured her that in such a frame of mind she might safely venture on the trial, and she accordingly carried the glowing bar triumphantly twice around the bishop’s chair, to the entire satisfaction of her lord and master.[1273]