Efforts of course were made from time to time to preserve the purity of the appeal, and to secure impartiality in its application. Clotair II., in 595, directs that three chosen persons shall attend on each side to prevent collusion;[1280] and among the Anglo-Saxons, some four hundred years later, Ethelred enjoins the presence of the prosecutor under penalty of loss of suit and fine of twenty _ores_, apparently for the same object, as well as to give authenticity to the decision.[1281] So in Hungary, the laws of St. Ladislas, in 1092, direct that three sworn witnesses shall be present to attest the innocence or guilt of the accused as demonstrated by the result.[1282] A rule announced by the Council of Grateley in 928, that if the accused is accompanied by more than twelve comrades he shall be adjudged as though he had failed in the ordeal, points to an obvious source of miscarriage of justice by which a crowd of partisans could interfere with the proceedings and then proclaim that the result had been successful.[1283] A law adopted by the Scottish Parliament under William the Lion, in the second half of the twelfth century, shows that corruption was not uncommon, by forbidding those concerned in the administration of ordeals from receiving bribes to divert the course of justice,[1284] and a further precaution was taken by prohibiting the Barons from adjudging the ordeal without the intervention of the sheriff to see that law and justice were observed.[1285] In spite of all that we have seen, the ordeal, with its undoubted cruelty, was not as cruel as it appears to us, and in its practical results it probably acquitted the guilty far more often than it convicted the innocent. Mr. Maitland tells us that in his researches in the English records from 1201 till the abolition of the ordeal in 1219—a period in which, as stated above (p. 387), it was in constant use—he has found but one instance in which it failed to clear the accused.[1286] It is true that the cold-water ordeal was the one most freely resorted to, but the red-hot iron was also freely employed, and the one case of failure occurred in the water ordeal. At this distance of time it would be useless to frame a positive explanation of this, although bribery and collusion of course naturally suggest themselves in the notorious and almost universal corruption of the period. Contemporaries reconciled themselves to this as best they could, but while relying comfortably upon the inscrutable judgment of God, and the preservative power of contrition and confession, they were not without other solutions of the problem.