Prelates, moreover, were everywhere found granting charters containing the privilege of conducting trials in this manner. It was sometimes specially appropriated to members of the Church, who claimed it, under the name of _Lex Monachorum_, as a class privilege exempting them from being parties to the more barbarous and uncanonical wager of battle,[1311] and in 1061 a charter of John, Bishop of Avranches, to the Abbot of Mont S. Michel, alludes to hot water and iron as the only mode of trying priests charged with offences of magnitude.[1312] St. Ivo of Chartres, who denied the liability of churchmen to the ordeal, admitted that it could be properly used on laymen, and even pronounces its result to be beyond appeal.[1313] Pope Calixtus II. in 1119 gave his sanction to it at the Council of Reims, and soon afterwards at the Council of Chartres he admitted the red-hot iron to decide a case of alleged violation of the right of asylum in a church.[1314] About the same time the learned priest, Honorius of Autun, specifies the benediction of the iron and water of the ordeal as part of the legitimate functions of his order;[1315] and even Gratian, in 1151, hesitates to condemn the whole system, preferring to consider the canon of Stephen V. as prohibiting only the ordeals of hot water and iron.[1316] The Church, in fact, lent its most impressive ceremonies to enhance the effect on the popular mind of these trials. An _Ordo_ or Ritual, of about the year 1100, informs us that when any one accused of theft or adultery or other crime refused to confess, the priest was to go to the church, put on his sacred vestments, except the chasuble, and then, holding the gospels and chrismatory, the chalice and paten and relics of saints, he from the vestibule summoned the people, while forbidding the accused, if guilty, and any of his accomplices to enter. At the same time he designated the spot in the vestibule where the fire was to be built to heat the caldron or the ploughshares, and sprinkled them all with holy water to prevent diabolical illusions. Then the accused entered. He was first required to forgive all offences as he hoped for pardon; he made confession of his sins and accepted penance, while the penitential psalms were sung customary for penitents on Ash Wednesday; if there was suspicion as to his faith he was made to swear on the altar his reliance on God rather than on the devil to manifest his innocence in the ordeal. Mass was then celebrated and communion was administered to him under the tremendous adjuration, “May the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ be unto thee a proof!” After this the priest led the people to the spot where the trial was to take place. Prayers were uttered to God to render judgment, litanies and psalms were sung, the material of the ordeal, whether iron or hot or cold water, was blessed with an adjuration that it would be the means of rendering a just verdict, and the accused was exorcised with an