about the middle of the thirteenth century, or a little earlier, speaks of it as a mode of proof formerly employed in cases where one of the parties was a woman who could find no champion to undergo the wager of battle, adding that it had been forbidden by the Church, and that such cases were then determined by inquests.[1359] Germany was more tardy in yielding to the mandates of the Church. The Teutonic knights who wielded their proselyting swords in the Marches of Prussia introduced the ordeal among other Christian observances, and in 1222 Honorius III., at the prayer of the Livonian converts, promulgated a decree by which he strictly interdicted its use for the future.[1360] Even in 1279 we find the Council of Buda, and in 1298 that of Wurzburg, obliged to repeat the prohibition uttered by that of Lateran.[1361] These commands enjoyed little respect, and the independent spirit of the Empire still refused obedience to the commands of the Church. It may probably be to Germany that Roger Bacon refers, about this time, when he speaks of the ordeals of red-hot iron and cold water being still in use by authority of the Church, and admits that the exorcisms employed in them by the priests may have virtue in the detection of guilt and acquittal of innocence.[1362] Even in the fourteenth century the ancestral customs were preserved in full vigor as regular modes of procedure in a manual of legal practice still extant. An accusation of homicide could be disproved only by the judicial combat, while in other felonies a man of bad repute had no other means of escape than by undergoing the trial by hot water or iron.[1363] In Aragon, Don Jayme I. included the ordeal in his prohibition of the duel when framing laws for his Minorcan conquest in 1230, and that this was his settled policy is seen by a similar clause of the fuero of Huesca in 1247.[1364] In Castile and Leon, the charter of Medina de Pomar, granted in 1219 by Fernando III., provides that there shall be no trial by the hot-water ordeal,[1365] and that of Treviño in 1254, by Alfonso X., forbids all ordeals.[1366] Still the Council of Palencia, in 1322, was obliged to threaten with excommunication all concerned in administering the ordeal of fire or of water,[1367] which proves how little had been accomplished by the enlightened code of the “Partidas,” issued about 1260 by Alfonso the Wise. In this the burden of proof is expressly thrown upon the complainant, and no negative evidence is demanded of the defendant, who is specially exempted from the necessity of producing it;[1368] and although in obedience to the chivalrous spirit of the age, the battle ordeal is not abolished, yet it is so limited as to be practically a dead letter, while no other form of negative proof is even alluded to.