In the ninth century, moreover, torture was incompatible with the forms of judicial procedure handed down as relics of the time when every freeman bore his share in the public business of his sept. Criminal proceedings as yet were open and public. The secret inquisitions which afterwards became so favorite a system with lawyers did not then exist. The _mallum_, or court, was perhaps no longer held in the open air,[1506] nor were the freemen of the district constrained as of old to be present,[1507] but it was still free to every one. The accuser and his witnesses were confronted with the accused, and the criminal must be present when his sentence was pronounced.[1508] The purgatorial oath was administered at the altar of the parish church; the ordeal was a public spectacle; and the judicial duel drew thousands of witnesses as eager for the sight of blood as the Roman plebs. These were all ancestral customs, inspiring implicit reverence, and forming part of the public life of the community. To substitute for them the gloomy dungeon through whose walls no echo of the victim’s screams could filter, where impassible judges coldly compared the incoherent confession wrung out by insufferable torment with the anonymous accusation or the depositions of secret witnesses, required a total change in the constitution of society. The change was long in coming. Feudalism arose and consolidated its forces on the ruins of the Carlovingian empire without altering the principles upon which the earlier procedures of criminal jurisdiction had been based. As the local dignitaries seized upon their fiefs and made them hereditary, so they arrogated to themselves the dispensation of justice which had formerly belonged to the central power, but their courts were still open to all. Trials were conducted in public upon well-known rules of local law and custom; the fullest opportunities were given for the defence; and a denial of justice authorized the vassal to renounce the jurisdiction of his feudal lord and seek a superior court.[1509] Still, as under the Merovingians, torture, though unrecognized by law, was occasionally employed as an extraordinary element of judicial investigation, as well as a means of punishment to gratify the vengeance of the irresponsible and cruel tyrants who ruled with absolute sway over their petty lordships. A few such instances occur in the documents and chronicles of the period, but the terms in which they are alluded to show that they were regarded as irregular.