In the ordeal by hot water the accused, plunging his hand to the wrist in the boiling fluid, brought forth a stone suspended therein by a cord. (This was the Single Ordeal, and it became the Triple when the plunge was up to the elbow.) The arm was done up in bandages not to be removed till after three days; if the scald had healed the man was innocent, if it still festered he was guilty. In the ordeal by hot iron, a piece of red-hot metal was carried a distance of nine feet; it was then dropped and the hand was bandaged as already set forth. A knight had to thrust his fist into a glowing gauntlet; another form was a walk with naked feet over a sequence of red-hot ploughshares. We have a picturesque circumstantial and absolutely untrustworthy monkish account of how Emma, mother of Edward the Confessor, being suspected of an all too intimate acquaintance with Alwyn, Bishop of Winchester, underwent this trial. She took nine steps for herself and five for the Bishop, fixing her eyes the while on heaven. "When shall we reach these ploughshares?" queried she. How agreeable a surprise to find her little promenade already past and done with! No need to swathe _her_ feet, the red-hot iron had marked them not at all! The last mode was the _Corsnæd_, or Cursed Morsel--a piece of barley-bread (or cheese), one ounce in weight. This "Creature of Sanctified Bread" was adjured, in terms terrible enough to make the sinner quake, to stick in the guilty throat, and cause the guilty jaws to be clenched and locked up. If in spite of all it went softly down, who dared to refuse belief in the man's innocence? It was chiefly for the clergy, and from every point of view must have been the most agreeable of the three, though a legend as untrustworthy as that of Emma ascribes to it the death of Earl Godwin, father of Harold. As he sat at meat with Edward the Confessor, the king brought up an old scandal about his brother's murder, "May God cause this morsel to choke me," passionately exclaimed the earl, "if I am guilty of the crime!" Edward blessed the bread; Godwin made an effort to swallow, choked and died. "Take away that dog," said the monarch in what would seem an outburst of savage glee. This was on April 15th, 1053, thirteen years before the Conquest. Godwin in truth died of a fit. It soon was the policy of the monkish chroniclers to write down the national party of which he had been the head, a fact which explains the fable were it worth serious examination. More interesting to note the survival of the rite in the still current rustic formula, "May this bit choke me if I lie!" If the ordeal proved a man guilty, the punishment was fine, death or outlawry, but even if he escaped, the Assize of Clarendon (1164) ordered that, in certain cases, he should abjure the realm. By that time compurgation was gone; in 1215 the Lateran Council issued a solemn decree against Trial by Ordeal; and soon after it had vanished from English law.