There is a curious reference to it in the State Trials as late as 1679. John Govan, a Jesuit priest, was indicted in that year at the Old Bailey for an alleged share in the Popish Plot. With some hesitation he claimed the right of Trial by Ordeal as an ecclesiastical privilege of a thousand years' standing, but Scroggs and North peremptorily refused to listen to his plea. "We have no such law now," said the latter. Sir James Stephen assures us that the formula, "By God and by my country," wherein, till 1827, a prisoner must answer the question how he would be tried, sets forth a memory of it. Of the customs akin to Trial by Ordeal only one can find mention here. It was held that if the murderer touched, nay, even approached, the body of his victim, the wounds gushed forth blood, thus in _Richard the Third_, "dead Henry's wounds" are seen "to open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh" as Gloucester draws near the bier. And according to one of the picturesque legends of English history, when Richard the Lion-Heart encountered at Fontevrault his father's body, the blood gushed from the nostrils of the dead king, a proceeding which, as Richard's offence was at the worst but unkindness, showed a somewhat excessive sensibility on the part of the royal clay. The oddest and latest case of all is from Scotland. In 1688 Philip Stanfield was tried for parricide at Edinburgh; one count of the indictment stated how his father's body had bled at his sacrilegious touch. The Lord Advocate, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, the "Bluidy Mackenzie" of covenanting legend and tradition, conducted the prosecution, and philosophic and cultured jurist as he was, he yet dwelt with much emphasis on the portentous sign. There was no lack of more satisfactory if more commonplace evidence, and young Stanfield assuredly merited the doom in the end meted out to him. WAGER OF BATTLE