Making manifest God's judgement: interpreting ordeals in late Anglo-Saxon England

In late Anglo-Saxon England, a priest called to perform the liturgical ritual of the ordeal of hot iron would address the iron directly, adjuring it by God, by the angels and saints and by the holy catholic Church to reveal the truth of a hidden matter, the guilt or innocence of the suspected offender being thereby put to the test. But when a proband was subjected to this kind of ordeal or to the ordeal of hot water for which liturgical rituals also survive in late Anglo-Saxon books, how exactly would God’s judgement be made manifest? In the light of modern scholarship on ordeals, this might seem like a daft question: according to Robert Bartlett, who has offered the most extended analysis of medieval judicial ordeals, if the range of evidence surviving from the tenth century to the twelfth is combined, ‘it is possible to reconstruct a reasonably well-modelled picture of the ordeal in England in this period.’ Other scholars have argued that judicial ordeals held a particular function in small communities where it was important to come to consensus and where individuals’ characters were well known to all or that they were not so peculiar as they might seem to modern scholars because they were rational within the particular intellectual and social contexts in which they originated and were used. This premise itself is questionable: anthropological studies suggest that what looks strange to Us often looks strange to Them too, and that these events or moments that look strange demand attention in the communities or contexts in which they occur or are recorded precisely because they are considered to be fascinating, alarming or unsettling by contemporary observers. Perhaps more importantly, the surviving evidence for ordeals in tenth and eleventh-century England, especially those of hot iron and hot water, is most puzzling for the fact that as a body of material it is so inconsistent – especially with regard to essential details such as how to interpret the outcome – that it seems likely that late Anglo-Saxon law-makers, ecclesiastics, judges or reeves were themselves not at all certain of what they expected to see, or how they expected God’s judgement to be made manifest in the result of an ordeal. Given this complexity, it is perhaps unsurprising that even works of scholarship which suggest that it is possible to understand the workings of the ordeal are often themselves contradictory about what they suggest that interpreters of judicial ordeals expected to see or thought they were looking for. This article reconsiders the extent to which it is possible to understand the workings and practicalities of judicial ordeals in late Anglo-Saxon England, in part by setting the evidence alongside contemporary theological ideas about the miraculous.