Page:Select historical documents of the Middle Ages.djvu/289

Rh women drowned would have had to be considerable had each "fossa" been used even but once.

According to another form of the ordeal, the accuser and the accused stood opposite to each other with outstretched arms—the trial of the cross it was called—until one of them could endure no longer. All the nuns of Bischofsheim were once submitted to this test, the body of a new-born babe having been found in a pond near by.

The emperor Charlemagne was a firm believer in ordeals, and ordered his subjects to respect them. Frederick II. (1215-1250), on the contrary, the most enlightened monarch of the Middle Ages, thought a person who believed in them " non tarn corrigendum quam ridendum." The fire and water trials were forbidden by the Lateran Council of 1215, and fours years later Henry III. declared them unlawful in England. But as late as the year 1686 a certain Jacob Rieck wrote a book in favour of the water ordeal as actually practised in his time upon witches in Cologne; and the so-called witch-bath is heard of in Prussia even in the middle of the eighteenth century.

No. III., the Constautine Donation, or Constitutum Constantini, purports to be a deed of gift made to pope Sylvester by Constantine the Great. It is found in the manuscript containing the " Pseudo Isidorian Decretals," but is older than that collection. Constantine grants to the pope imperial honours, the primacy over Antioch, Constantinople and Alexandria, makes him chief judge of the clergy, and offers him the imperial diadem. This the pope refuses, preferring a simpler croAvn. The clergy are to have the rank of senators and the privilege of riding upon white saddle-cloths. Last, but not least, the pope was to have dominion over all Italy, including Rome. The wording is Italiae seu occidentalium regionium, and later popes, translating "sen" as "et," claimed nothing less than all of Western Europe.