Diaconescu, Marius (szerk.): Mediaevalia Transilvanica 1999 (3. évfolyam, 1-2. szám)
Mentalităţi
The Trial by Hot Iron Ceremony 25 5. After the execution of the sentence, the judge took the obligation to inform the Oradea chapter about it. In the majority of the cases, the bailiff had made a vive vocis notice in front of the Oradea chapter.152 There were a few cases when the judge had sent a written announcement concerning the process to the Oradean chapter who had the obligation to take the cases down on record.153 In this way the Oradean register was bom. The complexity of the evidence for this ordeal does not permit any simple explanation. Yet it is, I think, legitimate to look more closely into the ceremony itself in order to decide, modestly, what continued to satisfy those people about this ordeal and what needs led them to maintain the ceremony as a satisfactory solution to some difficulties. What kind of conclusions can be reached after the presentation of the trial by hot iron practiced at Oradea? First, there was an incredible faith in the “supernatural”: people really thought that God chose this way to make justice. And they strongly believed that the heavenly - until that time - unattainable power would come down to this earthly community to decide people’s destiny. These were moments of wild hope. The register of Oradea records three hundred and fifty cases between 1208 and 1235 with a lapidary faith concerning the literal truth of the ceremony: “portato ferro, combusti sunt; portato ferro pro terra ista iustificatus est.”154 With Brown’s words: “We may know what everybody wants and has always wanted - the crowning mercy of truth in human affairs.”155 In this way the trial by hot iron was understood by people as a mediator between heaven and earth, making the first more “tangible” with the trial. The trial by hot iron was also mercifully slow. To call it a controlled miracle and to dismiss it as a temptation of God was to import into the ceremony, into the judicial process, a brisk expectation of the miracle. For God is revealing the truth, not any specific fact. He was judging the status of a person or of a group, whether their claims were “pure” and “just.”156 He was not deciding whether a piece of land belonged to a certain claimant, but the status in the community of the groups that had been brought into conflict. The most marked feature of this ordeal is the slow and solemn processes by which human conflict is taken out of its immediate context. The representative of this conflict - the man who undertakes the trial by hot iron, who can be either accuser or accused - is publicly shorn of all contact with the normal world.157 Once he was shaved, dressed in a shirt, and subjected himself to fasting for three days, his whole rhythm of life became that of a priest, not of a layman. He is solemnly 152 Vajda, A Váradi Regestrum, 22. 153 See, for instance, the already mentioned abduction case from 1216: “Iudex igitur condemnavit illos [Martinum de villa Zobolsu et coadiutores illius], nam per eundem pristaldum suum [Gyula] et Farcasium tales nobis [capitulo Varadinensis] remisit literas.” Karácsonyi, and Borovszky, Regestrum Varadinense, no. 162, pp. 211-12 cp. Vajda, A Váradi Regestrum, 23. 154 Karácsonyi, and Borovszky, Regestrum Varadinense, no. 62, p. 176; no. 182, p. 219. 155 Brown, “Society and the Supernatural,” 136. 136 See, Karácsonyi, and Borovszky, Regestrum Varadinense, 151, when the priest put the final question to the participant of the ordeal: “Frater, es iustus ab hoc crimine de quo accusaris? lustus sum. Mundus? Mundus sum.” s Brown, “Society and the Supernatural,” 138.
