Diaconescu, Marius (szerk.): Mediaevalia Transilvanica 1999 (3. évfolyam, 1-2. szám)
Mentalităţi
The Trial by Hot Iron Ceremony 7 been employed by people in many different parts of the world and throughout history. They appear in the laws of Hammurabi and in the judicial practice of modem Kenya; men have undergone the ordeal from Iceland to Polynesia, and from Japan to Africa. They have been “in fashion” even before Christianity in the Jewish, Greek, and Roman world.12 Thus, students of trial by ordeal can usefully compare and contrast the form, function, and workings of the ordeal in different times and places. In the history of the ordeals of fire and water, where the ordeal by hot iron practiced at Oradea can be included, Bartlett outlined two major phases: the period before AD 800 called protohistorical because of the scarcity of the evidence, and the period from 800 onwards, when there is a true “explosion of evidence.”13 The protohistorical period lasts about three hundred years, from the time of the earliest reference to trial by ordeal, around AD 500. During this period the only form of unilateral ordeal mentioned in these early Frankish records and law codes is the ordeal of the cauldron, that is, the ordeal of hot water.14 For the sixth, seventh, and most of the eighth century there are no references to any other kind of ordeal.15 Another point that emerges from this evidence is that there is a strong belief that the custom was of Frankish origin. References to the ordeal outside the Frankish world begin in the seventh century. The earliest of these occur in Irish law,16 but it is very interesting that the Burgundian, Alamannic, and Bavarian laws contain no mention of such practices. Starting from this Bartlett concluded that the trials of fire and water were not of pan-Germanic origin. So, they must have originated among either one or several individual Germanic peoples. 7 In this protohistorical period there were two traditions of trial by cauldron in Christian Europe, an isolated Irish one18 and an influential Frankish one.19 For the future history of the ordeal in Europe, it was this Frankish custom that was to be of importance. Trial by cauldron was, then, an ancient Frankish custom, appearing in the earliest legal records as a device employed in cases of theft, false witness, and contempt of court, used both against free men and slaves.20 21 As Frankish power and influence spread, so this form of proof was exported into neighboring regions, such as in Hungary.'1 The protohistorical period ends in the reign of Charlemagne and henceforth began a period where there was a real Carolingian efflorescence of trial by fire and water. ploughshares, or the trial by hot water and cold water. Bunyitay, A váradipüspökség, voi. 1,70-72. 12 Ibid., 70. 13 Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water, 4. 14 The procedure involved usually a stone or a ring which had to be plucked from a bubbling cauldron. 15 Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water, 4. 16 William Stokes, “The Irish Ordeals,” in Irische Texte, eds. William Stokes, and Edgar Windisch (Leipzig: 1967), 183-201. 17 Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water, 4-5. Solymosi arrived at the same conclusion adding that Germanic people used them even before their Christianization. Solymosi, “Guden magánoklevele,” 103. 18 Stokes, “The Irish Ordeals,” 202 -29. 19 Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water, 6. 20 Ibid., 9. 21 Solymosi, “Guden magánoklevele,” 103.
