could possibly be imagined.  These indisputable monuments of our ancient rudeness are a very sufficient confutation of the panegyrical declamations in which some persons would persuade us that the crude institutions of an unlettered people had attained an height which the united efforts of necessity, learning, inquiry, and experience can hardly reach to in many ages.  We must add, that, although as one people under one head there was some resemblance in the laws and customs of our Saxon ancestors throughput the kingdom, yet there was a considerable difference, in many material points, between the customs of the several shires:  nay, that in different manors subsisted a variety of laws not reconcilable with each other, some of which custom, that caused them, has abrogated; others have been overruled by laws or public judgment to the contrary; not a few subsist to this time.

[Sidenote:  Purgation by oath.]

[Sidenote:  By ordeal.]

The Saxon laws, imperfect and various as they were, served in some tolerable degree a people who had by their Constitution an eye on each other’s concerns, and decided almost all matters of any doubt amongst them by methods which, however inadequate, were extremely simple.  They judged every controversy either by the conscience of the parties, or by the country’s opinion of it, or what they judged an appeal to Providence.  They were unwilling to submit to the trouble of weighing contradictory testimonies; and they were destitute of those critical rules by which evidence is sifted, the true distinguished from the false, the certain from the uncertain.  Originally, therefore, the defendant in the suit was put to his oath, and if on oath he denied the debt or the crime with which he was charged, he was of course acquitted.  But when the first fervors of religion began to decay, and fraud and the temptations to fraud to increase, they trusted no longer to the conscience of the party.  They cited him to an higher tribunal,—­the immediate judgment of God.  Their trials were so many conjurations, and the magical ceremonies of barbarity and heathenism entered into law and religion.  This supernatural method of process they called God’s Dome; it is generally known by the name of Ordeal, which in the Saxon language signifies the Great Trial.  This trial was made either by fire or water:  that by fire was principally reserved for persons of rank; that by water decided the fate of the vulgar; sometimes it was at the choice of the party.  A piece of iron, kept with a religious veneration in some monastery, which claimed this privilege as an honor, was brought forth into the church upon the day of trial; and it was there again consecrated to this awful purpose by a form of service still extant.  A solemn mass was performed; and then the party accused appeared, surrounded by the clergy, by his judges, and a vast concourse of people, suspended and anxious for the event; all that assisted purified themselves