Why Trial by Fire Usually Found People Innocent

A medieval church kept a record of 208 people who carried a red-hot iron. Most of them walked away clean. If you've ever wondered how anyone thought holding burning metal could prove you innocent, this is how it really worked. Priest Grubb and his assistant Bones run the ordeal across four hundred years: the hot iron, the boiling cauldron, the cold pond. The guilty kept confessing or running before test day, and the priest controlled the fire, the prayers and the bandage. Then in 1215 the Church pulled its priests out, and Europe had to find something else. Topics covered: trial by ordeal, trial by fire, hot iron ordeal, cold water ordeal, the Varad Register, Peter Leeson's Ordeals, Ailward of Westoning, the Fourth Lateran Council 1215, the birth of the English jury, judicial torture in medieval Europe, medieval justice. 0:00 Pick Up the Iron 0:31 The Three Tests 2:00 Someone Kept Count 3:05 Who Showed Up 4:13 How the Priest Tipped It 6:40 When It Went Wrong 8:40 The Ban 9:59 What Replaced God 11:54 The Answer #History #Medieval #TrialByOrdeal Sources Peter T. Leeson, "Ordeals", Journal of Law and Economics 55:3 (2012) Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Clarendon Press, 1986) Regestrum Varadinense (the Varad Register, 1208-1235) Fourth Lateran Council (1215), canon 18; Finbarr McAuley, "Canon Law and the End of the Ordeal", Oxford Journal of Legal Studies (2006) Assize of Clarendon (1166) and Assize of Northampton (1176) Harvard Law School, "The veiled history of the English jury trial" Canterbury Cathedral Becket miracle windows; Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate (2011) Peter the Chanter, Verbum Abbreviatum (c.1192) John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof (University of Chicago Press, 1977) Margaret H. Kerr, Richard D. Forsyth and Michael J. Plyley, "Cold Water and Hot Iron: Trial by Ordeal in England", Journal of Interdisciplinary History (1992) New history episodes every week. This video was researched, written, and narrated with AI assistance, based on the published historical sources listed above.