Trial by Ordeal

confessions extracted under torture
"swimming witches" = trial by water



ordeal of hot water
the ordeal of hot water requires the accused to dip his hand in a kettle of boiling water and retrieve a stone.

ordeal of cold water
1.) where a man accused of sorcery is to be submerged in a stream and acquitted if he survives.

2.)The cruel pagans cast him into a river with a millstone tied to his neck, and when he had fallen into the waters he was long supported on the surface by a divine miracle, and the waters did not suck him down since the weight of crime did not press upon him.

3.)Ordeal by water was later associated with the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, although in this scenario the outcome was reversed from the examples above: an accused who sank (and usually drowned) was considered innocent, while floating indicated witchcraft. Demonologists developed inventive new theories about how it worked. Some argued that witches floated because they had renounced baptism when entering the Devil's service. Jacob Rickius claimed that they were supernaturally light, and recommended weighing them as an alternative to dunking them. King James VI of Scotland (later also James I of England) claimed in his Daemonologie that water was so pure an element that it repelled the guilty. A late witch process to include this ordeal took place in Szegedin, Hungary in 1728.[7]