If 1215 was the year in which the law outgrew the king, it was also the year it outgrew that rival power in the land, the Church. This institution had not only enjoyed its own separate legal system, but maintained a strong foothold in the common law: only a cleric could preside over trial by ordeal, only a cleric could judge the result. To possess an ordeal pit and the accoutrements of ordeal conferred dignity and status, but in addition priests were paid handsomely for their participation. The ordeal, despite those who doubted its efficacy, or questioned its rationale, remained strong throughout the twelfth century. Then suddenly in 1215 that all changed.

The Fourth Lateran Council prohibited clerical participation in, and thus in effect abolished, trial by ordeal. Why Pope Innocent III wanted to prohibit ordeals is not clear. To do so ran against clerical interests and influence. This high-minded decision would have been a conjunction of many things: theological disdain for dragging God into mundane affairs at the beck and call of mortals demanding a miracle on each and every occasion; concern that ordeal was uncanonical, being found neither in Scripture nor in Roman law, but was part of ‘custom’, a term becoming a dirty word for the Church; the pollution of the clergy by being involved in ‘judgments of blood’ and doubts about the efficacy of ordeals, especially for those who had confessed and been absolved. Whatever the reasons, the withdrawal of the Church from this procedure was fundamental. The ordeal was killed in its prime. Without it how do you secure a verdict in those difficult cases which were not amenable to other modes of proof?

It was a pivotal moment when English criminal procedure could have been merged with, or been submerged by, the system based on Roman precedent and created following the demise of the ordeal that was to become dominant on the Continent in the thirteenth century, a system designed to extract confessions or other evidence – by intimidation routinely, by torture if necessary – the Inquisitorial System.