The Widow's Ordeal

OR A JUDICIAL TRIAL BY COMBAT

The world is daily growing older and wiser. Its institutions vary with its
years, and mark its growing wisdom; and none more so than its modes of
investigating truth, and ascertaining guilt or innocence. In its nonage,
when man was yet a fallible being, and doubted the accuracy of his own
intellect, appeals were made to heaven in dark and doubtful cases of
atrocious accusation.

The accused was required to plunge his hand in boiling oil, or to walk
across red-hot plowshares, or to maintain his innocence in armed fight and
listed field, in person or by champion. If he passed these ordeals
unscathed, he stood acquitted, and the result was regarded as a verdict
from on high.

It is somewhat remarkable that, in the gallant age of chivalry, the gentler
sex should have been most frequently the subjects of these rude trials and
perilous ordeals; and that, too, when assailed in their most delicate and
vulnerable part--their honor.

In the present very old and enlightened age of the world, when the human
intellect is perfectly competent to the management of its own concerns, and
needs no special interposition of heaven in its affairs, the trial by jury
has superseded these superhuman ordeals; and the unanimity of twelve
discordant minds is necessary to constitute a verdict. Such a unanimity
would, at first sight, appear also to require a miracle from heaven; but it
is produced by a simple device of human ingenuity. The twelve jurors are
locked up in their box, there to fast until abstinence shall have so
clarified their intellects that the whole jarring panel can discern the
truth, and concur in a unanimous decision. One point is certain, that truth
is one and is immutable--until the jurors all agree, they cannot all be
right.

It is not our intention, however, to discuss this great judicial point, or
to question the avowed superiority of the mode of investigating truth
adopted in this antiquated and very sagacious era. It is our object merely
to exhibit to the curious reader one of the most memorable cases of
judicial combat we find in the annals of Spain. It occurred at the bright
commencement of the reign, and in the youthful, and, as yet, glorious days,
of Roderick the Goth; who subsequently tarnished his fame at home by his
misdeeds, and, finally, lost his kingdom and his life on the banks of the
Guadalete, in that disastrous battle which gave up Spain a conquest to the
Moors. The following is the story:

There was once upon a time a certain duke of Lorraine, who was acknowledged
throughout his domains to be one of the wisest princes that ever lived. In
fact, there was no one measure adopted by him that did not astonish his
privy counselors and gentlemen