People in the Middle Ages totally believed in the rule of law. They were not always sure what the law was, and often they seemed to be making it up as they went along, but they believed at least as much as do modern people in doing things in a lawful manner. Even though modern laws in the West grew directly out of medieval legal practice, there are plenty of differences.
One of the best examples of this is oath helpers. Most discussions of guilt and innocence, of who did what to whom, turned as they did today on witness testimony and physical evidence. But how to tell if someone was actually telling the truth?
As I have discussed previously, someone's truthfulness might be tested by ordeal, that is that they would swear to something and grasp a red-hot iron as proof of their veracity. If the burn healed up as it should, they were indeed telling the truth. Understandably, most people would prefer to be proven to be truthful by less extreme means. Indeed, more people threatened to undertake trial by ordeal than actually went through with it. (In some ways it was a bluff, saying "I'm so certain I'm innocent that I'll accept a horrible burn to prove it," forcing the other side to start to doubt their accusations.)
An alternate method was to gather oath helpers. These fidejussores as they were known in medieval Latin would swear to the truthfulness of someone else's oath. They were not witnesses, as they need not have any insights into what had happened, and they were not even character witnesses, as they were not expected to say (for example) that the accused was an affectionate husband and father who wouldn't hurt a fly. Instead they swore oaths that someone else's oath was true.
So someone accused of (say) murder would swear on holy relics that they had never touched the victim. Everyone would watch to see if he started frothing at the mouth and falling down. If he didn't, he would provide oath helpers who would similarly swear. Six or twelve men (or some different number, it wasn't absolute) would swear that this oath was true. If any of them gasped and choked and fell down while trying to swear falsely, guilt would be pretty well established (pending of course further discussion, medieval judgments always required a big discussion).
But even if the accused managed to get all his oath helpers to swear to his own oath's veracity, he was not necessarily found "not guilty." Part of any trial was "what everyone knew." If the accused was, in everyone's mind, clearly the murderer (in this example), then they'd keep going. They might require an ordeal, with further oaths from the fidejussores. They might have a combat or dunk the accused in water. Best of all, they might find that the knife stuck in the victim's throat was the accused's own distinctive knife.
When someone ultimately found guilty was to be punished, all his oath helpers were also punished. In the stories they were sometimes hung, although that was probably an extremely rare outcome. But being an oath helper was a serious business, as the fidejussor knew that if the person whose oath he was helping actually was guilty, he himself would be punished, by the court or by God.
(In the "Court Scar" series I've written with my husband, we include several examples of legal judgments that carry the plot along, based on real medieval events.)
© C. Dale Brittain 2024
For more on medieval law, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.
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