Trials by Ordeal in a Kentish Court in the Early Thirteenth Century

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ABSTRACT The document presented here, one which has gone almost entirely unnoticed by historians, contains the record of three trials by ordeal undergone by suspected thieves, almost certainly in the first decade of the thirteenth century. It has a special interest in that it illustrates procedure not in a royal but in a private court, that of the bishop of Rochester at Southfleet. In various ways, it illuminates the charges against the accused and their responses to them, the procedure of the court and attendance at it, and the differing fates of the suspects. It shows that the court was not in fact entirely ‘private’, since it acted under the supervision of royal officials, while on one occasion a number of local gentry were present as well. But the record does not appear to have owed its survival to its legal or even social significance, rather it is suggested that it was preserved because the monks of Rochester cathedral priory regarded it as potentially useful in their recurrent disputes with the bishop.