in all respects as opposite as could possibly be imagined. These
indisputable monuments of our ancient rudeness are a very sufficient
confutation of the panegyrical declamations in which some persons would
persuade us that the crude institutions of an unlettered people had
attained an height which the united efforts of necessity, learning,
inquiry, and experience can hardly reach to in many ages. We must add,
that, although as one people under one head there was some resemblance
in the laws and customs of our Saxon ancestors throughput the kingdom,
yet there was a considerable difference, in many material points,
between the customs of the several shires: nay, that in different manors
subsisted a variety of laws not reconcilable with each other, some of
which custom, that caused them, has abrogated; others have been
overruled by laws or public judgment to the contrary; not a few subsist
to this time.

[Sidenote: Purgation by oath.]

[Sidenote: By ordeal.]

The Saxon laws, imperfect and various as they were, served in some
tolerable degree a people who had by their Constitution an eye on each
other's concerns, and decided almost all matters of any doubt amongst
them by methods which, however inadequate, were extremely simple. They
judged every controversy either by the conscience of the parties, or by
the country's opinion of it, or what they judged an appeal to
Providence. They were unwilling to submit to the trouble of weighing
contradictory testimonies; and they were destitute of those critical
rules by which evidence is sifted, the true distinguished from the
false, the certain from the uncertain. Originally, therefore, the
defendant in the suit was put to his oath, and if on oath he denied the