ordeal offered an alternative for those unable or unwilling to swear an oath. The two most common methods were the ordeal by hot iron and by cold water. The former consisted in carrying a red-hot iron for five paces: the wound was immediately bound up and if, on unbinding, it was found to be festering the case was lost. In the ordeal by water the victim, usually an accused person, was cast bound into water: if he sunk he was innocent, if he floated, guilty. Although for perhaps understandable reasons the ordeals became associated with trials in criminal matters they were in essence tests of the truth of a claim or denial of a party and appropriate for trying any
legal issue. The allocation of a mode of proofand who should bear it was the substance of the Shire Court's judgment or doom and perhaps followed known customary rules of which we have no knowledge. Some measure of discretion must have existed in the determining of the outcome of an ordeal by hot iron but result of the cold water and the oath-helping would have been obvious to all.

Literature 

Old English literary works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, mainly the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, riddles and others. In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period, a significant corpus of both popular interest and specialist research. The manuscripts use a modified Roman alphabet, but Anglo-Saxon runes or futhorc are used in under 200 inscriptions on objects, sometimes mixed