It is with typically measured prose that Michael Lapidge concludes that Bishop Swithun of Winchester “can justly be regarded as a saint of the universal church.” Lapidge's comprehensive survey of the texts and traditions associated with Swithun's veneration amply justifies this assessment: in his Cult of St Swithun, Lapidge and his collaborators range widely from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries; from Winchester to Dublin, Helsinki, and Évreux; and from history into chronicle, hagiography, liturgy, poetry, musical composition, and artistic production, all to demonstrate the influence of Swithun's cult on medieval religious and cultural life. Indeed, there appears to be only one major area of early medieval culture omitted from this list, namely, the law. For as legal historians well know, the earliest life of Swithun, Lantfred's late tenth-century Translatio et miracula s. Swithuni, occupies an important place in the history of pre-Conquest legal practice as one of the few surviving narrative records of an Anglo-Saxon ordeal by hot iron. This chapter will focus on this episode in order to reassess the role of hagiographic narrative in both the history and practice of the ordeal and the composition of legal narratives more generally.

The ordeal, in its foreignness and seeming barbarity, has long been a problem for those seeking to understand the mentality of early medieval law. As William Ian Miller has written, “It appalls and intrigues. We marvel at the mentality of those cultures that officialize it; we feel a sense of horror as we imagine ourselves intimately involved with boiling water or glowing irons. And we don't feel quite up to it. So our terror and cowardice become their brutality and irrationality.” For earlier historians of English law, such as T. F. T. Plucknett and Frederick Pollock, the ordeal served as a marker of the primitivism they saw as characteristic of English law before the so-called “great leap forward” of the twelfth century. More recently, following the work of Rebecca Colman and Paul Hyams, scholars have instead adopted what has been referred to as a “functionalist” approach, focusing, in Colman's words, on the “functional relationship between certain legal procedures and their particular social context.” Influenced by social anthropology, the functionalist argument highlights the ordeal's potential to generate consensus in small communities.