THE SEVENTH-CENTURY KINGDOM 143outside of Spain suffered similar losses of legal freedom and endured
bondage to the state in later centuries. Those in France were made
royal serfs, and in 1205 Pope Innocent III declared the Jews to be
property of the Church. Secondly, as has been referred to, Egica's
ruling on the responsibilities of local communities in respect of fugi-
tive slaves mirrors such later developments in legal practice as the
Frankpledge system and the Jury of Presentment, that were important
features of the maintenance of public order in Anglo-Norman Eng-
land. In these and related developments the onus of responsibility
was placed firmly on the local community. Finally, what appears as
the last recorded secular law of the Visigothic kingdom, promulgated
by King Wittiza, relates to the administration of the ordeal. It is
matched by contemporary liturgical compositions for its performance.^97
Although anachronistically denounced as the nadir of Visigothic
legal thought and practice, in the eighth and ninth centuries the
ordeal became the standard means of determining guilt in judicial
processes throughout most of western Europe. It left the decision to
God, in that the accused could, by voluntarily submitting to an or-
deal, usually in the form of carrying a heated iron bar or plunging
a hand into hot water to extract a stone, appeal to a divine verdict,
manifested according to whether or not he then sustained visible
injury.
It would be quite unjustified to claim that the subsequent history
of Christian:Jewish relations, jurisprudence or the ordeal were in any
way directly affected by these precedents in late Visigothic Spain. The
fall of the kingdom and the limited subsequent dissemination and
use of its civil laws would show that. However, what is important to
note is that ideas and practices seen to be coming into being at the
end of the Visigothic period are remarkably congruous with develop-
ments elsewhere in the West. The society of Visigothic Spain was
heading in a way that others would soon unwittingly follow. It was not
declining or decaying: it was evolving. However, as with the Germanic
invasions, the Arab conquest of the peninsula in 711 cut across purely
internal developments in the society, and by introducing new ele-
ments of culture and population required the whole process of
assimilation and the search for unity to be begun anew.