The barbarian Aryans who occupied Europe brought with them the ancestral beliefs in a form more easily recognizable than the remnants which survived through Hellenic and Italiote civilization. The Feini, or Irish Celts, boasted that their ancient Brehons, or judges, were warned by supernatural manifestations as to the equity of the judgments which they rendered. Sometimes these took the shape of blotches on their cheeks when they pronounced false judgments. Sen Mac Aige was subject to these marks, but with him they disappeared when he decided righteously, while Sencha Mac Aillila was less fortunate, for he was visited with three permanent blotches for each mistake. Fachtna received the surname of Tulbrethach because, whenever he delivered a false judgment, “if in the time of fruit, all the fruit in the territory in which it happened fell off in one night; if in time of milk, the cows refused their calves; but if he passed a true judgment, the fruit was perfect on the trees.” Morann never pronounced a judgment without wearing around his neck a chain, which tightened upon him if the judgment was false, but expanded down upon him if it were true. These quaint legends have their interest as manifesting the importance attached by the ancient Irish to the impartial administration of absolute justice, and the belief entertained that a supernatural power was ever on the watch over the tribunals, but these manifestations were too late to arrest injustice, as they did not occur until after it was committed. The Feini therefore did not abandon the ancient resource of the ordeal, as is shown by a provision in the Senchus Mor, which grants a delay of ten days to a man obliged to undergo the test of boiling water.[868] The Celts of the Rhinelands also had a local custom of determining the legitimacy of children by an ordeal of the purest chance, which became a common-place of Roman rhetoric, and is thus described in the Anthology:—
Θαρσαλέοι Κελτοὶ ποταμῷ ζηλήμονι Ρήνω χ. τ. λ.
Upon the waters of the jealous Rhine
The savage Celts their children cast, nor own
Themselves as fathers till the power divine
Of the chaste river shall the truth make known.
Scarce breathed its first faint cry, the husband tears
Away the new-born babe, and to the wave
Commits it on his shield, nor for it cares
Till the wife-judging stream the infant save,