31. Peter Leeson on Why Trial-by-Fire Wasn’t Barbaric and Why Pirates Were Democratic

**Steve Levitt** (0:04)
The topics I study are unusual for an economist. Things like cheating and sumo wrestling, a link between abortion and crime, the perils of walking drunk.
But on the scale of weirdness, I can't even begin to compete with my guest today, Pete Leeson. The list of subjects he has studied tilted to pure absurdity. Everything from the practice of wife selling in industrial revolution era England, to trials in Italy in the 15th to 17th century, in which insects were the defendants. And even what are called ordeals, the medieval practice of determining innocence or guilt by plunging someone's hand into boiling water.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:43)
Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

**Steve Levitt** (0:49)
But the amazing thing about Pete Leeson is that he takes these crazy topics and through a brilliant mix of meticulous historical research, data gathering and creative economic thinking, he shows that these seemingly nonsensical practices actually make a whole lot of sense once you understand them. I can't think of another economist whose work has so consistently blown my mind. And I'm pretty confident he will do the same to you.
Way too much time has passed since we last spoke. Has it been a decade or more?

**Peter Leeson** (1:21)
It's been about 10 years if you can believe it, Steve.

**Steve Levitt** (1:24)
That's way too long and even if we haven't been talking, I've made a point of following your research because I can honestly say, there's nobody else like you in the field of economics. So before we do anything else, I think we need to give people a few examples of your research. Could you provide a little history lesson?
What were ordeals and when were they used?

**Peter Leeson** (1:46)
Absolutely. For about 400 years between the ninth century and the early 13th, the most sophisticated legal systems in Europe conducted physical tests in criminal cases to determine the guilt or innocent of accused suspects.
In the classic medieval judicial ordeal, as these things were called, the priest or the cleric who was overseeing the trial, boiled a pot of water into which he threw a stone or a ring. He then asked the criminal defendant to plunge his arm into the boiling water and to pluck the object out. After that, the priest would wrap the defendant's hand and then they would revisit it. The whole court would three days later. If the arm showed evidence of having been burned very badly, that was considered evidence that God was giving to the court, that the defendant was in fact guilty of the crime. In which case, the defendant would then face the secular punishment, the fine or imprisonment, so to speak, although they didn't typically use prison in the Middle Ages. If the defendant's arm didn't show evidence of having been burned, that was considered evidence that the defendant was innocent. God had performed a miracle and he would be let go.
There was another type of hot ordeal that was popular at the time, which was the hot iron ordeal. Instead of the defendant being asked to plunge his arm into boiling water, he was asked to carry a burning hot iron in a stipulated number of paces. The number of paces that he was supposed to walk depended upon the severity of the crime.

**Steve Levitt** (3:20)
From the modern perspective, ordeals seem both barbaric and also so idiotic.

**Peter Leeson** (3:27)
Well, let me tell you a little something about the data.
What if I told you that we had data from an ordeal register, in this case the ordeal of burning iron that was conducted in Hungary in the early 13th century? We have about 308 cases in which ordeals were ordered.

**Steve Levitt** (3:43)
So these are real data, Pete, that you and others have collected about actual ordeals?

**Peter Leeson** (3:48)
Yes, about actual ordeals.
We have 308 cases in which criminal defendants were ordered to undergo the ordeal. And it turns out that in 100 of those cases, the criminal defendant never actually ended up undergoing the ordeal. He declined, which means he probably either confessed or he settled with his accuser, a sort of medieval version of a plea bargain. In 208 of those cases, however, the criminal defendant actually ended up carrying the supposedly red-hot burning iron. But in about two-thirds of those cases, the defendant had his arm unscathed.

**Steve Levitt** (4:25)
So I guess one possibility is that God directly intervened on behalf of the innocents. But I suspect you think that there might be an alternative explanation to that.

**Peter Leeson** (4:36)
Yes, that's one possibility. But I think a probably stronger possibility is that priests intervened to make sure that red-hot burning iron wasn't in fact red-hot, or that the boiling water, for which we have similar evidence, wasn't in fact boiling.