was quite in accordance with the rude justice of the age, that, as a last resource, the accused might defend his head with his hand. The challenger faced the west, the challenged party the east, and he who was defeated lost all “right” for ever; though, if he “craved” his life, he might live as a “recreant,” a _craven_ who “recanted” the perjury he had sworn to; so that most brave men must have fought to the death. Compurgation, which passed into the English law as “the wager of law,” and was not quite forgotten in the Perthshire highlands in the early part of the seventeenth century, was probably one of the first compromises of the ancient “wager of battle”--perhaps suggested by the softening influence of Christianity[303]--the same number of the kindred who formed the _Wer-borh_, or cleared their kinsman on oath, having, perhaps, in early times, like the second in a duel of the seventeenth century, stood beside him occasionally in the actual combat, or kept the ground during its progress--one of the latest instances in Scotland of such a combat on a great scale being, perhaps, the well-known contest on the North Inch of Perth.[304] Compurgation and ordeal seem to have been as familiar to the Celts as to the Teutons, until by degrees the system known of old in English law as the “Jugement del Pais,” superseded all the earlier methods of trial. Amongst the early Germans, a leading magnate, or prince, was chosen in the yearly meeting to judge the people, making the tour of the whole confederacy, with a hundred _comites_ to assist and support him in his decisions; the _Vergobreith_ amongst the Gauls being a very similar character, though, from the peculiar separative principle of Gallic policy, the Druids supplied the place of the Comites, the exposition of the law being one of the prerogatives of the sacred caste. Every freeman, therefore, was tried in the open _Mall_, or court, of his own district by a judge, in whose appointment he was supposed to have a voice; and in the presence of his equals, or of the class to which all legal and religious obligations were deputed. For his family, his _Hird_ or followers, his _Lœts_ and serfs--for all who were in his _mund_ or under his protection--he was himself the judge; and as the class of Comites increased in numbers, a greater body of freemen was transferred, so to say, from the jurisdiction of the public to that of the private judge, thus exhibiting the spectacle of a free population living, in a certain sense, according to different laws. This is nowhere better exemplified than in the case of Sweden in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the whole of the Bonders, or allodial proprietary, were under the jurisdiction of their chosen _Lagaman_, none of “the king’s men” having a right to enter the Bonders’ Court without their permission, where, when the king was present, the Lagaman sat on a raised seat opposite the royal throne, on the footing of all