by the kindred, was to be declared successor by the voice of “the good men of the neighbourhood;” whilst the claimant of property held by another--he who urged that he had been unjustly _disseised_--was not to support his claim by an appeal to the sword, but to submit it to the verdict of a similar jury.[314] The older system, however, appears to have been reluctantly abandoned, or at any rate to have died out very gradually; and in Galloway, which, after its closer union with the rest of Scotland, retained its peculiar code until the days of the first Edward and Robert Bruce, the was the exception and not the rule, none being judged according to its provisions except they refused the older law, and claimed _Visnet_. The Ordeal, the Wager of battle, and the Wager of Law, long held their ground side by side with the Verdict of the “good men and true,” for most of the ordinary trials of “Common Pleas;” and it seems doubtful even if in other quarters besides Galloway it were not open to the contending parties, at a much later period, to choose between the “Jugement del Pais,” and the misnamed “Judgment of God.”[315] Another of the innovations upon “ancient custom,” traceable apparently to the reigns of Alexander and David, though more particularly to the reign of the latter king, was the introduction of the written charter as the necessary evidence of the right to freehold property. It was long before any of the northern nations attached importance to the written documents, which were at the basis of the whole system of free rights, or property, held by Roman law. He who was freed “by tablet” ranked merely as a Roman citizen, reckoned at half the value of the man freed in open Court “by casting the _denarius_;” and when the horn of the Graphio summoned the _Voisinage_ around the body of the murdered man, or when the suspended shield of the Centenarius marked the spot where the _Mall_ was to be held, the parchment _writ_ would have been unheeded by the Frank living by Salic Law, or despised as an unmeaning formula of _the Roman_. Liability was transferred, or responsibility was shifted, by casting a small stick into the lap, or by throwing a handful of earth, in open _Mall_, or before witnesses; and allodial right was alone acquired by undisputed possession for a term of years, or by descent. The earliest application of the Roman principle appears in the royal grant equivalent to the Franc-Alleu-noble--the permanent alienation of a certain portion of the Fiscal or Folk-land, in which, by ancient custom, the king, or the community, held a life interest alone: a similar process, some centuries later, converting the Benefice into the hereditary Feud, held by written charter. The royal grant of _Bocland_ had long been familiar to the Anglo-Saxons as the sole known form of permanent property; but the Benefice, rather than the chartered Feud, was its equivalent amongst the Normans in the earlier