there were some sceptics in Italy who argued that conviction by the duel ought not to entail the same punishment as conviction by witnesses “quia pugna est incertum Dei judicium.” This struck directly at the root of the whole system, and Roffredo insists that the legal penalty is to be enforced.[537] Mediæval legislation was not usually lenient to a worsted appellant. The application of the _lex talionis_ to the man who brought a false charge, thus adjudging to him the penalty which was incurred by the defendant if convicted, was widely current during the Middle Ages. This principle is to be found enunciated in the broadest and most decided manner in the ecclesiastical law,[538] and it was naturally brought into play in regulating the fate of those engaged in the wager of battle. Thus Guillaume le Breton states that when Philip Augustus, in 1203, wrested Normandy from the feeble grasp of John Lackland, one of the few changes which he ventured to introduce in the local laws of the duchy was to substitute this rule of confiscation, mutilation, or death, according to the degree of criminality involved in the accusation, for the comparatively light pecuniary mulct and loss of legal status previously incurred by a worsted appellant.[539] The same system is followed throughout the legislation of St. Louis, whether the punishment be light or capital, of an equal responsibility on both parties.[540] In capital cases, when champions were employed, the principals were held in prison with the cord around them with which the defeated party was to be hanged; and if one were a woman, for the cord was substituted the spade wherewith she was to be buried alive.[541] The same principle of equal responsibility prevailed throughout the Frankish kingdoms of the East, where, in an appeal of murder, as we have seen, the appellant fought by means of one of his witnesses, and the defendant personally. In civil cases, in the Bourgeois Court, the party defeated, including the plaintiff, if his side was the loser, was forever debarred from giving testimony, and had no future standing in court; while in serious criminal cases, in both upper and lower courts, either side, when defeated, was hanged with the utmost impartiality;[542] and it finally established itself in England, where in the fourteenth century we find it positively declared as an imperative regulation by Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, in an elaborate treatise on the rules of single combat printed by Spelman.[543]