This becomes very evident as early as we have detailed regulations of procedure in the books of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In England, for instance, until the first statute of Westminster, issued by Edward I., in 1275, the hired champion of the defendant, in a suit concerning real estate, was obliged to assume the position of a witness, by swearing that he had been personally present and had seen seizin given of the land, or that his father when dying had enjoined him by his filial duty to maintain the defendant’s title as though he had been present.[587] This legal fiction was common also to the Norman jurisprudence of the period, where in such cases the champion of the plaintiff was obliged to swear that he had heard and seen the matters alleged in support of the claim, while the opposing champion swore that they were false.[588] In a similar spirit, an earlier code of Normandy prescribes that champions shall be taken to see the lands and buildings in dispute, before receiving the oath of battle, in the same manner as a jury of view.[589] We have seen that in the Assises d’Antioche it was requisite for a prosecutor or a plaintiff to have a witness who was ready to offer battle, in default of which the unsupported oath of the other party was sufficient to secure a verdict.[590] It necessarily follows that this witness must in most cases have been a hired champion, and this connection between the two functions is further shown in the regulation of the Assises de Jerusalem and of the Sicilian constitutions, which directed that the champion should swear on the field of battle as to his belief in the justice of the quarrel which he was about to defend,[591] a practice which is also found in the Scottish law of the thirteenth century.[592] An English legal treatise of the period, indeed, assumes that the principals can put forward only witnesses as substitutes, and gives as a reason why combats in civil suits were always conducted by champions, that in such cases the principals could not act as witnesses for themselves.[593] In a similar spirit, if on the field of battle one of the parties presented a champion who was not receivable as a witness and had not been accepted by the court, the case could be decided against him by default.[594]