Looking on the profession of a champion in this light, as that of a witness swearing for hire, we can find a justification for the heavy penalties to which he was subjected in case of defeat—penalties of which the real purport presumably was to insure his fidelity to his principal. Thus, in the Norman coutumier above referred to, in civil suits as to disputed landed possessions, the champion swearing to the truth of his principal’s claim was, if defeated, visited with a heavy fine and was declared infamous, being thenceforth incapable of appearing in court either as plaintiff or as witness, while the penalty of the principal was merely the loss of the property in dispute;[595] and a similar principle was recognized in the English law of the period.[596] In criminal cases, from a very early period, while the principal perhaps escaped with fine or imprisonment, the hired ruffian was hanged, or at best lost a hand or foot, the immemorial punishment for perjury;[597] while the laws of the Kingdom of Jerusalem prescribe that in combats between champions, the defeated one shall be promptly hanged, whether dead or alive.[598] The Assises d’Antioche are somewhat more reasonable, for they provide merely that the vanquished champion and his principal shall suffer the same penalty, whether simply a forfeiture of civil rights in civil cases, or hanging as in accusations of homicide or other serious crime.[599] That, in the later periods, at least, the object of this severity was to prevent the champion from betraying his employer’s cause was freely admitted. Beaumanoir thus defends it on the ground of the liability of champions to be bought over by the adverse party, which rendered the gentle stimulus of prospective mutilation necessary to prevent them from being purchased by the adversary;[600] and it is probably owing to this that the full severity of the punishment is shown to be still in existence by a charter of so late a date as 1372, when the use of the judicial duel had fully entered on its decline.[601] In the same spirit, the Emperor Frederic II. prohibited champions from bargaining with each other not to use teeth and hands. He commanded them to inflict all the injury possible on their adversaries, and decreed that they should, in case of defeat, share the punishment incurred by the principal, if the judge of the combat should consider that through cowardice or treachery they had not conducted the duel with proper energy and perseverance.[602]