When the Roman law commenced to exercise its powerful influence in moulding the feudal customs into a regular body of procedure, and admiring jurists lost no opportunity of making use of the newly-discovered treasures of legal lore, whether applicable or not, it is easy to understand that the contempt and the civil disabilities lavished by the Imperial jurisprudence on the gladiator of antiquity came to be transferred to the mediæval champion; although the latter, by the theory of the law, stood forth to defend the innocent, while the former ignobly exposed his life for the gratification of an imbruted populace. This legacy of shame is clearly traceable in Pierre de Fontaines. To be a gladiator or an actor was, by the Roman law, a competent cause for disinheritance.[607] One of the texts prescribing it is translated bodily by de Fontaines, the _arenarius_ of the Roman becoming the _champions_ of the Frenchman;[608] and in another similar transcription from the Digest, the _athleta_ of the original is transformed into a “champion.”[609] By the thirteenth century, the occupation of champion had thus become infamous. Its professors were classed with the vilest criminals, and with the unhappy females who exposed their charms for sale, as the champion did his skill and courage.[610] They were held incapable of appearing as witnesses, and the extraordinary anomaly was exhibited of seeking to learn the truth in affairs of the highest moment by a solemn appeal to God, through the instrumentality of those who were already considered as convicts of the worst kind, or who, by the very act, were branded with infamy if successful in justifying innocence, and if defeated were mutilated or hanged.[611] By the codes in force throughout Germany in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they were not only, in common with bastards, actors, and jugglers, deprived of all legal privileges, such as succeeding to property, bearing witness, etc., but even their children were visited with the same disabilities.[612] The utter contempt in which they were held was moreover quaintly symbolized in the same codes by the provisions of a tariff of damages to be assessed for blows and other personal injuries. A graduated list of fines is given for such insults offered to nobles, merchants, peasants, etc., in compensation of their wounded honor; below the serf come the mountebank and juggler, who could only cuff the assailant’s shadow projected on the wall; and last of all are rated the champion and his children, whose only redress was a glance of sunshine cast upon them by the offender from a duelling shield. Deemed by law incapable of receiving an insult, the satisfaction awarded was as illusory as the honor to be repaired.[613] That this poetical justice was long in vogue is proved by the commentary upon it in the Richstich Landrecht, of which the date is shown to be not earlier than the close of the fourteenth century, by an