allusion in the same chapter to accidental deaths arising from the use of firearms.[614] The Italians, however, took a more sensible and practical view of the matter. Accepting as a necessity the existence of champions as a class, they were disposed rather to elevate than to degrade the profession. The law required that they should not be criminals or infamous, and the fact that they fought for hire did not render them so.[615] In the Veronese code of 1228, they appear as an established institution, consisting of individuals selected and appointed by the magistrates, who did not allow them to receive more than one hundred sous for the performance of their office.[616] It is evident that the evils attendant upon the employment of champions were generally recognized, and it is not singular that efforts were occasionally made to abrogate or limit the practice. Otho II., whose laws did so much to give respectability to the duel, decreed that champions should be permitted only to counts, ecclesiastics, women, boys, old men, and cripples.[617] That this rule was strictly enforced in some places we may infer from the pleadings of a case occurring in 1010 before the Bishop of Arezzo, concerning a disputed property, wherein a crippled right hand is alleged as the reason for allowing a champion to one of the parties.[618] In other parts of Italy, however, the regulation must have been speedily disregarded, for about the same period Henry II. found it necessary to promulgate a law forbidding the employment of substitutes to able-bodied defendants in cases of parricide or of aggravated murder;[619] and when, two hundred years later, Frederic II. almost abolished the judicial combat in his Neapolitan dominions, we may fairly presume from one of his remarks that champions were universally employed.[620] Indeed, he made provision for supplying them at the public expense to widows, orphans, and paupers who might be unable to secure for themselves such assistance.[621] In Germany, early in the eleventh century, it would seem that champions were a matter of course, from the expressions made use of in describing the execution of a number of robbers convicted in this manner at Merseburg in 1017.[622] At a later period, it seems probable, from a comparison of two chapters of the Suabian laws, that efforts were made to prevent the hiring of professional gladiators,[623] and in the Saxon burgher laws a man could refuse the duel if he could prove that his antagonist was a champion serving for pay.[624] That these efforts to restrict the practice, however, were attended with little success may be inferred from the disabilities which were so copiously showered on the class by the same laws.