which renders the cure of souls too often a matter of bargain and sale. CHAPTER VIII. DECLINE OF THE JUDICIAL COMBAT. So many influences were at work in favor of the judicial duel, and it was so thoroughly engrafted in the convictions and prejudices of Europe, that centuries were requisite for its extirpation. Curiously enough, the earliest decisive action against it took place in Iceland, where it was formally interdicted as a judicial proceeding in 1011;[662] and though the assumption that this was owing to the introduction of Christianity has been disproved, still, the fact that both events were contemporaneous allows us to conclude that some influence may have been exercised by even so imperfect a religion as that taught to the new converts, though the immediate cause was a _holm-gang_ between two skalds of distinction, Gunnlaug Ormstunga and Skald-Rafn.[663] Norway was not long in following the example, for about the same period the Jarls Erik and Sven Hakonsen abolished the _holm-gang_, while paganism was as yet widely prevalent.[664] Denmark was almost equally prompt: indeed Saxo Grammaticus in one passage attributes to it the priority, asserting that when Poppo, in 965, converted Harold Blaatand by the ordeal of red-hot iron, it produced so powerful an effect as to induce the substitution of that mode of trial for the previously existing wager of battle.[665] Yet it evidently was not abolished for a century later, for when Harold the Simple, son of Sven Estrith, ascended the throne in 1074, among the legal innovations which he introduced was the substitution of the purgatorial oath for all other forms of defence, which, as Saxo specifically states, put an end to the wager of battle, and opened the door to great abuses.[666]