Some reason for setting them aside was never hard to find. In 1208 a canon of Bourges was elected prior; his disappointed competitor claimed that he was ineligible because he had once served as judge in a duel in which there was effusion of blood. Innocent III. was appealed to, who decided that the canon was capable of promotion to any dignity, and the chief reason alleged was that the evil custom of the duel was so universal in some regions that ecclesiastics of all classes from the lowest to the highest were habitually concerned in them.[701] Innocent III., however, took care that the great council of Lateran in 1215 should confirm all the previous prohibitions of the practice.[702] It was probably this papal influence that led Simon de Montfort, the special champion of the church, to limit the use of the duel in the territories which he won in his crusade against the Count of Toulouse. In a charter given December 1, 1212, he forbids its use in all the seignorial courts in his dominions, except in cases of treason, theft, robbery, and murder.[703] De Montfort’s dependence on Rome, however, was exceptional, and Christendom at large was not as yet prepared to appreciate the reformatory efforts of the popes. The most that the Council of Paris, held in 1212 for the reformation of the church by the cardinal-legate Robert de Curzon, could do was to order the bishops not to permit the duel in cemeteries or other sacred places.[704] The opposition of the church as represented by its worthiest and most authoritative spokesmen continued. St. Ramon de Peñafort, the leading canonist of his time, about 1240, asserts uncompromisingly that all concerned in judicial combats are guilty of mortal sin; the sin is somewhat lightened indeed when the pleader is obliged to accept the combat by order of the judge, but the judge himself, the assessors who counsel it, and the priest who gives the benediction all sin most gravely; if death occurs they are all homicides and are rendered “irregular.”[705] About the same time Alexander Hales ingeniously argued away the precedent of David and Goliath by showing that it was simply a prefiguration of the Passion, in which Christ triumphed over Satan as in a duel.[706] With the development, moreover, of the subtilties of scholastic theology the doctors found that the duel was less objectionable than the other forms of ordeal, because, as Thomas Aquinas remarks, the hot iron or boiling water is a direct tempting of God, while the duel is only a matter of chance, for no one expects miraculous interposition unless the champions are very unequal in age or strength.[707] This struck at the very root of the faith on which confidence in the battle ordeal was based, yet in spite of it the persistence of ecclesiastical belief in the divine interposition is fairly illustrated by a case, related with great triumph by monkish chroniclers, as late as the fourteenth century, when a duel was