In 1409, the battle trial was materially limited by an ordonnance of Charles VI. prohibiting its employment except when specially granted by the king or the Parlement;[770] and though the latter body may never have exercised the privilege thus conferred upon it, the king occasionally did, as we find him during the same year presiding at a judicial duel between Guillaume Bariller, a Breton knight, and John Carrington, an Englishman.[771] The English occupation of France, under Henry V. and the Regent Bedford, revived the practice, and removed for a time the obstacles to its employment. Nicholas Upton, writing in the middle of the fifteenth century, repeatedly alludes to the numerous cases in which he assisted as officer of the Earl of Salisbury, Lieutenant of the King of England; and in his chapters devoted to defining the different species of duel he betrays a singular confusion between the modern ideas of reparation of honor and the original object of judicial investigation, thus fairly illustrating the transitional character of the period.[772] It was about this time that Philippe le Bon, Duke of Burgundy, formally abolished the wager of battle, as far as lay in his power, throughout the extensive dominions of which he was sovereign, and in the Coutumier of Burgundy, as revised by him in 1459, there is no trace of it to be found. The code in force in Britanny until 1539 permitted it in cases of contested estates, and of treason, theft, and perjury—the latter, as usual, extending it over a considerable range of civil actions, while the careful particularization of details by the code shows that it was not merely a judicial antiquity.[773] In Normandy, the legal existence of the judicial duel was even more prolonged, for it was not until the revision of the coutumier in 1583, under Henry III., that the privilege of deciding in this way numerous cases, both civil and criminal, was formally abolished.[774] Still, it may be assumed that, practically, the custom had long been obsolete, though the tardy process of revising the local customs allowed it to remain upon the statute book to so late a date. The fierce mountaineers of remote Béarn clung to it more obstinately, and in the last revision of their code, in 1552, which remained unaltered until 1789, it retains its place as a legitimate means of proof, in default of other testimony, with a heavy penalty on the party who did not appear upon the field at the appointed time.[775]