Yet with all these influences at work, the ancestral customs maintained their ground long and stubbornly. It is not until the latter half of the thirteenth century that the first faint traces of legalized torture are to be found in France, at whose University of Paris for more than a hundred years the study of the Pandects had become the absorbing topic, and where the constantly increasing power of the crown found its most valuable instruments in the civil lawyers, and its surest weapon against feudalism in the extension of the royal jurisdiction. In Germany, the progress was even slower. The decline of the central authority, after the death of Frederic Barbarossa, rendered any general change impossible, and made the absolutist principles of the imperial jurisprudence especially distasteful to the crowd of feudal sovereigns, whose privileges were best supported by perpetuating organized anarchy. The early codes, therefore, the Sachsenspiegel, the Schwabenspiegel, the Kayser-Recht, and the Richstich Landrecht, which embodied the judicial proceedings of the Teutonic nations from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, seem to know no other mode of deciding doubtful questions than sacramental purgation and the various forms of ordeal. During the latter portion of this period, it is true, torture begins to appear, but it is an innovation.[1538] The first indications of the modern use of torture show distinctly that its origin is derived from the civil law. In the Latin Kingdoms of the East, the Teutonic races were brought into contact with the remains of the old civilization, impressive even in its decrepitude. It was natural that, in governing the motley collection of Greeks, Syrians, and Franks, for whom they had to legislate, they should adopt some of the institutions which they found in force amid their new possessions, and it is only surprising that torture did not form a more prominent feature in their code. The earliest extant text of the _Assises de Jerusalem_ is not older than the thirteenth century, and the blundering and hesitating way in which it recognizes, in a single instance, the use of torture shows how novel was the idea of such procedure to the feudal barons, and how little they understood the principles governing its application. When a murderer was caught in the act by two witnesses, he could be promptly hanged on their testimony, if they were strangers to the victim. If, however, they were relatives, their testimony was held suspect, and the confession of the accused was requisite to his conviction. To obtain this, he was subjected to torture for three days; if he confessed, he was hanged; if obdurate, he was imprisoned for a year and a day, with the privilege of clearing himself during that period by the ordeal of the red-hot iron. If he declined this, and if during his confinement no additional evidence was procured, he was acquitted, and could not be again appealed for the murder.[1539]