In later times, compurgation was also sometimes used as an alternative when circumstances prevented the employment of other popular modes of deciding doubtful cases. Those, for instance, who would ordinarily be required to defend themselves by the wager of battle, were permitted by some codes to substitute the oaths of a certain number of conjurators, when precluded by advanced age from appearing in the arena. The burgher law of Scotland affords an example of this,[156] though elsewhere such cases were usually settled by the substitution of champions. Class privileges also manifested themselves in this as in so many other features of mediæval law, and we sometimes find compurgation allowed as a favor to those of gentle birth. Thus, in the Council of Reims in 1119, among the provisions for the enforcement of the Truce of God, accusations of its violation are rebutted by knights with six compurgators, while common people are required to undergo the ordeal.[157] CHAPTER VI. FORMULAS AND PROCEDURE. The primitive lawgivers were too chary of words in their skeleton codes to embody in them the formula usually employed for the compurgatorial oath. We have therefore no positive evidence of its nature in the earliest times; but as the forms made use of by several races at a somewhat later period have been preserved, and as they resemble each other in all essential respects, we may reasonably assume that little variation had previously occurred. The most ancient that I have met with occurs in an Anglo-Saxon formulary which is supposed to date from about A. D. 900: “By the Lord, the oath is clean and unperjured which N. has sworn.”[158] A century later, in a compilation of the Lombard law, it appears: “That which the accused has sworn is true, so help me God.”[159] The form specified in Béarn, at a period somewhat subsequent, is curt and decisive: “By these saints, he tells the truth;”[160] while the code in force in Normandy until the sixteenth century directs an oath identical in spirit: “The oath which William has sworn is true, so help me God and his saints.”[161] It will be observed that all these, while essentially distinct from the oath of a witness, are still unqualified assertions of the truth of the principal, and not mere asseverations of belief or protestations of confidence. The earliest departure from this positive affirmation, in secular jurisprudence, occurs in the unsuccessful attempt at legislation for Norway and Iceland by Haco Haconsen in the thirteenth century. In this, the impropriety of such oaths is pointed out, and it is directed that in future the compurgator shall swear only, in confirmation of his principal, that he knows nothing to the contrary.[162] In the similar code promulgated in 1274 by his son Magnus in Norway, it is directed that the accused shall take a full oath of denial, and the conjurators shall swear in the same words that his oath is true, and that they know nothing truer.[163]