throne with her innocence recognized.[309] Indeed, the tenacious hold which it maintained on the veneration of the Lombards is seen in the fruitless efforts to restrict its employment and to abrogate it by Rotharis and his successors under the civilizing influence of contact with Roman institutions. Thus Rotharis forbids its use in some cases of importance, substituting conjurators, with a marked expression of disbelief, which shows how little confidence was felt in its results by enlightened men.[310] The next lawgiver, King Grimoald, decreed that thirty years’ possession of either land or liberty relieved a defendant from maintaining his title by battle, the privilege of employing conjurators being then conceded to him.[311] In the succeeding century, King Liutprand sought to abolish it entirely, but finding the prejudices of his people too strong to be overcome, he placed on record in the statute-book a declaration of his contempt for it and a statement of his efforts to do away with it, while he was obliged to content himself with limiting the extent of its application, and diminishing the penalties incurred by the defeated party.[312] While the laws of the Angles, the Saxons, and the Frisians bear ample testimony to the general use of the wager of battle,[313] it is not a little singular that the duel appears to have been unknown among the Anglo-Saxons. Employed so extensively as legal evidence throughout their ancestral regions, by the kindred tribes from which they sprang, and by the Danes and Norwegians who became incorporated with them; harmonizing, moreover, with their general habits and principles of action, it would seem impossible that they should not likewise have practised it. I can offer no explanation of the anomaly, and can only state the bare fact that the judicial combat is not referred to in any of the Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Danish codes.[314] There seems, indeed, to be no reason to doubt that its introduction into English jurisprudence dates only from the time of William the Conqueror.[315]