Le fiz estephene pleia sun guant Al rei le tendi meintenant: De quantque lui sauerat retter Lui vodrat robert adrescer En sa curt mult uolenters Par la garde de tuz sez pers. Asez le plegerent errant Franceis, flamengs e normand. Mr. Orpen aptly quotes the case of the dying Roland, when ‘por ses pechiez Dieu porofrit lo guant,’ and refers us to ‘vadium in duello,’ and ‘plicare vadia’ in Du Cange. But the most instructive remarks on this custom will be found in Professor Maitland’s introduction to precedents for the Court Baron.[349] The formula he finds for this antique wager runs thus: “He shall wage his law with his folded glove (_de sun guant plyee_) and shall deliver it into the hand of the other, and then take his glove back and find pledge for his law.” The learned, writer explains that the folded glove typified that chattel of value which “in very old times” was the _vadium_, _wed_, or gage constituting the contract, and that this was now supplanted by a contract with sureties, who had become the real security for the party’s appearance in court. This procedure, it will be seen, is brought out in our poem, which was written about a century earlier than the treatise Mr. Maitland quotes. The mention here, I may add, of “his peers,” and the phrase, as Mr. Orpen points out, ‘Li reis receut le cors’ (l. 2635) suggest surely that the writer of the poem had a special knowledge of legal formulas. The careful reader will detect also a constitutional hint in the summons to the tenants by knight service to come to the assistance of king Henry in the rebellion of 1173: Chevalers, baruns e meyne, _A chescun barun par sei_, Par le commandement le rei, Que tuz passassent la mer En normandie li reis aider.