When the tenant in a writ of right pleaded the general issue, and offered to decide the cause by the body of a champion, a piece of ground was selected sixty feet square, inclosed with lists, and on one side a court was erected for the accommodation of the judges of the court of Common Pleas, who attended there in their scarlet robes: a bar was also prepared for the sergeants learned in law. When the court sat, which was before sun-rising, proclamation was made for both parties and their champions: the latter were introduced by two knights, and were dressed in a coat of mail, with red sandals, bare-legged from the knee downwards, bare-headed, and with arms bare to the elbows. The weapons allowed them were batons, or staves of an ell long, and a four-cornered leathern target, so that death very seldom ensued from these civil combats. In the court military, however, they fought with sword and lance. When the champions thus armed arrived within the lists, or place of combat, the champion of the tenant took his adversary by the hand, and made oath that the tenement in dispute was not the right of the demandant; the champion of the demandant of course took a contrary oath. Another oath was then taken against sorcery and enchantment, in the following form: “Hear this, ye justices, that I have neither eaten, drunk, nor have I upon me either bone, stone, or grass,--no enchantment, sorcery, or witchcraft, whereby the law of God may be abased, or the law of the devil exalted; so help me God and his saints!” The battle then began, and the combatants were bound to fight till the stars appeared in the evening; and, if the champion of the tenant could defend himself till the stars appeared, the tenant prevailed in his cause, and the vanquished was proclaimed a _Craven_: a degradation of the highest importance; for when a champion had once admitted that he was “_Craven_,” or one who craves for mercy, he ceased to be a freeman--_liber et legalis homo_, and, having been proved forsworn, was no longer eligible as a juryman, or in any manner entitled to belief or respect. In appeals of felony, the parties were obliged to fight in their proper persons, unless the appellant were a woman, a priest, or an infant,--of the age of sixty, lame, or blind; in either which cases, he or she counter-pleaded, and threw themselves upon the country. Peers of the realm could not be challenged to wage battle; nor the citizens of London, it being specified in their charter that fighting was foreign to their education and employment. In regard to trial by battle in civil cases, the mystic appeal to the judgment of God at this period was abandoned, and the institution of chivalry gave to personal combats a character totally different. CHAPTER V. INSTITUTION OF CHIVALRY AND DUELS.