TRIAL BY COMBAT

You stand in your armour, sword and shield at your side. Across from you is your opponent – similarly dressed and awaiting the moment when your duel will begin. Perhaps you are professional ‘champions’, thugs hired to defend your employers’ rights on the battlefield. Perhaps it’s your rights you are protecting, facing your enemy yourself while the eyes of the court and even God look on. Or maybe you are standing in a hole, defending yourself with a club while your wife chucks rocks at you to settle a marital dispute. For centuries, these scenarios were very real ways through which a variety of legal cases were solved, from land disputes to accusations of theft and even rape. ‘Trial by combat’ or ‘Judicial Duels’ were used throughout Europe, particularly during the Middle Ages where they saw something of a ‘golden age’.

Trials by combat had ancient origins and had been practised prior to their proliferation in the Middle Ages. In particular, Ancient Greece was known to favour single combat to solve disputes, as A MacC Armstrong of the Classical Association noted in a 1950 paper on the subject: “The Heroic age of Greece, like the heroic age of western Europe, practised trial by combat. For a combat to be judicial it must be single combat, it must be of numinous imports, as evidenced among the Greeks by a connexion with