ments, and even the amusements of these great barons and
nobles, were all military. They looked down with great disdain upon
all the useful pursuits of art and industry, regarding them as only
fit occupations for serfs and slaves. Their business was going to war,
either independently against each other, or, under the command of the
king, against some common enemy. When they were not engaged in any of
these wars they amused themselves and the people of their courts with
tournaments, and mock combats and encounters of all kinds, which they
arranged in open grounds contiguous to their castles with great pomp
and parade.

[Sidenote: Courts of justice.]

[Sidenote: Quarrels among the nobles.]

It could not be expected that such powerful and warlike chieftains as
these could be kept much under the control of law by the ordinary
machinery of courts of justice. There were, of course, laws and courts
of justice in those days, but they were administered chiefly upon the
common people, for the repression of common crimes. The nobles, in
their quarrels and contentions with each other, were accustomed to
settle the questions that arose in other ways. Sometimes they did this
by marshaling their troops and fighting each other in regular
campaigns, during which they laid siege to castles, and ravaged
villages and fields, as in times of public war. Sometimes, when the
power of the king was sufficient to prevent such outbreaks as these,
the parties to the quarrel were summoned to settle the dispute by
single combat in the presence of the king and his court, as well as of
a vast multitude of assembled spectators. These single combats were
the origin of the modern custom of dueling.

[Sidenote: Dueling.]

At the present day, the settlement of disputes by a private combat
between the parties to it is made a crime by the laws of the land. It
is justly considered a barbarous and senseless practice. The man who
provokes another to a duel and then kills him in the fight, instead of
acquiring any glory by the deed, has to bear, for the rest of his
life, both in his own conscience and in the opinion of mankind, the
mark and stain of murder. And when, in defiance of law, and of the
opinions and wishes of all good men, any two disputants who have
become involved in a quarrel are rendered so desperate by their angry
passions as to desire to satisfy them by this mode, they are obliged
to resort to all sorts of manoeuvres and stratagems to conce