in Malta with regard to duelling. By this
law it was permitted, but only upon condition that the parties should
fight in one particular street. If they presumed to settle their quarrel
elsewhere, they were held guilty of murder, and punished accordingly. What
was also very singular, they were bound, under heavy penalties, to put up
their swords when requested to do so by a priest, a knight, or a woman. It
does not appear, however, that the ladies or the knights exercised this
mild and beneficent privilege to any great extent; the former were too
often themselves the cause of duels, and the latter sympathised too much
in the wounded honour of the combatants to attempt to separate them. The
priests alone were the great peacemakers. Brydone says, that a cross was
always painted on the wall opposite to the spot where a knight had been
killed, and that in the "street of duels" he counted about twenty of
them.[63]

[63] Brydone's _Tour in Malta_, 1772.

In England the private duel was also practised to a scandalous extent,
towards the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth
centuries. The judicial combat now began to be more rare, but several
instances of it are mentioned in history. One was instituted in the reign
of Elizabeth, and another so late as the time of Charles I. Sir Henry
Spelman gives an account of that which took place in Elizabeth's reign,
which is curious, perhaps the more so when we consider that it was
perfectly legal, and that similar combats remained so till the year 1819.
A proceeding having been instituted in the Court of Common Pleas for the
recovery of certain manorial rights in the county of Kent, the defendant
offered to prove by single combat his right to retain possession. The
plaintiff accepted the challenge, and the Court having no power to stay
the proceedings, agreed to the champions who were to fight in lieu of the
principals. The queen commanded the parties to compromise; but it being
represented to her majesty that they were justified by law in the course
they were pursuing, she allowed them to proceed. On the day appointed, the
justices of the Common Pleas, and all the counsel engaged in the cause,
appeared as umpires of the combat, at a place in Tothill-fields, where the
lists had been prepared. The champions were ready for the encounter, and
the plaintiff and defendant were publicly called to come forward and
acknowledge them. The defendant answered to his name, and reco