h, the defendant stepped forward, took hold
of the witness' thumb, and raised him up, declaring him a false and
perjured witness, and that he was ready to maintain this with his life.
Then followed the judicial combat as above.

The procedure was similar when any one would contest a judgment already
rendered. The court itself must be solemnly accused of falsehood; the
complainant must fight with _all_ the associate judges of the court, or
have his tongue cut off as a calumniator. Whoever in such case did not
vanquish _all_ the judges of the court, and that, too, _on the same
day_, must be hanged.

The obvious remark in relation to all the processes above described is,
that unless hanging was much more honorable then than now, however
numerous the capital crimes committed, probably few complaints were
entered, very few witnesses accused of perjury, very few combatants
cried for grace, even in the most desperate struggle, very few judicial
decisions were contested, and very few injured husbands used their right
of punishing the unfaithful wife and her accomplice, since _all parties,
innocent and guilty, stood about equal chances of being hanged at the
end_.

The Crusades furnish the subject of frequent popular disquisitions and,
sketches, but the laws by which the Crusaders lived in their promised
land have rarely, if ever, been popularly sketched in this country. This
brief notice may do something toward supplying this desideratum, and at
the same time toward reconciling the most poetic reader--the greatest
admirer of the institutions of chivalry--to having been born in this
prosaic age, nearly a thousand years later. It may make such persons
feel that even 'the glorious uncertainty of the law' has some advantages
over the judicial processes of the kingdom of Jerusalem.

But I must not close my article, as some in similar cases have done,
without informing the reader to whom he is indebted mainly for it. I
have myself often entered that hall in the Royal Library at Munich, and
looked with interest upon that manuscript of the Assizes of Jerusalem,
but I have never studied it. In the winter of 1858, however, I heard a
course of popular lectures on various subjects, by a number of
distinguished men, before an audience of invited ladies and gentlemen,
at the lecture room of Baron von Liebig's chemical laboratory. One of
these was delivered by Baron de Voelderndorff on the Assizes of
Jerusalem. On opening my box of books,