Thanks, that's good to hear!

When I'm talking about trials by combat I'm talking about roughly 1400 onward so I can't say much about what happens before that but to my knowledge it wasn't over after the fight was over. In my example, if Albrecht won and Werner survived the fight then Werner was on the hook now. Because if Albrecht won then Werner really did lie. To a judge, under oath. That was a serious crime in and of itself.

Less than you'd expect but more than today. A trial by combat was very much the exception, not the norm.

But swords and the ability to fight were status symbols, they expressed power, authority and privilege. First and foremost of nobles and knights but also of other social classes and authority figures.

That has to do with the feudal class system. Generally, in the very broad strokes, serfs didn't have the right to wear swords, but they also didn't have the duty to join the army in case of a war. Free people could be drafted but they had the right to wear swords. That was very important to the craftspeople and merchants in the big cities, especially since there wasn't such a thing as the police yet so knowing how to defend yourself was sometimes a good idea and sometimes legally required. Wearing a sword meant "Look at me, I'm free and proud of it. I can afford a sword and I can and will use it on you if you give me a reason to."

Pretty much, yeah. But only if those murderers have just as many friends as their accusers.

This is a legal system that assumes God exists and is interested in humanity. Werner says that Albrecht killed somebody. Albrecht says that's a lie. Both have three respected members of the community backing them up. Evidence - based rulings and In Dubio Pro Reo aren't really things yet.

So what's the logical consequence? Appeal to the ultimate authority. Give Albrecht and Werner weapons, put them in the arena and let God sort them out. He'll make sure the guy who's in the right wins. It might seem barbaric from a modern perspective but from a medieval mindset it's elegant.

> it’s not from trial by combat, there were no records of that being used after 1200.

It's not from trial by combat to settle a dispute between husband and wife.

Trial by combat in general was still around, but it was only invoked in cases of (for example) murder, treason, blasphemy and a few other high-profile accusations.

It's this manuscript. You can see contact with genitals not only in this specific setup, it also appears in other areas. Not exactly sure why, maybe it's because the groin is a convenient place to set up a takedown that also hurts when you grab it. AFAIK you get similar situations in folk style wrestling like Turkish oil wrestling or Glima, but I'm not sure. That said, grappling isn't my strong point, I mainly concentrate on the armed stuff.

Yup. There's a treatise associated with Albrecht Dürer (yes, that Albrecht Dürer) where groins get kicked, knees get stomped, arms get broken and eyes get gouged.

It's kinda-sorta both. Most European fighting manuals don't really work with forms as you would know them from Eastern martial arts, it's mostly scenarios. The text says "If your opponent does X then you do Y" in varying degrees of detail and the picture shows what that's supposed to look like.

The problem with Talhoffer is that it's essentially only images and no text which makes it harder to interpret. Also it's still medieval, and medieval art doesn't follow modern rules of depth which doesn't help either.

Talhoffer shows judicial duels because that's what he knew, that's what he was qualified to talk about. Other manuals depict fighting in the context of self defense or a training hall or a duel of honor depending on where the qualifications of the author were and how they wanted to present themselves.

Maybe it's because I've been reading these treatises and attempting to reconstruct the techniques in them for a long time but it makes sense to me. In that image the man has (somehow) managed to neutralize the woman's weapon (possibly by wrapping it around his mace or arm) and gotten her close enough that he could sweep her off her feet and pull her into the hole where she's defenseless.

Also, yeah, that might result in a broken neck. That was the goal. Judicial duels were fought until one side was either dead or had given up. They were only called when there was a stalemate in a case where the death penalty was on the table, this wasn't something people did for petty grievances. Especially since they believed that God would grant victory to the person who had been telling the truth. That meant the loser hadn't been telling the truth, which means they had been lying under oath. Which could be punishable by death.

Well, the guy who wrote the treatise fought judicial duels as a job so I'm not sure if there's a whole lot of trolling going on here. That doesn't mean something like this happened often or regularly but I wouldn't discount it happening at all. It might be a way to even the playing field so to speak. The woman gets the freedom of movement and can play out her range but since the man is standing in a hole his center of gravity is so low he can't be grappled effectively.

None, this isn't a self defense situation, this is highly ritualized trial by combat. Treatises for "real" combat or self defense exist as well but obviously they look a bit different. They don't start with one of the combatants in a hole, for example.

France sponsoring Sweden makes sense from a geopolitical standpoint. It was less a lootfest and more a very calculated move from the French higher-ups to preserve their status.

France was wedged in between Spain which was ruled by the Habsburgs and the HRE which usually had a Habsburg as emperor. The Holy Roman Emperor couldn't actually do all that much without his nobles' consent though, up until the war where the emperor was fighting against some of his most powerful lords.

But Cardinal Richelieu (yes, the one from The Three Musketeers) figured that if the Catholic side (meaning the Emperor) was successful in forcing the protestant lords to re-convert to Catholicism the logical next step would be to take this newfound power and convert the empire into a single centralised realm under Habsburg rule.

That would mean France would quickly lose its status as one of the hegemons of Europe. The best way to prevent this was to keep the emperor small and that meant sponsoring Sweden.