DUDLEY LOCUST, the popular name for a trilobite (ealymena Blumenbachii, q.v.) which is very abundant in the Dudley limestone.
DUEL (Fr. duel, Lat. duellum or dvellum, which, as Cicero remarks [Oral. 45], was the old form of helium, war), a combat between two persons, at a time and place indi cated in the challenge, cartel, or defiance borne by one party to the other. A D. gener ally takes place in the presence of witnesses, called seconds, who regulate the mode of fighting, place the weapons in the hands of the combatants, and enforce compliance with the rules which they have laid down.
No trace of the D., as an institution, is to be found in the history of the classical nations of antiquity, the Latin word from which ours is derived having been used to signify a war between two nations. So long as men continued to be barbarians, their personal quarrels were no doubt decided in the ancient, as national quarrels still are in the modern world, by an appeal to physical force. But though war has been in all times the practical solution of strife, it was not till the middle ages that it came to be regarded as a means, in any sense judicial, of settling disputes. Hitherto, it had deter mined who was able to prevail, justice being set aside, but it was a new view that it would determine who ought to prevail on the principles of justice. The rationale of the judicial combat or wager of battle was probably two-fold. On the one hand, and generally amongst the people, it depended on a belief that God would interfere directly and miraculously in the conflict to protect the innocent, and to punish the guilty, and that thus the weakest combatant who had God on his side would prove more than a match for the strongest, when destitute of His aid. But there was a view of the matter which was not so directly superstitious, and which rested rather on a confusion between the principle of the original constitution and the principle of the transmission of rights. All human rights originate in the powers and, faculties which God has given to man, and it was suppoged that as the right originated in power, its continued existence in the individual could be ascertained by ascertaining whether the power still existed in him. The error consisted, as we have said, in confounding the principle of the consti tution with the principle of the transmission of rights. If a field which was claimed by two competitors had as yet been appropriated to nobody, or had been abandoned, and was, as lawyers say, res nullius, the fact of which of the two claimants ought to become the possessor, might be ascertained by judicial combat. But if it was already the prop erty of one of them on a title which was to be held sacred, and the question was which of the two had this sacred title, that fact could never be determined by ascertaining which would have been in a condition to constitute it for the first time, had it been non existent. The principle of the private D., in so far as it had any principle at all, and was not merely a piece of barbarous and irrational foppery, was precisely the same as that of the judicial combat. But the latter had been applied to a class of cases which admitted of legal investigation and decision, and it was consequently abandoned in the days of Queen Elizabeth; whereas the former was supposed to be a means of redress ing wrongs which hardly can come within the cognizance of a human tribunal, and the consequence was that it continued in green observance in this country until recently, and is still in vigor in many continental countries.
Like the other peculiarities of mediceval life, the D. probably originated with the Germanic nations. It is said to have been introduced into legal proceedings in lieu of an oath by Gundebald, king of the Burgundians, in 501. Louis le Dehonnaire was the first of the French kings who permitted litigants to appeal to arms. The practice was prohibited by Henry II., in consequence of a noted D. which took place in his pres ence between his friend, Francis de la Chastaignerie, and Guy Chabot de Jarnac, in which the latter was slain. The royal edict, however, was totally ineffectual, and the practice of private dueling has generally prevailed more extensively in France than in any other country. Francis I. patronized it by declaring that a lie could be borne without satisfaction only by a base-born churl, and still more by the example which he set in challenging his own great rival Charles V. In 1589, the parliament of Paris declared all persons who were either principals or seconds in D. to be rebels to the king. But its efforts were unavailing; and it is said that during the first 18 years of IIenry IV., no fewer than 4,000 gentlemen perished in this foolish manner. In 1609, Henry added to the existing penalties, introducing even punishment by death in extreme cases. But these regulations were forced upon him by popular feeling; lie had himself no aversion to the practice, and when he gave permission to Crequi to fight Don Philip of Savoy, he added: " If I were not the king, I would be your second." The consequence of this feeling was, that he readily granted pardons to those who had violated the laws which he had been forced to enact, and these laws not unnaturally produced an effect the very reverse of their ostensible object. Dueling acquired the charm of what the French call "forbidden fruit," and thus became a fashionable and favorite vice. In the reign of Louis XIII., the custom was so prevalent, that lord Herbert, the English ambassador, wrote home to his court that there was scarcely a Frenchman worth looking on who had not killed his man. It would not.seem, however, that it was from negligence in •enforcing the royal edicts that dueling then reached to so alarming a height; for it was during this reign that two noblemen, the greatest duelists of the day, the count de Boutteville and the marquis de Beuron, were tried and beheaded for persisting to fight. In the commencement of the reign of Louis XIV., D. with four or five a side began to be fought; and two very sanguinary affairs of this description having taken place, in which several persons of the highest rank were slain, the king determined to put an end to the practice. He published an edict in 1679, forbidding it under the highest penal ties, which, unlike most of his predecessors, he had the firmness to inflict; and this measure, together with a solemn agreement which was entered into amongst the nobility themselves, led at that time to its almost total abolition.