ABSTRACT
THE system of legal proof that replaced trial by battle in Continental Europe during the Middle Ages reflected a starkly numerical jurisprudence. The law typically specified how many uncontradicted witnesses were required to establish various categories of propositions, and defined precisely how many witnesses of a particular class or gender were needed to cancel the testimony of a single witness of a more elevated order.1 So it was that medieval law, nurtured by the abstractions of scholasticism, sought i n mathematical precision an escape from the perils of irrational and subjective judgment.
