A closer look
Medieval combat manuals often included ridiculous instructions, but none top the judicial duel rules between a man and a woman in fifteenth-century Germany. To make the fight "fair," the man was forced to stand waist-deep in a hole with one hand tied behind his back, wielding a wooden club, while the woman was free to move around and hit him with a rock tucked inside a heavy cloth sack. It looks less like a dignified legal proceeding and more like a bizarre fetish game orchestrated by a very bored local magistrate. The justice system back then literally thought the best way to resolve a property dispute was a highly specific game of extreme whack-a-mole. You definitely would not sue your annoying neighbor if it meant getting beaten with a heavy bag of rocks inside a muddy ditch
