[185] A number of broadsides and pamphlets were published in 1641 upon the abolition of the spiritual courts.  Consult Mr. Stephen’s Catalogue (1870) for those in the British Museum.  One of them is entitled The Proctor and Parator their Mourning ...  Beinge a true Dialogue, Relating the fearfull abuses and exorbitances of those spirituall Courts, under the names of Sponge the Proctor and Hunter the Parator.  In the spirited dialogue between the two Hunter tells of his ways of extorting money from recusants, seminary priests and neophytes, “whose starting holes I knew as well as themselves”; also, he adds, “I got no small trading by the Brownists, Anabaptists and Familists who love a Barne better than a Church.”  “Poor Curates, Lecturers and Schoolmasters ... that have been willing to officiate their places without licences” are also his special prey.  As for minor offenders “against our terrible Canons and Jurisdiction ... had I but given them a severe looke, I could ... have made them draw their purses ...”  “I tell you,” he concludes, “the name of Doctors Commons was as terrible to these as Argier [Algiers] is to Gally-slaves.” Sponge admits that he has made many a fat fee by Hunter’s procurement.  For more serious documents in corroboration see Whitgift’s circular to his suffragans in May, 1601, and also his address to his bishops a few months later in Strype, Whitgift, ii, 447 ff.  Among many other and grave abuses he refers to “the infinite number” of apparitors and “petty Sumners” hanging upon every court, “two or three of them at once most commonly seizing upon the subject for every trifling offence to make work to their courts.”  Cf.  Canons of 1597, can. xi (Multitude of apparitors and their excesses) in Cardwell, Syn., i, 159.  Also Canons of 1603/4, ibid.  Most of the Elizabethan and Stuart metropolitan and diocesan injunctions call for the presentment of the abuse of apparitors and other court officials.  See Cardwell, Doc.  Ann., ii, passim.  Also Appendix to 2nd Rep. of the Com. on Ritual to Parliament (1870), where a large number of injunctions from Parker to Juxon (1640) are gathered together.

[186] By this system, if the accused could get together a certain number of his neighbors (3, 4, 6 or more) to act as oath-helpers, i.e., who would swear that they believed him on oath, he was acquitted.  It seems to have been no concern of the judge to weigh the evidence on the facts themselves.

[187] The churchwardens accounts are full of items for horse hire and other expenses for long journeys, for ecclesiastical courts were held at all kinds of places at the pleasure of the judges.  See Mr. Bruce’s remarks on the Minchinhampton Acc’ts, Archaeologia, xxxv, 419 ff.  Cf. the Ludlow Acc’ts, Shrop.  Arch.  Soc. 2nd. ser., i, 235 ff.—­in fact any of the accounts of the period that have been printed in detail.

[188] Archdeacon Hale in Crim.  Prec., introd., p. lx.