To provide such necessary remedy, it was enacted that thenceforward no person under the degree of subdeacon, if guilty of felony, should be allowed to plead “his clergy” any more, but should be proceeded against by the ordinary law.  So far it was possible to go—­an enormous step if we think of what the evil had been; and in such matters to make a beginning was the true difficulty—­it was the logical premise from which the conclusion could not choose but follow.  Yet such was the mystical sacredness which clung about the ordained clergy, that their patent profligacy had not yet destroyed it—­a priest might still commit a murder, and the profane hand of the law might not reach to him.

The measure, however, if imperfect, was excellent in its degree; and when this had been accomplished, the House proceeded next to deal with the Arches Court—­the one enormous grievance of the time.  The petition of the Commons has already exhibited the condition of this institution; but the act by which the power of it was limited added more than one particular to what had been previously stated, and the first twenty lines of the statute which was now passed[346] may be recommended to the consideration of the modern censors of the Reformation.  The framer of the resolution was no bad friend to the bishops, if they had possessed the faculty of knowing who their true friends were, for the statement of complaint was limited, mild, and moderate.  Again, as with the “benefit of clergy,” the real ground for surprise is that any fraction of a system so indefensible should have been permitted to continue.  The courts were nothing else but the vicious sources of unjust revenue; and with the opportunity so fairly offered, it is strange indeed that they were not swept utterly away.  But sweeping measures have never found favour in England.  There has ever been in English legislation, even when most reforming, that temperate spirit of equity which has refused to visit the sins of centuries upon a single generation.  The statute limited its accusations to the points which it was designed to correct, and touched these with a hand firmly gentle.

“Whereas great numbers of the king’s subjects,” says the preamble, “as well men, wives, servants, or others dwelling in divers dioceses of the realm of England and Wales, heretofore have been at many times called by citations and other processes compulsory to appear in the Arches, Audience, and other high Courts of the archbishops of this realm, far from and out of the dioceses where such persons are inhabitant and dwelling; and many times to answer to surmised and feigned causes and matters, which have been sued more for vexation and malice than from any just cause of suit; and when certificate hath been made by the sumners, apparitors, or any such light litterate persons, that the party against whom such citations have been awarded hath been cited or summoned; and thereupon the same party so certified to be cited or summoned