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.

[189] Hale, _Crim. Prec_., 205 (1591). In Warrington deanery, at the
bishop's visitation in 1592, one Grimsford is cited for not living
with his wife. On a later occasion he appeared and affirmed that his
wife had run away with another man, "whereupon the Judge, having
regard to the poverty of the man," absolved him. _Warrington Deanery
Visit_., 190. An ecclesiastical judge in Durham city made this decree
in 1580: "_Dominus ... decrevit scribendum fore Aldermanno_ ... to
whip and cart the said Rowle and Tuggell in all open places within the
city of Durham, for that they faled in thei