The state of feeling disclosed by this offensive farce shows plainly, even at that time, that the public which tolerated it had passed out of a state of mere supineness and had assumed an attitude of disrespect and defiance towards the authority of oaths. The system had been allowed to overreach itself, and thenceforward its set forms and all the paraphernalia that pertained to them were made over to the service of criminality and to the uses of violent speech. The modern practice of swearing, in either its flippant or vituperative shape, is derived from the break-up of the process once devised as a protection of truthfulness and fair dealing. So nearly allied have been the oaths of piety and statecraft with those of violence and malice, that the severer thinkers, whether Lollards, Puritans, or Quakers, have waged a war of extermination against both alike. They have contended, and with some amount of probability, that these jarring expletives of passion and irreligion have only been perpetuated by reason of the familiarity that has ensued from the undue exaction of legal tests. The same stubbornness with which they combated the evil in endless tracts and broadsides they maintained before courts and inquisitions. At the Lancaster Assizes of 1664, George Fox and Mrs. Margaret Fell stood upon their trial for refusing to conform. "I have never laid my hand on the book to swear in all my life," urged the woman. "I do not care if I never hear an oath read, for the land mourns because of oaths." And then appealing to the jury she exclaims: "I was bred and born in this county and never have been at this assize before. I am a widow, and my estate is a dowry, and I have five children unpreferred."