I have already indicated in outline the result of the investigations of the two judicial commissions. I have told you how juries were empanelled from every hundred in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey, and from the wards of the city of London and from Westminster. The details of the evidence are worthy of more special treatment than I can give them here, because they afford a wonderful picture of the loose-living, easy-going, slack, negligent, casual, and criminal doings of mediaeval men and women. I must, however, be content to restate the general result of the trials. Richard of Pudlicott was found guilty. Various other people, including William of the Palace, and certain monks, were declared accomplices, while Adam Warfield was shrewdly suspected to be at the bottom of the whole business. More than a year was spent in investigations, and it was not until March, 1304, eleven months after the burglary, that William of the Palace and five other lay culprits were comfortably hanged. The great problem was how to deal with the clerical offenders without adding to the king’s difficulties by rousing the sleeping dogs of the church, always ready to bark when the state meditated any infringement of the claim of all clerks to be subject solely to the ecclesiastical tribunals. Accordingly Richard of Pudlicott, and ten monks were reserved for further treatment. Pudlicott, as we have seen, had been a tonsured person in his youth, and he probably claimed, as did the monks, benefit of clergy. It was probably now that Pudlicott nobly tried to shield his monastic allies by his extraordinary confession. His heroism, however, availed him nothing. But whatever his zeal for the church, Edward I was upon adequate occasion ready to ride rough-shod over clerical privileges, and he always bitterly resented any attempt of a culprit, who had lived as a layman, trying to shield himself on the pretext that he had been a clerk in his youth. His corrupt chief justice, Thomas Weyland, had sought to evade condemnation by resuming the tonsure and clerical garb which he had worn before he abandoned his orders to become a knight, a country squire, and the founder of a family of landed gentry. But Weyland’s subdiaconate did not save him from exile and loss of land and goods. Pudlicott’s sometime clerical character had even less power to preserve him. He also paid tardily the capital penalty for his misdeed. But it was surely his clergy that kept him alive in prison for more than two years after the date of the commission of his crime. [Illustration: The Outrage at Westminster.]