Moreover, this authority credits the tradition that, in former times, the dance, which was a preliminary to making the round of the parish, was performed in the church[439]. Having considered the use of the nave for purposes of trade and amusement, we must now notice what really seems to have been an unusual occurrence--the confinement of animals within the church. The custom was uncommon, because it never seems to have been actually sanctioned. And little wonder; decency alone demanded some limitation of such ignoble uses. In permitting the building to be employed for secular purposes, there was always a danger of licence, yet it must be said that notorious laxity seems to have usually brought a reprimand. But the practice alluded to, like a troublesome weed, refused to be extirpated. Von Hefele relates that, at the Quinsext, or Trullan Synod, held in the Imperial Palace at Constantinople in A.D. 692, the following decree was passed: “No cattle may be driven into the church, except in the greatest need, if a stranger has no shelter and his animals would otherwise perish[440].” One wonders whether a certain Essex vicar, who, in A.D. 1550, was reported for allowing sheep to be folded in the church, had ever heard of this decree. At all events, he pleaded that his action was taken “for grete and extreme necessitie sake, and not in anie contempt.” He was able to prove that there had been a heavy and unexpected fall of snow, and that the animals were placed in the church to save their lives. After the storm had abated, the sheep had been removed, and the church cleaned. The offender did not altogether escape punishment, even after this plea, for he was ordered to do penance and to distribute alms to the poor of the parish[441]. The vicar might have found a still wider loophole provided by an injunction belonging to the reign of the English king Edgar. This injunction not only specifically forbids eating, drinking, and indecorous behaviour within the church, but bans the entrance of dogs, or of more pigs than could be kept under control. The position is most remarkable, though, indeed, the expression used seems equivocal, “_Neque intra ecclesiae sepem canis aliquis veniat, neque porcorum plures quam quis regere possit_[442].” If we assume that all churchyards were actually enclosed at this period, and if we allow the wider interpretation of “_ecclesiae sepem_,” as meaning the whole enclosure of church and churchyard, the decree still appears inferentially to permit a considerable latitude of custom. That, in periods of general looseness of discipline, animals were allowed to graze in the churchyard, is well known to most readers. In the same year that the Essex clergyman was summoned for folding sheep in the church, complaint was made, concerning a churchyard in the Archdeaconry of Colchester, that “hogges do wrote up graves, and besse (= cattle) lie in the porch”; while a parish priest was “sworn to penance” for putting his