The laity, as well as the clergy, being subject to the ecclesiastical tribunals, causes relating to the former, after being tried elsewhere, were finally adjudicated by the delegates. One man was proceeded against for having three children unbaptized, and for not receiving the Lord’s Supper; a second, for absence from public worship; a third, for not keeping in repair the chancel of the parish church; and a fourth, for contempt of the law, and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, in teaching boys without having obtained any faculty or license.[297] Ancient forms of Church discipline sometimes followed conviction. A party, charged in the Consistory Court of Norwich with defamation, was sentenced to do penance in the parish church of Darsham, by repeating, after the minister, words of confession and contrition.[298] [Sidenote: ECCLESIASTICAL COURTS.] As to the number of appeals there may be reckoned up forty-five during a little more than a century, between the year 1533--the date of the commencement of the ecclesiastical power of the court--and the year 1641, the period of its temporary suppression. There were forty-six between the date of its re-establishment, in 1660, and the year of the Revolution, 1688. This would look as if more dissatisfaction was felt with the judgment of the lower ecclesiastical authority during this twenty-eight years after the Restoration, than during the hundred and eight years before the outbreak of the Parliament struggle with Charles I. Hence it might be inferred that the grievances of ecclesiastical rule increased in the reign of Charles II.; but this would not be a fair deduction, because the High Commission Court, which had been by far the most oppressive tribunal for spiritual causes, and which had been exempted from the supervision of the Court of Delegates, remained no longer in existence; and thereby a large amount of injustice was prevented. Forty-five appeals in twenty-eight years from all the ecclesiastical courts of England and Wales do not form a large number, and would seem to show that trials in ecclesiastical cases must have been much less numerous than when the High Commission existed in full play. Very few cases of appeal touching Dissenters appear in the records of the Court of Delegates. Dissenters, of course, were subject to trouble and annoyance from Archidiaconal and Consistorial authorities, but the main sorrows of Nonconformity, under the last two Stuarts’ reign, arose from the operation of Statute Law, as found in the Uniformity, Conventicle, and Five Mile Acts.