“Also ye shalbe redy at the obite of Kyng Adelstan, at the dirige, and the messe, at such tyme as it is done, at the warnyng of the belman of the towne, and doe your dewte in ryngyng, and for to offer at the messe on the morne,”[202] etc. To drag men out of the sanctuary was a sacrilege punished with whipping, heavy fines, excommunication, or even death. Nicholas le Porter had helped to snatch from the church of the Carmelites of Newcastle some laymen who had taken refuge there “for the safety of their lives,” and who, once delivered to the civil authority, had been executed. Only the Pope’s nuncio could secure for him his pardon, and he had to submit to a public penance very little in accord with our present customs: “We order,” wrote Bishop Richard to the parson of St. Nicholas of Durham, “that on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the Whitsun-week just coming, he shall receive the whip from your hands publicly, before the chief door of your church, in his shirt, bare-headed, {166} and barefoot.[203] He shall there proclaim in English the reason for his penance and shall admit his fault; and when he has thus been whipped the said Nicholas will go to the cathedral church of Durham, bareheaded, barefoot, and dressed as above, he will walk in front, you will follow him; and you will whip him in the same manner before the door of the cathedral these three days, and he will repeat there the confession of his sin.”[204] Excommunication was the punishment meted out to Ralph de Ferrers, one of the retainers of the then all-powerful John of Gaunt, for having dragged from the Westminster sanctuary, at mass time, two prisoners escaped from the Tower where his master had sent them, and for having killed one in the process, 1378. The Duke of Lancaster, in alliance then with Wyclif, caused the reformer to write one of his most virulent treatises against the right of sanctuary, asking for its abolition.