The state endeavoured to maintain its authority against the immunities of the Church by increasing the harshness of the code. So long as these immunities subsisted, it had no other resource; but judges and, magistrates shrank from inflicting penalties so enormously disproportioned to the offence. They could not easily send a poacher or a vagrant to the gallows while a notorious murderer was lounging in comfort in a neighbouring sanctuary, or having just read a sentence from a book at the bar in arrest of judgment, had been handed over to an apparitor of the nearest archdeacon's court, and been set at liberty for a few shillings. I have met with many instances of convictions for deer stealing in the correspondence of the reign of Henry VIII.; I have met but one instance where the letter of the law was enforced against the offender, unless the minor crime had been accompanied with manslaughter or armed resistance: the leaders of a gang who had for many years infested Windsor Forest were at last taken and hanged. The vagrancy laws sound terribly severe; but in the reports of the judges on their assize, of which many remain in the State Paper Office, I have not found any one single account of an execution under them. Felons of the worst kind never, perhaps, had easier opportunities. The parish constables were necessarily inefficient as a police; many of them were doubtless shaped after the model of Dogberry; if they bid a man stand and he would not stand, they would let him go, and thank God they were rid of a knave. There was a sanctuary within reach all over England, even under the very walls of Newgate, where escaped prisoners could secure themselves. The scarcely tolerable licence of ordinary times had broken its last bonds during the agitations of the Reformation, and the audacity of the criminal classes had become so great that organized gangs of them assembled at the gaol deliveries and quarter sessions to overawe the authorities. Ambitious or violent knights and noblemen interfered to rescue or protect their own dependents.[480] They alone were the guardians of the law, and they at their pleasure could suspend the law; while the habit of admitting plea of clergy, and of respecting the precincts of sanctuary, had sunk so deeply into the practice of the country, that, although parliament might declare such privileges curtailed, yet in many districts custom long continued stronger than law. The constables still respected the boundaries traced by superstition; felons were still "saved by their book;" the English, like the Romans, were a people with whom legislation became strong only when it had stiffened into habit, and had entered slowly and formally into possession of their hearts and understandings.