It was decided that although the prisoner was charged with the gravest kind of a felony, he was to be safely kept in prison, but the imprisonment was not to endanger life or limb. No suggestion was made of attempting to compel the submission to a trial, and the details of assessing the punishment to be inflicted was left wholly to the discretion of the justices.[13] The cases occurring before the passage of the statute of Westminster in the reign of Edward I., show that the justices did not have any fixed method of handling the cases wherein the prisoner refused to plead, but took such course as seemed best suited to the individual case before the court. Sometimes the expedient was resorted to of taking the verdict of an exceptionally strong jury and condemning the prisoner, if he was found guilty, regardless of whether he had formally entered his plea or not. During the Warwickshire eyre of 1221 Martin Pateshull pursued this course, on two different occasions.[14] The prisoner stood mute and refused to plead, but the twelve hundredors and twenty-four other knights, having sworn to his guilt, he was hanged.[15] In 1222, on the refusal of a prisoner accused of receiving felons, to plead to the charge, at Westminster, the court merely committed him to prison, to be held in solitary confinement, although the townships and the knights of the shire had declared him guilty.[16] During Bracton’s time, the procedure does not seem to have taken the course that it did in later years, as he speaks of the method of compelling a man to place himself upon the country and states that he was considered undefended and quasi-convict, if he refused.[17] Thus, it appears that before the enactment of the statute of Edward I. the cases arising were determined without any fixed rule governing the punishment to be assessed, but a few years after this act, the prisoner was laden with irons and in the course of a short period the hideous _peine forte et dure_ was developed.[18] During the reign of Edward III. the courts adopted starvation as a remedy for refusing to plead to an indictment for murder, as the case of Cecelia Rygeway illustrates. She was indicted for the murder of her husband and refusing to plead, she obstinately stood mute. She was committed to prison and lived without meat or drink for a period of forty days and nights, when she was allowed to go free, as her wonderful longevity, without food, was ascribed to the influence of the Virgin Mary, whose intercession could only be reconciled with the innocence of the defendant.[19] Starvation was generally discarded sometime after the statute of Edward I. and after the reign of Henry IV. the _peine forte et dure_ was the regular and lawful mode of punishing persons who stood mute and obstinately refused to plead in charges of felony.