And upon the theory that an attorney could be compelled by the judges of the common pleas court to render faithful service to his client and was not allowed to refuse such service, we find that Chief Justice Fortescue decided, during this reign, that in an action by an attorney for services rendered in such a court, no wager of law would lie on the part of defendant.[51] By the middle of the fifteenth century, in England, the wager of law in criminal cases had begun to fall into disuse, for the method followed in such trials, at Westminster, was such that professional oath-helpers were customarily used and such professional swearers necessarily debased the wager of law in criminal cases.[52] And in the courts of the country districts it got to be a very easy matter for a citizen of bad repute to produce his oath-helpers, and his neighbors were afraid to negative the oaths of men who were frequently too desperate to thus antagonize,[53] and this led to a gradual preference for the trial by jury, in criminal cases, both on the part of the person accused of crime and by the general public, who came to regard the wager of law, in such cases, with odium.[54] Long before its repeal, by statute, the old defense had fallen into disuse, and in 1833, by 3 & 4 William IV.,[55] the wager of law was finally abolished in England, and compurgation in the ecclesiastical courts was abolished during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. While this irrational procedure obtained in England, the accused in the gravest criminal charges, could avoid punishment, regardless of the notorious character of his crime, without being confronted with evidence of his guilt, if he was able to find compurgators who would testify to their belief in his innocence.[56] And while he could not invoke this procedure in a case of theft, if the stolen goods were found upon his person, or he had been previously convicted, in all other offenses, he was at liberty to thus acquit himself, by means of his oath-helpers,[57] and this favorable procedure for the criminals continued long after its abuses were set forth and denounced in the Council of Bale,[58] in municipal and ecclesiastical courts, although in the king’s court, in criminal cases of the graver sort compurgation is said to have disappeared in consequence of what has been styled “the implied prohibition” of the Assize of Clarendon, in 1166.[59] But the statute of Elizabeth (38 Elizabeth, 3, 5), shows that the wager was in common use in 1596, in actions of debt upon simple contracts.[60]