“Immediately after his confession, and before his abjuration, was to be branded by the coroner with a hot iron upon the brawn of the thumb of the right hand, with the sign of the letter A, to the intent he might be the better known among the king’s subjects to have abjured.” It was found that the citizenship of the realm was becoming weakened by sanctuary men _abjuring the realm_, so Henry VIII., by statute provided,[50] That “every person abjuring was to repair to some sanctuary within the reign which himself should choose, and there remain during his natural life; and to be sworn before the coroner upon his abjuration so to do. But if he went out of that sanctuary, unless discharged by the king’s pardon, and committed murder or felony, he was liable to be brought to trial for that offense, and was excluded from the right of sanctuary.” In the twenty-sixth year of the reign of this monarch, sanctuary was taken away where the crime was treason,[51] and in the thirty-second year of his reign it was enacted that “all sanctuary persons were to wear a badge or cognisance to be assigned and appointed by the governour of every sanctuary, openly upon their outer garment, of the compass, in length and breadth of ten inches under the pain of forfeiting the privilege of sanctuary.” They were also prevented from carrying knives or swords or other weapons and were not to leave their lodging except between sunrise and sunset, and the right of sanctuary was also confined, by Henry VIII., to parish churches, churchyards, cathedrals, hospitals and college churches and all dedicated chapels. One of the first acts of James I., when he began to rule over England, was to further abridge the right of sanctuary and twenty years afterward in 1624, the same monarch finally abolished the right of sanctuary for all kinds of crime, in England.[52] Various precincts continued to afford shelter for criminals, in and about London, however, long after the enactment of this statute of James I., intended to finally abolish the practice and it was not until the later act of 1697 that the custom was finally abrogated for good, in England.[53] Both while the practice of sanctuary obtained and years after it passed away, however, the institution furnished a theme for popular authors to weave romances around and Shakespeare, Shadwell, Sir Walter Scott, and other writers, whose names commence with other letters of the alphabet, have found the ancient law of sanctuary, an attractive source of legal reference. In describing the argument before the Council, as to the right of Queen Elizabeth, the widow of Edward IV. and her son, to claim sanctuary, when they had committed no crimes and the son had done nothing to entitle him to sanctuary, Shakespeare makes Buckingham say, in Richard III.: