The Church being debarred from the employment of the swift and sanguinary penalties of those times, had to resort to other methods of disapproval, and it evolved the penitential discipline. At first it wielded only spiritual weapons—none the less terrible in those days because they were ghostly—and by refusing access to Church or Communion, and thereby (as all concerned fully believed) closing on kings the everlasting doors, it sometimes brought the mightiest to their knees to implore pardon from the priests of God.[350] On confessing a crime, or upon being condemned, all manner of tasks and toils were laid upon the penitent. Sometimes they were capricious and poetic; thus if a man had slain his near kindred,[351] the weapon with which the deed was committed could then be forged into a penal chain, and, bound therewith, arrayed in the sclavinia,[352] or, it might be, naked, he would have to trudge away, staff in hand, to his destination, which might be some local shrine, or that of St. Thomas of Canterbury; but which might be far off, across and beyond the seas, to Compostela, Rome, or Palestine.[353] The ordinary penitent wore no chains, but he was usually required to go unarmed, to eat no flesh, to take no strong drink, and to abstain from warm baths, and sometimes he had to fulfil weird and painful conditions particularly imposed by his penitentiary;[354] as, for instance, when Robert, called the Devil, was ordered by a certain hermit[355] to eat only bones and scraps which had been thrown to dogs, and to be dumb and act like one insane. Our own King Edgar[356] was condemned not to wear his crown for seven years. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. A much-employed form of correction consisted in imposing penitential fasts,[357] during which the offender was to subsist upon bread and water,[358] and was subject to many disabilities and restrictions.[359] These sentences might be for any period ranging from a single day to twenty years, and even longer, and all the while the penitent was supposed to drag out his existence in shame and disgrace, making prayers for deliverance.[360] The Church allowed class distinctions in several ways;[361] offences might be punished according to the rank of the aggrieved party, so that the penance for the murder of a bishop was for twelve or fourteen years, or longer, upon bread and water, while the slaying of a deacon could be atoned for by seven or ten years’, and of a layman by four, five, or seven years’ discipline.