Again we may read of another example occurring in the year 1283. A certain Brother John had, it appears, bitten his prior’s finger “like a dog,” it was said; and for this we find the bishop ordering the outraged prior[398] “to keep the said Brother John in prison under iron chains, in which he shall be content with bread, indifferent ale, pottage, and a pittance of meat or fish (which on the sixth day he shall do without) until he is penitent.” A worse fate befell Alexander de Langley in the same century.[399] This unfortunate creature was a man of great culture and was the keeper of the abbot’s seal. Either from approaching general paralysis, or from some other form of insanity, he passed into a state of extreme exaltation, perhaps to the extent of being, as they would take it, mutinous or blasphemous. A severe flogging having failed to restore his sense of proportion, he was consigned in fetters to a cell in which he ultimately died, and was buried, the corpse still chained. There had also existed within the monasteries the dreadful punishment of solitary confinement known as _In Pace_. “Those subjected to it,” says Dr. Lea,[400] “died in all the agonies of despair. In 1350 the Archbishop of Toulouse appealed to King John to interfere for its mitigation, and he issued an ordinance that the superior of the convent should, twice a month, visit and console the prisoners, who, moreover, should have the right, twice a month, to ask for the company of one of the monks. Even this slender innovation incurred the bitterest resistance of the Dominicans and Franciscans, who appealed to Pope Clement VI., but in vain.” There could indeed be abuses and cruelties in ecclesiastical prisons, as there always are where high walls conceal. For instance, we may read[401] that in A.D. 1283 certain monks were seized by the Abbot of Westminster, “and so greatly beaten that one of them has miserably expired.” There were cases where the Church took the extreme step of degrading from orders. In the very early period this often meant that degraded clerics would be immediately claimed by the secular authorities and set servile tasks[402]—after which they could not be reinstated. Very often they were shut up in the monasteries,[403] a course which the bishops preferred to remitting them to lay punishment.[404] Innocent III. (1198–1216), however, directed that clergy who had been degraded should then be handed over to the secular powers.[405] But in actual practice clerks were not often totally degraded.[406] To be deprived of orders was looked upon as a terrible punishment;[407] it was the final casting from the fold and was inflicted with great difficulty.[408] Three bishops were required to degrade even a deacon; six were necessary to unfrock a priest; and it took twelve prelates to adjudicate upon a bishop.[409]