In 1261 Archbishop Boniface[440] ordered that the clerks in their bishops’ custody for capital crimes should suffer perpetual imprisonment. In 1275 Edward I. expressly ordered that the bishops were to allow no clerks to depart without purgation.[441] In 1276,[442] the _Bigami_, _i.e._ the persons who had been twice married or those who had married widows[443] (highly respectable acts at the present time), were excluded from claiming clergy.[444] In 1279 Archbishop Peckham decreed in his _Constitutions_:[445] “Let not clerks that are in prison for their crimes, and afterwards delivered to the Church as convicts, be easily enlarged, or admitted to purgation upon too slight pretence, but with all solemnity of law and with such provident deliberation that it may not offend against the king’s majesty or any that have a regard to equity.” In 1350 there came the statute _Pro Clero_.[446] Many persons had, it appears, been seized by the seculars. By this Act the Church’s privileges were reaffirmed,[447] and the offending clerks were ordered to be handed over to the spiritual courts. But for this grant the king demanded that the clerical convicts should thenceforth be safely kept and duly punished, “so that no clerk shall take courage to offend for default of correction.” Thus urged by the Crown, and perhaps fearful of other enactments, Simon Islip, Archbishop of Canterbury, endeavoured to make things harder for the Church’s prisoners. “They are,” he complains, “with so much backwardness and favour committed to gaol, and are so deliciously fed there, that the prison intended for a punishment for their crimes is turned into a refreshment and delicious solace, and they are pampered in their vices by ease and such inducements and yet make their escape out of custody as injurious to them.... And some notoriously infamous criminals, that are in truth wholly without excuse, are yet so easily admitted to their purgations, that every clerk thus delivered (by the secular judge) hath sure hopes of returning to his former evil life by one means or other.... Therefore we have thought fit thus to ordain concerning the imprisoned clerks[448] ... (they are) to be closely imprisoned with all proper care and expedition according to the quality of their persons and the heinousness of their crimes, that they may not to the scandal of the Church return to their former way of life from an imprisonment intended for a punishment.” Clerks guilty of bad offences are, on Wednesday, Friday, and Sabbath day, to have bread and water; on the other days, bread and small beer; “but on the Lord’s day, bread, beer, and pulse, for the honour and eminence of that day. And let nothing else be given them by way of alms or gratuity from their acquaintance and friends, or for any pretence or reason whatsoever; nor let any purgation be granted them.” These severe rules, which, coming from the archbishop,[449] were, of course, repeated by all the prelates,