An ordained priest could appeal to his Church again, but if he should claim his clergy a second (or other) time, he was to have his letters of ordination ready at hand, though he might be allowed one day’s grace in which to obtain them—or equivalent evidence from the nearest bishop—and if they were not forthcoming he forfeited all clerical privileges.[463] In 1496 lay persons who should murder their lord, master, or sovereign immediate were deprived of their clergy; and in the fourth year of the following reign more exceptions were made, and clergy was taken from all, not actually within orders, who committed a felony in a church, or upon the king’s highway, or who slew anybody in his own house.[464] We have already seen with what exceeding difficulty a clerk, and more especially a priest, could be degraded and cast out of orders. To remedy this. Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop of York, obtained a Bull[465] (as regarded England) from Pope Clement VII. in 1528, by which a single bishop, assisted by two abbots or other high dignitaries, could perform the ceremony.[466] The statute 23 Hen. VIII. c. 1 (1531) alludes to the monition of Edward I. (1275), to the effect that no Church prisoners should depart without strict purgation, on which Henry VIII. observes that, nevertheless, they were released very easily. It cites the statute of Henry IV. (1402), which ordered that notorious criminals should make no purgation, and goes on to say that the ordinaries kept releasing offenders speedily and hastily “for corruption and lucre,” or because the clergy will in no wise consent to take charge of prisoners. The law then proceeds to take away the benefit of clergy from the various petit treasons previously referred to, and also for arson, from all clerks—subdeacons and the grades above them still excepted. The clergy within orders were to have lifelong imprisonment for these crimes, By the fourth Canon at the thirteenth session of the Council of Trent in 1551, it was decreed that a bishop or his vicar-general could condemn, and even degrade criminous clergy, with the assistance of as many mitred abbots, or, in default of them, as many high ecclesiastics as there would have been bishops under the old system. Lecourayer, i. p. 550; Luzio, _Cath. Ency._ iv. p. 678.] unless they could find guarantees for good conduct—the accused to the extent of £40, with two substantial sureties in £20 apiece. By this statute it was also intended to relieve the bishops of the burden of maintaining their prisoners, and they were empowered to degrade such offending clerks, and to hand them over “in sure and safe keeping into the King’s Bench,” with a certificate certifying their degradation—now so much easier—upon which the king’s judges were to pass such sentences (usually of death) as would have been passed upon the convicted if, at the time of their accusation, they had been laymen and not clerks of any kind.