In England, although as we have seen (p. 57), the wager of law was the customary resource of the manorial courts in disputed questions, the shrewd and intelligent lawyers who were building up and systematizing the practice of the royal courts were disposed to limit it as much as possible in criminal cases. Towards the close of the twelfth century, Glanville compiled his excellent little treatise “De legibus Angliæ,” the first satisfactory body of legal procedure which the history of mediæval jurisprudence affords. Complete as this is in all the forms of prosecution and defence, the allusions to conjurators are so slight as to show that already they were employed rather on collateral points than on main questions. Thus a defendant who desired to deny the serving of a writ could swear to its non-reception with twelve conjurators;[195] and a party to a suit, who had made an unfortunate statement or admission in court, could deny it by bringing forward two to swear with him against the united recollections and records of the whole court.[196] The custom, however, still maintained its hold on popular confidence. In 1194, when Richard I. undertook, after his liberation, to bring about a reconciliation between his chancellor William, Bishop of Ely, and the Archbishop of York, one of the conditions was that the chancellor should swear with a hundred priestly compurgators that he had neither caused nor desired the arrest of the archbishop.[197] In the next century Bracton alludes to the employment of conjurators in cases of disputed feudal service between a lord and his vassal, wherein the utmost exactness was rigidly required both as to the number and fitness of the conjurators,[198] and we shall see that no formal abrogation of it took place until the nineteenth century. An outgrowth of the custom, moreover, was the Inquest of Fame, by which “the general character of the accused, as found by a jury, was accepted as an indication of the guilt or innocence of the prisoner.”[199]