occurring in 1708, known as Gunner’s case, where “the plaintiff became nonsuit, when the defendant was ready to perfect his law,”[242] and Jacob, in his “Review of the Statutes,” published not long after, treats of it as still part of the existing judicial processes. As the wager of law came to be limited to simple actions of debt, shrewd lawyers found means of avoiding it by actions of “trespass upon the case,” and other indirect forms which required the intervention of a jury, but Burn in his Law Dictionary (Dublin, 1792) describes the whole process with all its forms as still existing, and in 1799 a case occurred in which a defendant successfully eluded the payment of a claim by producing compurgators who “each held up his right hand, and then laid their hands upon the book and swore that they believed what the defendant swore was true.” The court endeavored to prevent this injustice, but was forced to accept the law of the land. Even this did not provoke a change. In 1824, in the case of King _v._ Williams (2 Barnewell & Cresswell, 528), some black-letter lawyer revived the forgotten iniquity for the benefit of a client in want of testimony, and demanded that the court should prescribe the number of conjurators necessary for the defence, but the court refused assistance, desiring to give the plaintiff the benefit of any mistake that might be made. Williams then got together eleven conjurators, and appeared in court with them at his back, when the plaintiff, recognizing the futility of any further proceedings, abandoned his case in disgust.[243] Still, the fine reverential spirit postponed the inevitable innovation, and it was not until 1833 that the wager of law was formally abrogated by 3 and 4 William IV., c. 42, s. 13.[244] English colonists carried the ancestral custom across the sea and seem to have resorted to it as an infallible mode of settling certain cases for which no positive evidence could be had. Small as was the infant colony of Bermuda, its court records for a little more than six months show four instances of its use, all of which occur in deciding cases of “suspition of incontinency” regularly presented by the grand jury or the ecclesiastical authorities.[245] Doubtless if the early records of Virginia and Massachusetts could be searched similar evidence of its use would be found in them. Indeed it is quite possible that, strictly speaking, the wager of law may still preserve a legal existence in this country. In 1712 an act of the Colony of South Carolina, enumerating the English laws to be held as in force there, specifically includes those relating to this mode of defence, and I am not aware that they have ever been formally abrogated.[246] In 1811 Chancellor Kilty, of Maryland, speaks of the wager of law as being totally disused in consequence of the avoidance of the forms of suit which might admit of its employment, but he evidently regards it as not then specifically abolished.[247]