the abuse of the privilege was presently greatly checked, it was not until the reign of William and Mary that benefit of clergy was absolutely denied to burglars, pickpockets, and other heinous offenders. Yet there were occasional spasmodic intervals of extraordinary severity. Twenty thieves, says Sir Thomas More in his ‘Utopia,’ might then be seen hanging on a single gibbet. Special legislation was introduced to deal with special crimes. Although there was an appropriateness in the retribution which overtook him, the sentence inflicted upon the Bishop of Rochester’s cook in 1531, under a new act passed on purpose, was ferociously cruel. This man, one Richard Rose or Rouse, was convicted of having poisoned sixteen persons with porridge specially prepared to put an end to his master. The crime had been previously almost unknown in England, and special statutory powers were taken to cope with it. An act was at once passed defining the offence to be high treason, and prescribing boiling to death as the penalty. Rose was accordingly, after conviction, boiled alive in Smithfield. It may be added that this cruel statute, which may be read _in extenso_ in Froude, was soon afterwards repealed, but not before another culprit, Margaret Davy by name, had suffered under its provisions for a similar offence. Newgate, like all other gaols, was at times scandalously over-crowded, not only with the felons and trespassers who long languished waiting trial, but with far less guilty offenders. There were also the debtors and the conscience prisoners: the delinquents whose crime was impecuniosity or commercial failure, and the independent thinkers who stoutly maintained their right to profess forms of belief at variance with the government creed of the hour. It is only a passing glimpse that we get of the meaner sort of criminal committed to Newgate in these times. The gaol, as I have said, was but the ante-chamber to something worse. It was the starting-point for the painful promenade to the pillory. The jurors who were forsworn “for rewards or favour of parties were judged to ride from Newgate to the pillory in Cornhill with paper mitres on their heads, there to stand, and from thence again to Newgate.”[31] Again, the ringleaders of false inquests, Darby, Smith, and Simson by name, were, in the first year of Henry’s reign (1509), condemned to ride about the city with their faces to the horses’ tails, and paper on their heads, and were set on the pillory at Cornhill. After that they were brought back to Newgate, where they died for very shame.[32]