The machinery which the canon and the civil law placed at the disposal of the ordinary for his judicial administration of the parish was extraordinarily flexible. Courts Christian were unencumbered by the formalities of the common law or by the coöperation of juries. They could proceed _ex officio, i.e_., without formal presentment and upon hearsay only, and they were armed with the formidable power of administering the oath _ex officio_ by which a parishioner was forced to disclose all he knew against himself. They could in all cases command the _doing_, as well as the _giving_[181] of a thing--powers far more extensive than those possessed by any court of equity of today. Lastly, it was their custom to require that a return be made in court, or in other words, a certification, that their commands had been duly performed--thus stamping them as true administrative bodies. It was inevitable from the nature of their jurisdiction and procedure that abuses should be committed both by ecclesiastical judges and by their officers, such as registrars, proctors and apparitors. These judges wielded an admirable instrument of administration and discipline, one that could be bent to meet any emergency, but this efficiency had been attained at the sacrifice of some indispensable safeguards for the carrying out of impartial justice. First, no parishioner's acts, whether done in an official or a private capacity, were ever quite safe from misrepresentation, or downright falsification by his enemies, for secret denunciation to wardens or sidemen (or to the ordinary himself) by any one[182] might start a proceeding against the person denounced and force him upon oath to disclose the most private, the most confidential, matters. Again, proctors, apparitors, registrars, and other scribes whose fees depended on citations and the drawing up of court proceedings, documents, or certificates, had every interest in haling persons before the official, because court fees had to be paid whether a man were found innocent or guilty.[183] Hence the system tended to create spies, of whom the chief were the apparitors, or summoners, and their underlings. There is a very interesting contemporary ballad entitled _"A new Ballad of the Parrator and the Divell_," attributed by its modern editor to not later than 1616, which throws much light on the proceedings of certain unscrupulous apparitors, and reflects also the strong dislike entertained for the whole tribe of apparitors by people of the time.[184] The devil going a hunting one Sunday and beating the bushes, up starts a proud apparitor. During several stanzas the apparitor narrates to the devil, as one consummately wicked man to another, all the tricks of his trade to drum up cases for himself and his court. He spies on lovers as they pass unsuspecting; he haunts the ale-houses and overhears men's tales over their cups; if business be dull he even devises scandal among neighbors, and sets them at enmity.