Now, so far, the system is intelligible, but in the succeeding centuries it lost this quality. English legal reformers have ever shown a strong disinclination to make a clean sweep of a system, but they keep tinkering at it year after year with a view of making it more rational or better adapted to current needs. They did so here, and the result was a strange jumble of contradictions. First, the privilege was confined to such as had the clerical dress and tonsure, afterwards it was extended to mere assistants, the very door-keepers being held within the charmed circle; yet the line had to be drawn somewhere, and how to decide when every ruffian at his wits' end for a defence was certain with blatant voice to claim the privilege? Well, could he read? If so, ten to one he was an ecclesiastic of some sort, and therefore entitled to his clergy. And it soon came that this was the only test demanded. If you could read you were presumed a parson, and had your right to at least one crime free. As no woman could possibly be ordained, she could not "pray her clergy"--(an exception was made in the case of a professed nun)--nor might a _bigamus_, who was not a man who had committed bigamy, but one who "hath married two wives or one widow." However, a statute (1 Edw. VI., c. 12, s. 16, _temp._ 1547) made an end of this latter distinction by declaring, with quaint tautology that _bigami_ were to have their clergy, "although they or any of them have been divers and sundry times married to any single woman or single women, or to any widow or widows, or to two wives or more." Before this it might well be that your chance of saving your neck depended on whether you had married a widow or not; which species was dangerous in a sense undreamt of by Mr Weller. As regards the reading, it must not be supposed that a difficult examination was passed by the prisoner before he escaped. You had but to read what came to be significantly called the Neck-verse from the book which the officer of court handed you when you "prayed your clergy." The Neck-verse was the first verse of the fifty-first Psalm in the Vulgate. It was only three words--_Miserere mei, Deus_: "Have mercy on me, O God." It seems strange that it was ever recorded of anyone that he did not read, and was therefore condemned to be hanged; for surely it were easy to get these words by heart and to repeat them at the proper time? This must have been done in many cases, and yet sometimes criminals were so densely ignorant and stupid, or it might be merely bewildered, that they failed; then the wretch paid the penalty of his life. "_Suspendatur_," wrote the scribe against his name, and off he was hauled. The endless repetition of this word proved too much for official patience, and with brutal brevity the inscription finally appears, "Sus." or "S."