In October 1598, he was taken to the Old Bailey to stand his trial. He pleaded guilty, asked for the book, read like a clerk ("Jonson's learned sock," forsooth!), and as the strangely abbreviated Latin of the record has it, "_sign' cum lra' T et del_," that is, marked with the letter "T," and set at large to repair to "The Sun," "The Bolt," "The Triple Tun," or some other of those dim, enchanting Elizabethan taverns, there to give such an account of the transaction as sufficed to dissemble it till this age of grubbers and dictionaries wherein you are destined to nose every ancient scandal as you go up the staircase of letters. It has been suggested that the officer, moved to inexplicable tenderness, touched him with a cold iron. The only ground for this is that Dekker, in his savage Satiro Mastix; or, _The Untrussing of the Humourous Poet_, makes no reference to the "Tyburn T." One fancies that Ben speedily acquired a trick of carrying his hand so that the mark was not readily seen, or he may have cut or burnt it out as others did. All the same, the best evidence shows it to have been there. In the reign of James I. another change was made. Women got the benefit of clergy in certain cases, and afterwards they were put on the same footing as men. Then in 1705 the necessity for reading was abolished, and in 1779 so was branding. But another process was going on all this time. A great and ever-increasing number of crimes were declared to be without benefit of clergy. The selection was somewhat capricious. Among the exempted felonies were abduction with intent to marry, stealing clothes off the racks, stealing the kings' stores, and so on. Naturally the whole subject fell into inextricable confusion, and when it was abolished in 1827, even pedants must have given a sigh of relief. One detail escaped the reformer: since the time of Edward VI. every peer ("though he cannot read," saith the statute) enjoyed a privilege akin to that of clergy, and it was not till 1841 that this last vestige of the system vanished from the statute-book. I will only add that, in its details, "benefit of clergy" was even more grotesque and fantastic than it has here been possible to set forth. PEINE FORTE ET DURE