All these precautions, thorough and effective as they were, were not thought sufficient, and were supplemented by instructions to the Inquisitors that less evidence was needed to prove heresy than to prove any other crime. The crowning infamy of keeping secret the names of witnesses was a peculiarity of the ecclesiastical procedure, of which its administrators were a little ashamed; but the feeble protests of one or two councils were ignored. As a slight concession to justice the accused was, though rarely, shown a list of names, but without being told which of them applied to his own case; and also a witness would sometimes be sworn in the presence of the accused, but _examined apart_. On occasion the whole of the evidence was withheld from the knowledge of the accused, and if a witness retracted his testimony the fact was not revealed to the interested party. In practice it was found best to leave all these details to the Inquisitors’ discretion. The field which all this secrecy opened to malice, slander, and perjury may be faintly imagined. Serious abuses in connection with the handling of evidence were exposed in the fourteenth century by conscientious Inquisitors themselves, and the fact suggests that an appalling amount of injustice remained undiscovered. The extraordinary rule by which a perjured witness was to be punished, but his testimony was to hold good, was a development that might have been expected from an organization bent on the manufacture of criminals. And, because it was fairly safe, perjury by witnesses for the prosecution was by no means uncommon. _The Defence._