Nevertheless, whenever their incomes were at stake, the Polish bishops were still quick to resort to their ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and to excommunicate those failing to pay their tithes according to the agreement at the Diet of 1555. If the excommunicated person remained under the ban for a year without an effort to have it lifted, his property was to be seized and confiscated. The execution of such episcopal decrees was not easy; for the civil authorities declined to act. And even if there were officials who tried to execute such decrees, they found the task was altogether too difficult to perform. For instance, Lasocki, a well known Arian Protestant, failing to pay his tithes to the cathedral chapter of Cracow, was excommunicated. After a year Chancellor Ocieski, who was at the same time starosta of Cracow, ordered his possessions seized. The Protestant nobility, aroused by this order, came armed, one thousand men strong, to Cracow on May 14, 1561, and refused to allow the seizure of Lasocki’s estate.[169] This and other similar cases determined the course of action of the Protestant nobility at the Diet of Piotrków, 1562-1563. The Protestants were well represented, and again elected one of their number, Raphael Leszczyński, as president of the Chamber. They protested now, not only against ecclesiastical jurisdiction in matters of heresy and tithing, but also against the edicts issued against heresy by Sigismund I.[170] They appealed to their special privileges received at Czerwińsk in 1422 and at Jedlnia in 1430, guaranteeing them freedom of person and inviolability of property rights, and to the constitution of the Diet of Radom, 1505, which made the royal edicts against heresy unconstitutional. For that constitution, known as “Nihil novi,” explicitly declared that no new fundamental law could be passed without the common consent of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies.[171] In these matters the Chamber again had the full support of all the temporal peers in the Senate, regardless of creed. As a result of these protests the king issued instructions to the starostas to respect the constitutionally guaranteed privileges of the szlachta. By this act all the edicts against heresy were practically annulled and the execution of judgments of ecclesiastical courts, whether in cases of heresy or in case of failure to pay tithes, was made impossible.