and by his or the bishop’s licence and allowance.  So true was this that the schoolmaster was, like the parson, a church officer.  For the parishioner his church was the place of business where all local affairs, civil or ecclesiastical, were transacted, as well as the centre of social life in the village.  Here the mandates of the authorities in Church and State were read to him; here he was admonished of his duty to contribute to, or to perform, the burdens of parish administration and warned of the penalties for neglect; here he met with his fellows to settle parish affairs and audit parish accounts, or to choose parish officers under the auspices of the ordinary, being himself compelled, if necessary, by that official to serve when his own turn for office came round.  As churchwarden it was his duty to collect the rents from parish lands and tenements, and to see that parish offerings were gathered and the parish rates assessed and paid, or recovered by means of the ecclesiastical courts.  If the church was ruinous; if bread and wine were lacking for the communion; if any of the books, furniture, utensils or ornaments enjoined by the diocesan’s articles or by the canons were missing; if the curate did not follow the Rubric, or retained “superstitious” rites; if the yearly perambulation was omitted; if faults of the minister or of the parishioners were not presented:  he and his fellow-warden were held responsible by the official.

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 cooeperation 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