An exposure too common to attract notice, and a fine of six and eightpence was held sufficient penalty for a mortal sin.

Even this, however, was a severe sentence compared with the sentence passed upon another priest who confessed to incest with the prioress of Kilbourn.  The offender was condemned to bear a cross in a procession in his parish church, and was excused his remaining guilt for three shillings and fourpence.[204]

I might multiply such instances indefinitely; but there is no occasion for me to stain my pages with them.[205]

An inactive imagination may readily picture to itself the indignation likely to have been felt by a high-minded people, when they were forced to submit their lives, their habits, their most intimate conversations and opinions to a censorship conducted by clergy of such a character; when the offences of these clergy themselves were passed over with such indifferent carelessness.  Men began to ask themselves who and what these persons were who retained the privileges of saints,[206] and were incapable of the most ordinary duties; and for many years before the burst of the Reformation the coming storm was gathering.  Priests were hooted, or “knocked down into the kennel,"[207] as they walked along the streets—­women refused to receive the holy bread from hands which they thought polluted,[208] and the appearance of an apparitor of the courts to serve a process or a citation in a private house was a signal for instant explosion.  Violent words were the least which these officials had to fear, and they were fortunate if they escaped so lightly.  A stranger had died in a house in St. Dunstan’s belonging to a certain John Fleming, and an apparitor had been sent “to seal his chamber and his goods” that the church might not lose her dues.  John Fleming drove him out, saying loudly unto him, “Thou shalt seale no door here; go thy way, thou stynkyng knave, ye are but knaves and brybours everych one of you."[209] Thomas Banister, of St. Mary Wolechurch, when a process was served upon him, “did threaten to slay the apparitor.”  “Thou horson knave,” he said to him, “without thou tell me who set thee awork to summon me to the court, by Goddis woundes, and by this gold, I shall brake thy head."[210] A “waiter, at the sign of the Cock,” fell in trouble for saying that “the sight of a priest did make him sick,” also, “that he would go sixty miles to indict a priest,” saying also in the presence of many—­“horsyn priests, they shall be indicted as many as come to my handling."[211] Often the officers found threats convert themselves into acts.  The apparitor of the Bishop of London went with a citation into the shop of a mercer of St. Bride’s, Henry Clitheroe by name.  “Who does cite me?” asked the mercer.  “Marry, that do I,” answered the apparitor, “if thou wilt anything with it;” whereupon, as the apparitor deposeth, the said Henry Clitheroe did hurl at him from off his finger that instrument of his