"Benefit of Clergy" is a phrase which has entered into English literature and English thought. The thing itself exists no longer, though the last traces of it were only removed during the present reign; but it so strikingly illustrates certain peculiarities of English law-making, it has, moreover, so curious a history as to be interesting even to-day. It took its rise in times when the pretensions of the Church, high in themselves, were highly favoured by the secular power. The clergy was a distinct order, and to subject its members to the jurisdiction of the secular courts was deemed improper; so, when a clerk was seized under a charge of murder, or some other crime, the ordinary stepped forth and claimed him for the "Court Christian," whereto the whole matter was at once relegated. There the bishop or his deputy sat as judge. There was a jury of twelve clerks before whom the prisoner declared his innocence on oath. He was ready with twelve compurgators (a species of witnesses to character) who, after their kind, said more good of him than they had any warrant for; after which, on the question of fact, some witnesses were examined for, but none against him. This curious proceeding, which was not abolished till the time of Elizabeth, soon became a sham. Nearly every accused got off, and the rare verdict of guilty had no worse result than degradation or imprisonment.

Now, so far, the system is intelligible, but in the succeeding centuries it lost this quality. English legal reformers have ever shown a strong disinclination to make a clean sweep of a system, but they keep tinkering at it year after year with a view of making it more rational or better adapted to current needs. They did so here, and the result was a strange jumble of contradictions. First, the privilege was confined to such as had the clerical dress and tonsure, afterwards it was extended to mere assistants, the very door-keepers being held within the charmed circle; yet the line had to be drawn somewhere, and how to decide when every ruffian at his wits' end for a defence was certain with blatant voice to claim the privilege? Well, could he read? If so, ten to one he was an ecclesiastic of some sort, and therefore entitled to his clergy. And it soon came that this was the only test demanded. If you could read you were presumed a parson, and had your right to at least one crime free. As no woman could possibly be ordained, she could not "pray her clergy"—(an exception was made in the case of a professed nun)—nor might a bigamus, who was not a man who had committed bigamy, but one who "hath married two wives or one widow." However, a statute (1 Edw. VI., c. 12, s. 16, temp. 1547) made an end of this latter distinction by declaring, with quaint tautology that bigami were to have their clergy, "although they or any of them have been divers and sundry times married to any single woman or single women, or to any widow or widows, or to two wives or more." Before this it might well be that your chance of saving your neck depended on whether you had married a widow or not; which species was dangerous in a sense undreamt of by Mr Weller. As regards the reading, it must not be supposed that a difficult examination was passed by the prisoner before he escaped. You had but to read what came to be significantly called the Neck-verse from the book which the officer of court handed you when you "prayed your clergy." The Neck-verse was the first verse of the fifty-first Psalm in the Vulgate. It was only three words—Miserere mei, Deus: "Have mercy on me, O God." It seems strange that it was ever recorded of anyone that he did not read, and was therefore condemned to be hanged; for surely it were easy to get these words by heart and to repeat them at the proper time? This must have been done in many cases, and yet sometimes criminals were so densely ignorant and stupid, or it might be merely bewildered, that they failed; then the wretch paid the penalty of his life. "Suspendatur," wrote the scribe against his name, and off he was hauled. The endless repetition of this word proved too much for official patience, and with brutal brevity the inscription finally appears, "Sus." or "S."

And now the Neck-verse was free to everyone were he or were he not in holy orders, and he claimed the privilege after conviction, but in the reign of Henry VII. (1487) an important change was made. A person who claimed clergy was to be branded on the crown of his thumb with an "M" if he were a murderer, with a "T" if he were guilty of any other felony; if he "prayed his clergy" a second time this was refused him, unless he were actually in orders. Of course the mark on the thumb was to record his previous escape from justice. It was with this "Tyburn T" (as it was called in Elizabethan slang) that Ben Jonson was branded. It is only within the last few years that careful Mr Cordy Jeaffreson has exhumed the true story from the Middlesex County Records. The poet quarrelled and fought a duel with Gabriel Spencer, an actor, and probably a former colleague. The affair came off at Shoreditch. Jonson, with his rapier, which the indictment (for a reason explained in the chapter on "Deodands") values at three shillings, briskly attacked his opponent, and almost immediately gave him a thrust in the side, whereof Spencer died then and there. Ben was forthwith seized and thrown into prison. Whilst waiting his trial he said that spies were set on him, but he was too much for them, and afterwards all the judges got from him was but "Ay" and "No." Why spies should have been necessary in so plain a case is far from clear. It is more significant that a devoted priest succeeded in converting him for the time to Roman Catholicism, and he afterwards confessed to Drummond of Hawthornden that he had come near the gallows. However, what he said, or did not say, is of little weight as compared with the evidence of contemporary judicial records. The fact is clear that the poet of Every Man in his Humour, the cunning artist of Queen and Huntress, and Drink to me only with thine Eyes, had a true bill found against him by the grand jury, who sat, by the way, in a tavern, for as yet Hicks Hall, the predecessor of the Session's-House on Clerkenwell Green, was not.

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.