ch payments be made content without
delay, or long and great pursuit. It appears from the writer's statements,
that the royal officers, deputies, and commissioners had not only been
guilty of the practices thus denounced, but that those officers themselves
had been needlessly numerous, living as they did upon bribery and
extortion, and neglecting the exercise of arms necessary for the defence
and protection of the territory. Oftentimes they had wasted of the
subjects'[18] livelode more than was necessary, and oftentimes had suffered
them to be menaced and beaten, and mischieved their beasts with their
weapons, so that they were nigh out of their wits for sorrow, and thus
enforced "for duresse" to forsake the title and laws of their English
sovereign. Moreover, they had been so often grievously surcharged with
paying of tasques, tails (or tolls), subsidies, and impositions, besides
their rents paid either to the crown or their landlords, and many of them
dwelling upon the marches having also patised (or compounded?) to the
adverse party in order to dwell in rest, that these innumerable charges and
divers torments had effected their uttermost undoing. The author cannot
quit these reflections without this passionate appeal to the Almighty: "Oh
God! which art most mercifulle and highest juge, soverein and just, how
maist thou long suffre this (misery) regnyng without the stroke of
vengeaunce and ponisshement commyng upon the depryvyng or yelding up of
that Dukedom?"

The next chapter (p. 74) appears to intimate that the writer personally
sympathised in the degradation of the clergy. "Moreover, (he exclaims,) in
way of gret pitee, and in the worship of God, suffre ye not the prelates of
the Chirche of that lande, as archebisshoppis, bisshoppis, abbatis,
priours, denes, archedenes, and their ministrours, to be oppressid,
revaled, ne vileyned, as in your predecessour's {xiv} daies they have been
accepted in fulle litelle reverence or obedience;" having as he alleges
been privily coerced to give to the rulers, governors, and masters of the
marches and countries great fees, wages, and rewards, for permission to
live at rest upon their livelodes. And oftentimes they were visited by
strangers of great estate, both spiritual and temporal, and particularly by
those intrusted with the administration of the laws, besides other needless
people that wasted and surcharged them, an exaction beyond the intent of
their foundation, which was