ared
that "the Title of Clergy St Peter gave to all God's people," its later
restriction being a papal and prelatical usurpation (i.e. i Peter v. 3,
for [Greek: kleros] and [Greek: kleron]).

Clerical immunities, of course, differed largely at different times and
in different countries, the extent of them having been gradually
curtailed from a period a little earlier than the close of the middle
ages. They consisted mainly in exemption from public burdens, both as
regarded person and pocket, and in immunity from lay jurisdiction. This
last enormous privilege, which became one of the main and most efficient
instruments of the subjection of Europe to clerical tyranny, extended to
matters both civil and criminal; though, as Bingham shows, it did not
(always and everywhere) prevail in cases of heinous crime (_Origines
Eccles._ bk. v.).

This diversity of jurisdiction, and subjection of the clergy only to the
sentences of judges bribed by their _esprit de corps_ to judge
leniently, led to the adoption of a scale of punishments for the
offences of clerks avowedly much lighter than that which was inflicted
for the same crimes on laymen; and this in turn led to the survival in
England, long after the Reformation, of the curious legal fiction of
benefit of clergy (see below), used to mitigate the extreme harshness of
the criminal law.

CLERGY, BENEFIT OF, an obsolete but once very important feature in
English criminal law. Benefit of clergy began with the claim on the part
of the ecclesiastical authorities in the 12th century that every
_clericus_ should be exempt from the jurisdiction of the temporal courts
and be subject to the spiritual courts alone. The issue of the conflict
was that the common law courts abandoned the extreme punishment of death
assigned to some offences when the person convicted was a _clericus_,
and the church was obliged to accept the compromise and let a secondary
punishment be inflicted. The term "clerk" or _clericus_ always included
a large number of persons in what were called minor orders, and in 1350
the privilege was extended to secular as well as to religious clerks;
and, finally, the test of being a clerk was the ability to read the
opening words of verse 1 of Psalm li., hence generally known as the
"neck-verse." Even this requirement was abolished in 1705. In 1487 it
was enacted that every layman, when convicted of a clergyable felony,
should be branded on the thumb, and disabled from