personages like kings, and consequently it was the same thing whether,
when you said a clerk, you meant a person who could read and write or
a priest. But when there got to be people who could read and write and
who were not priests, it became an important distinction. There was
a privilege in England known as the "benefit of the clergy"; if any
clerk was tried for a criminal offence, no matter what, all he had to
do was to state that he was a priest and he was at once set free. In
other words, he could not be punished. That doesn't concern us; but, I
suppose, it resulted from the old notion that all priests were subject
only to Rome, and to the church courts, and not to the civil law
courts; and consequently when a priest was attempted to be tried in a
civil law court, it was a way of doing what we should call "pleading
to the jurisdiction" of the court. Later, as time went on, in England
it was greatly abused, especially when there got to be clerks who
were not priests. When it meant anybody who could read and write, and
anybody who had committed a murder had only to say, "I can read and
write," and be set free, it led to an extraordinary state of things.
So, from time to time, they modified the benefit of the clergy, until
ultimately it was abolished entirely; first by not allowing it in high
offences like murder; then by imposing certain slight punishment--they
were "burned in the hand"; then by applying it only to the first
offence, and so on, until they got rid of it entirely; and this
Statute of Marlborough is simply one of the first of that long chain
of statutes which finally did away with it and prevented people from
getting rid of a criminal prosecution merely because they knew how to
read and write or were priests.

In 1275 I note the first use of the word parliament. I have used it
from the beginning, but it is important to remember that the thing
was not _called_ parliament until 1275. Before that it was called