presented: he and his fellow-warden were held responsible by the
official.

The machinery which the canon and the civil law placed at the disposal
of the ordinary for his judicial administration of the parish was
extraordinarily flexible. Courts Christian were unencumbered by the
formalities of the common law or by the coöperation of juries. They
could proceed _ex officio, i.e_., without formal presentment and upon
hearsay only, and they were armed with the formidable power of
administering the oath _ex officio_ by which a parishioner was forced
to disclose all he knew against himself. They could in all cases
command the _doing_, as well as the _giving_[181] of a thing--powers
far more extensive than those possessed by any court of equity of
today. Lastly, it was their custom to require that a return be made in
court, or in other words, a certification, that their commands had
been duly performed--thus stamping them as true administrative bodies.
It was inevitable from the nature of their jurisdiction and procedure
that abuses should be committed both by ecclesiastical judges and by
their officers, such as registrars, proctors and apparitors. These
judges wielded an admirable instrument of administration and
discipline, one that could be bent to meet any emergency, but this
efficiency had been attained at the sacrifice of some indispensable
safeguards for the carrying out of impartial justice. First, no
parishioner's acts, whether done in an official or a private capacity,
were ever quite safe from misrepresentation, or downright
falsification by his enemies, for secret denunciation to wardens or
sidemen (or to the ordinary himself) by any one[182] might start a
proceeding against the person denounced and force him upon oath to
disclose the most private, the most confidential, matters. Again,
proctors, apparitors, registrars, and other scribes whose fees