=Source.=--_Rotuli Parliamentorum_, vol. v., p. 285.
... There be great and grievous riots done in the West Country at the
city of Exeter by the earl of Devonshire, accompanied with many riotous
persons, as it is said, with eight hundred horsemen and four thousand
footmen, and there have robbed the church (cathedral) of Exeter, and
taken the canons of the same church and put them to ransom, and also
have taken the gentlemen in that country, and done and committed many
other great and heinous inconveniences; that in abridging of such
riots ... a Protector and Defensor must be had ... and that he, in
abridging of such riots and offences, should ride and labour into that
country, for but if the said riots and inconveniences were resisted,
it should be the cause of the loss of that land, and if that land were
lost, it might be the cause of the subversion of all this land.
THE LITIGIOUSNESS OF THE AGE (_circa_ 1455).
=Source.=--Gascoigne's _Loci e Libro Veritatum_, edited by Rogers,
pp. 108, 109. (Oxford: 1881).
Formerly, when there were many good and mature rectors of churches
resident there, the quarrels and dissensions which arose within a
parish or between parishioners, were generally settled by the good
handling and advice of such rectors, and there were few pleas and
actions through lawyers.... But now, by the lack of such good rectors,
strifes, quarrels, dissensions, actions and pleas are multiplied and
prolonged, and thus the money, which might have gone to good works,
owing to the number of the quarrels goes to the lawyers, advocates, and
counsel; whence by the multiplication of such dissensions and actions,
the number of these lawyers, jurists, advocates and defenders of evil
(who defend evil for love or for fear of evil) is far greater than it
need be. And yet many times the cause which has been pleaded long and
at great expense is settled and concluded by the interference of the
great.