Talk:Benefit of clergy

message: :A person convicted by an ecclesiastical court could be defrocked and returned to the secular authorities for punishment, but over time, the English ecclesiastical courts became increasingly lenient, and by the 15th century, most convictions in these courts led to a sentence of penance.
I'm a bit confused by this. Since many of the people weren't actually clergy could they be defrocked? I guess perhaps the reasoning was that the only reason they could get the benefit of clergy was because they claimed to be clergy and could 'prove' it by reciting a passage from the bible so perhaps they were always considered clergy and therefore could be defrocked. But couldn't this person claim the benefit of clergy again or did being defrocked mean your weren't clergy no matter what you could recite? Also, was claiming to be clergy when you weren't legal? Was there any way to disprove you were clergy other then the reading test? For that matter if you failed the reading where you punished more then you would otherwise be? Finally, for people who weren't clergy so were branded (even though they were still considered clergy) what would happen if later after being branded they had the extra evidence that they were clergy (e.g. they became a real clergy in the mean time)? Nil Einne 18:41, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: In 1575 a statute of Elizabeth I radically changed the effect of the benefit of clergy. Whereas before, the benefit was pled before a trial to have one's case transferred to an ecclesiastical court, under the new system the benefit of clergy was pled after conviction but before sentencing, and it did not nullify the conviction, but rather changed the sentence for first-time offenders from probable hanging to branding and up to a year's incarceration.
Also, I guess this means that the ecclesiastical courts weren't even used any more? I.e. you claimed you were clergy but all it meant was that you were branded and jailed instead of hung, with no difference between real clergy or not, and no requirement to recite a bible passage? Nil Einne 18:46, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: If "In 1706, the reading test was abolished"...how would judges have "retained the discretion to ask the accused to read a text other than Psalm 51 where they suspected the privilege was being abused"?203.184.41.226 (talk) 23:26, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Literacy Test 

message: I removed the two "alert" boxes from the top of this article because they are a) redundant and b) haven't actually been talked about on this talk page, which is where any such things should be discussed before they are added to an article.
The opening sentence makes it very clear that this is pertaining to English law, and there is a further section discussing how this carried forward into the United States, so the boxes were actually not true.
The more pertinent issues are: a) more citations.  b) archiving the talk page because there is a lot of very old stuff here that appears to just be comments made by people who don't understand the article (maybe some previous incarnation of it) but it's not talking about how to improve the article or putting suggested edits forward so they should be archived.
Is anyone regularly editing this page? 90.214.133.96 (talk) 13:05, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edit: April 2016.