3 Michael Dalton, The Office and Authoritie of the Sherifs (London, 1623, rpt. 1682, 1700).

4 Cyrus H. Karraker, The Seventeenth-Century Sheriff: A Comparative Study of the Sheriff in England and the Chesapeake Colonies, 1607-1689 (Chapel Hill, 1930), 77-78.

5 Arthur P. Scott, Criminal Law in Colonial Virginia (Chicago, 1930), 316.

6 The neck verse ran, “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness; according unto the multitude of thy mercies blot out my transgressions.”

7 Benefit of clergy rarely occurred in New England. Only two cases have been found in that region—in York County, Maine (1736), and in the trial of British soldiers after the Boston massacre (1770). Hundreds of cases have been found in Virginia; see Arthur Lyon Cross, “Benefit of Clergy in American Criminal Law,” MAHSP 61 (1928), 154-81; George W. Dalzell, Benefit of Clergy & Related Matters (Winston-Salem, 1955); Hugh F. Rankin, “Criminal Trial Proceedings in the General Court of Colonial Virginia,” VMHB (1964), 50-71.