NOTE OMITTED.

Introduction, page xlviii. lines 21–30, Note.

It is just possible that, notwithstanding the many rights and immunities claimed by the citizens, the prelacy, who are known to have possessed the privilege of issuing licences to "sage women" at a later date, may have exercised it in London so early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Such however was the general unpopularity of the secular clergy, that the citizens would hardly have brooked any control or surveillance on their part as to the conduct of the practitioners of the obstetric art.