It was an ancient custom, where children were born out of lawful wedlock, and their parents were afterwards married, that those children, together with the father and mother, should stand pallio cooperiti, under a cloth, while the marriage was solemnizing; which was a kind of adoption, and had the effect of a legitimation. Thus Robert Grossthead, the famous bishop of Lincoln, in one of his letters says: In signum legitimationis, nati ante matrimonium consec-