reversion of his benefice to his son Nicholas, and applied to the patron of his church, Martin, Abbot of Battle Abbey, who agreed to conform to his wishes on condition that the annual payment exacted from the church in question should be increased from ten shillings to forty. Witgar agreed, and on an appointed day, accompanied by his son, he met the abbot and his attendants at Colchester, where oaths were publicly interchanged and a formal agreement was entered into.[692] * * * * * The efforts of Alexander and his successors were seconded by frequent national and local synods, to whose special injunctions it is scarcely worth while to refer in full. One noticeable point about them, however, is that the term “wife” disappears, and is replaced by “concubina” or “focaria”—the latter meaning a person who was a permanent occupant of the priest’s hearth, but was not recognized by the authorities as a lawful wife. Deans and archdeacons were enjoined to hunt up these illegal companions, but from the frequency of the injunctions, we may safely conclude that the search was not often successful, and that the officials found the duty assigned to them too difficult or too unprofitable for execution. That it was not impossible, however, when earnestly undertaken, is shown by the readiness with which King John unearthed the unfortunate creatures when it suited his policy to do so. During the long dispute over the election of Giraldus Cambrensis to the see of St. David’s, the king, who was resolved that no Welshman should hold that preferment, instructed his officers, in 1202, to seize the women of all the cathedral chapter who persisted in supporting Giraldus.[693] The measure was doubtless an efficacious one, and he repeated it when, in 1208, he persecuted the clergy in his blind impotence of wrath at the interdict set upon his kingdom by Innocent III. Discerning in these quasi-conjugal relations the tenderest spot in which to strike those who had rebelled against his authority by obeying the interdict, and at the same time as the surest and readiest means of extorting money, among his other schemes of spoliation he caused all these women to be seized, and then forced the unfortunate churchmen to buy their partners back at exorbitant prices.[694] The ease, indeed, with which the eyes of the officials were blinded to that which was patent to the public was the subject of constantly recurring legislation, the reiteration and increasing violence of which bears irrefragable testimony at once to its necessity and its impotence. Not only in grave synods and pastorals was the abuse reprehended and deplored, but it offered too favorable a subject for popular animadversion to escape the shafts of satire. In the preceding century, Thomas à Becket, in a vehement attack upon simony, includes this among the many manifestations of that multiform sin—