The rule was now fairly established and generally acknowledged; concubinage, though still prevalent—nay, in fact almost universal—was not defended as a right, but was practised with what concealment was possible, and was the object of unremitting assault from councils and prelates. To enter into the details of the innumerable canons and constitutions directed against the ineradicable vice during the succeeding half century would be unprofitable. Their endless iteration is only interesting as proving their inefficacy. A popular satirist of the reign of Edward II. declares that bribery of the ecclesiastical officials insured the domestic comfort of the clergy and their female companions;[718] while in time the canon law seems to have lost all its terrors. One of the earliest acts of the reign of Henry VII. was a law empowering the ecclesiastical officials to imprison “priests, clerks, and religious men” convicted of incontinence, and guaranteeing them against prosecution by the offenders.[719] That the aid of the secular legislator should thus have been invoked for protection under such circumstances showed the audacity resulting from long immunity, and is the abject confession that the ceaseless labor of four centuries had utterly failed. * * * * * In one part of England, however, the reform seems to have penetrated even more slowly. We have seen above, on the testimony of Giraldus Cambrensis, that in the early part of the thirteenth century the marriage of priests and the hereditary transmission of benefices were almost universal in Wales. As in the wild fastnesses of the Principality the ecclesiastical regulations seemed powerless, recourse was had to the secular law, which was employed to inflict various disabilities on offenders and their offspring, and the repetition of these shows how obstinately the custom was adhered to by the clergy until a comparatively late period. Thus, in the Gwentian and Dimetian Codes there is a provision that the son of a married priest, born after the ordination of his father, shall not share in the paternal estate;[720] and this provision is retained and repeated in a collection of laws which contains the date of 2 Henry IV., showing it to be posterior to the year 1400.[721] The same collection enumerates married priests among “thirteen things corrupting the world, and which will ever remain in it; and it can never be delivered of them.”[722] In the same spirit, the Book of Cynog, which is of uncertain date, declares “nor is a married priest, as he has relinquished his law, to be credited in law,” and it therefore directs that the testimony of such witnesses shall not be receivable in court;[723] while another collection of laws, occurring in a MS. of the fifteenth century, repeats the provision—“their testimony is not to be credited in any place, and they are excluded from the law, unless they ask a pardon from the pope or a bishop, through a public penance.”[724] In fact,