laymen concerned in such transactions with much less ceremony than the concubinary clergy.[774] The elaborate regulations promulgated by this council produced little effect. The council of Salamanca in 1335 renews the previous repressive legislation, adding a threat of _ipso facto_ excommunication for those who give Christian burial to priestly concubines, including all who are present on such occasions, who are not to be absolved until they shall have paid a fine of fifty maravedis to the cathedral church.[775] At length, in 1388, a national council held at Palencia under Cardinal Pedro de Luna, papal legate, made a determined effort to eradicate the ineradicable vice. It renewed the regulations of the council of Valladolid, which it stated were not obeyed, and added to them a clause by which all benefices were held under a sort of tenure of chastity, and subject to forfeiture. Besides this, all ecclesiastics who, within two months of death, had kept concubines, were declared incapable of testating, and their property was adjudged, one-third to the fabric of their churches, one-third to the Ordinary of the diocese, and one-third to the fund for the redemption of captives under the care of the Orders of Trinidad and Mercede, who were empowered to seize their share. Moreover, all bishops were commanded to appoint official Visitors, who were to report at annual synods, to be held thereafter, all cases of infraction of the rules.[776] The desolation which the enforcement of such regulations would have wrought may be inferred from the description which a contemporary, Alvarez Pelayo, Bishop of Silva in Portugal, gives us of his fellow ecclesiastics. He states that many of the clergy in holy orders throughout the Peninsula publicly associated themselves with women, frequently of noble blood, binding themselves against separation by notarial acts and solemn oaths, endowing their consorts with the goods of the church, and celebrating with the kindred these illegal espousals as joyously as though they were legitimate nuptials. Yet even this flagrant defiance of the canons was better than the wickedness common between confessors and their penitents, or than the promiscuous and unrestrained licentiousness of those who were not fettered by the forms of marriage, whose children, as Pelayo asserts, almost rivalled in number those of the laity.[777] These excesses were not suppressed by the council of Palencia. In 1429 the council of Tortosa, under the presidency of the Cardinal de Foix, papal legate, renewed the lament that the canons of Valladolid remained unobserved, and in repeating them it added a penalty of incarceration for pertinacious offenders, indicating, moreover, one of the worst abuses to which the subject gave rise, in forbidding all officials to take bribes from those who transgressed the rules.[778] This effort was as fruitless as all previous ones had been, and we shall see hereafter that the same state