In 1729, Earl Middleton offered, on the part of Lord Harley, to return the thirty-four leaves of the Epistles in his possession, asking only in return an acknowledgment sealed with the grand seal. Cardinal Fleury, finding that the Royal signature could hardly be employed for such a purpose, wrote in the King's name a letter to the Earl of Oxford of a flattering nature, and the lost MSS. were restored in September, 1729. Those in the Sunderland collection have not, I believe, been returned. And what became of Aymon? In 1718 he inhabited the Chateau of Riswyck. Thence he sent to the brothers Wetstein, publishers at Amsterdam, the proofs of his edition of the letters of Visconti. It appeared in 1719 in two 12mo volumes, under the title "Lettres, Anecdotes, et Mémoires historiques du nonce Visconti, Cardinel Préconisé et Ministre Secret de Pie IV. et de ses créatures." The date of his death is not known. Authority: Hauréau, J. Singularités Historiques et Litéraires. Paris, 1881. The Patarines of Milan. I. In the eleventh century, nearly all the clergy in the north of Italy were married.[7] It was the same in Sicily, and it had been the same in Rome,[8] but there the authority and presence of the Popes had sufficed to convert open marriage into secret concubinage. [7] "Cuncti fere cum publicis uxoribus ... ducebant vitam." "Et ipsi, ut cernitur, sicut laici, palam uxores ducunt."--_Andr. Strum. "Vit. Arialdi."_ "Quis clericorum non esset uxoratus vel concubinarius?"--_Andr. Strum. "Vit. S. Joan. Gualberti."_ [8] "Coeperunt ipsi presbyteri et diacones laicorum more uxores ducere suscepsosque filios hæredes relinquere. Nonnulli etiam episcoporum verecund â omni contemptâ, cum uxoribus domo simul in unâ habitare."--_Victor Papa "in Dialog."_ But concubinage did not in those times mean exactly what it means now. A _concubina_ was an _uxor_ in an inferior degree; the woman was married in both cases with the ring and religious rite, but the children of the concubine could not inherit legally the possessions of their father. When priests were without wives, concubines were tolerated wives without the legal status of wives, lest on the death of the priest his children should claim and alienate to their own use property belonging to the Church. In noble and royal families it was sometimes the same, lest estates should be dismembered. On the death of a wife, her place was occupied by a concubine, and the sons of the latter could not dispute inheritance with the sons of the former. Nor did the Church look sternly on the concubine. In the first Toledian Council a canon was passed with regard to communicating those who had one wife or one concubine;--such were not to be excluded from the Lord's Table,[9] so long only as each man had but one wife or concubine, and the union was perpetual.