Most of the domus we have examined so far belonged to the traditional world of settled farmers. But the village also contained woodcutters, who might work part of the time as farmers or even shepherds. This group was very little infected by heresy and so, since they did not interest the Inquisition, we do not know much about them.
But we do know a good deal about the shepherds. They were comparatively numerous in Montaillou. There were about ten specifically referred to as such, belonging to at least eight families in the village. They included Guillaume Pellissier, Guillaume Belot, Guillaume Guilhabert, Jean Marty, Pierre and Guillaume Bailie, Pierre and Jean Maury, Guillaume Maurs and one of the Benets. Among the occupations not strictly ‘agricultural’, the profession of shepherd is most frequently mentioned in Montaillou.
The word ‘shepherd’ itself is ambiguous. In the villages of the upper Ariège, villages such as Montaillou and Ornolac, everyone was in a sense a shepherd because everyone was more or less engaged in raising sheep. The bayle of Ornolac, Guillaume Austatz, speaking to the men of the community gathered together under the elm tree in the square, said (i.208–9), ‘Instead of burning heretics they ought to burn Bishop Fournier himself, because he demands that we pay carnelages, or tithes in lambs.’ With these sacrilegious words Guillaume Austatz made himself the spokesman of a community of farmer-stockbreeders, holders of the land and of the domus but also owners of flocks. These men often acted as their own shepherds, with the aid of their children.
But we have already been able to form some impression of the lives of these people. Here we are chiefly concerned with the iterant shepherds who moved about the country.1 They formed a rural nomad semi-proletariat, without hearth or home but with their own traditions, their own pride and their own special conceptions of mountain liberty and fate. They contributed, both temporarily and permanently, to the great wave of Pyrenean emigration which gradually flowed towards the lowlands, especially towards Spain.
The shepherds functioned within the framework of existing authority. As they travelled about from village to village they formed part of the network of domus which were often friendly to them. Pierre Maury, a shepherd of Montaillou, travelled through Catalonia and what is now the department of Aude; but he still maintained relationships with, and could count on protection from, the Clergue clan (ii.176). On the other hand, the lives of the mountain shepherds were made more difficult by private wars between local lords on the Spanish side of the mountains, always ready to tear one another to pieces as in the heyday of feudalism. This would scarcely have mattered if the shepherds had not had to foot the bill. But if one of these private wars broke out between Guillaume d’Entensa, lord of Casteldans, and another lord about whom we know nothing except that he was called Nartès or En Artès, the Maury brothers were obliged to withdraw their flocks from the Casteldans lands (ii.479; iii.195).
Many of these wandering shepherds came from Montaillou, and some of them we know. A few were suspected of crime, or were merely unstable characters who had taken to the road, the draille (transhumance), or even the maquis, as the result of some brawl or tiff. Jean Maury, who was involved in a fight with some other shepherds, explained quite simply how this incident confirmed his inveterate wanderlust (ii.476). I was involved in a brawl with some shepherds from Razès, in which I was injured. A certain Vézian, who was then living with Raymond Lizier of Montaillou, took my part in the quarrel. I went and lodged a complaint about my injuries with Bernard Clergue, who was then bayle of Montaillou acting for the lord Comte de Foix; I also complained to the châtelain of Montaillou. He did not want to compensate me for the injury I had received at the hands of the shepherds from Razès. Because of this wrong, I left Montaillou and went to Puigcerda where I hired myself out as a shepherd to the lady Brunissende de Cervello; I remained with Brunissende and her sheep for four years and two and a half months. Similarly, Guillaume Bélibaste took to the road after a set-to that went too far. He was the guilty party and killed another shepherd in the fight. So he had to leave his prosperous farm and the fraternal domus at Cubières. He became first a shepherd, then a parfait. It was not until later that he settled down as prophet to a little Albigensian colony in Catalonia, where he exchanged the occupation of shepherd for that of a maker of baskets or carding combs.
In a slightly different style, Bernard Benet was another victim of downward mobility.1 He came from a worthy and prosperous family of farmer-stockbreeders in Montaillou. But his people were ruined by the Inquisition, and their lands confiscated and handed over to the Comte de Foix, who administered them through Bernard Clergue, the bayle. The most obvious result of this operation was to add to the Clergue domus at the expense of the Benet domus, though these were once indirectly connected. Bernard Benet himself was ejected into the proletariat of the shepherds. His material and moral situation was not strong. At the time when the Inquisitors of Pamiers were interested in him, his livelihood depended entirely on his flock, and in Montaillou itself he was caught between two fires: the Clergue clan which wanted to make him bear false witness to the Carcassonne Inquisition, and the Azéma clan, enemy to the Clergues, who wanted to make him retract his deposition. Bernard Clergue, following the instructions of his brother the priest, promised Bernard Benet to give him back one of his confiscated meadows in return for his cooperation. Pierre Azéma, using the stick rather than the carrot, tried to influence Bernard Benet in the opposite direction by confiscating his precious sheep, his last remaining wealth. Finally Bernard Benet was arrested. He managed to escape from Mas-Saint-Antonin, where he was under house arrest (i.408). But after a detour in Cerdagne he was taken again at Ax-les-Thermes: Pierre Roussel of Ax and his wife Alissende had given him away. This Alissende was none other than the sister of Gaillarde Benet, wife of Pierre Benet, himself the brother of Bernard. So Bernard was given away by his sister-in-law’s sister. It was not very nice, but there was an explanation: at different times Alissende and Gaillarde had both been mistress to Pierre Clergue the priest. Betraying their legitimate connections with the house of Benet in order to perform the behests of the Clergues, they had first been lovers and later spies. Thus did Pierre Clergue’s harem contribute to the prosperity of his domus. As for Bernard Benet, this young man of good social position who might have looked forward to a future as a farmer-proprietor ended up a mere shepherd, at the mercy of the various village clans. In these circumstances he was lucky to emerge unscathed from the heavy hands of the Inquisitors (i.395, 405–06, 408).
Another déclassé shepherd who fell even lower than Bernard Benet was Guillaume Maurs. He too came from a respectable domus of farmers in Montaillou who had been ruined by the Inquisition, backed up as usual by the good offices of the house of Clergue. Guillaume Maurs’s father and brothers were arrested. His mother, Mengarde, who had spoken out imprudently about the heretical youth of the Clergues, had her tongue cut out, through the judicial powers invested in the bayle, Bernard Clergue. Guillaume Maurs himself managed to escape prison and torture. He fled over one mountain pass after another from the Comté de Foix to Catalonia and back again, nourishing revenge in his heart rather than heresy in his soul. (His absence of Cathar zeal is illustrated by a surly remark to the parfait, Guillaume Bélibaste (ii. 187). ‘I would rather eat tripe than be one of your company.’ There was nothing surprising in this: the wandering Guillaume Maurs wanted to kill the Clergues, who had ruined his domus, but fundamentally he cared little about the fate of Albigensianism, though it was for this that the Inquisition had imprisoned his family.) The unwilling shepherd ceaselessly ruminated on the faded splendours of his family’s past; they were modest enough, but distance lent enchantment. His life of seasonal migration took him to various cheese-producing shepherd communities in the mountain, but finally he was captured at Puigcerda, and from there the representative of the King of Majorca had him transferred to the prisons of Bishop Fournier.
The shepherds Bélibaste, Maurs and Benet are instances of people who came down in the world, examples of more than individual or purely local interest. In this connection see the long, fascinating and miserable biography of the shepherd Bernard Marty of Junac (iii.253–95). Born of a rich family of blacksmiths ruined by the Inquisition and its henchmen, Bernard Marty was reduced to keeping other people’s sheep, tossed hither and thither, unemployed as often as not.
Some, however, were shepherds not through misfortune but by vocation. As younger sons, or members of poor families, they made no bones about settling down in the lower stratum of rural society. They were comparatively well-adjusted to their fate and in some cases might even be happy and proud to be shepherds. One who is well known to us is Jean Pellissier; more familiar still is Pierre Maury.
Jean Pellissier, son of Bernard Pellissier of Montaillou, became a professional keeper of flocks when he reached the age of twelve or so. (It was usually from the age of twelve that young peasants used to be made responsible for looking after the sheep: this has been an age-old feature of rural education.) For these modest beginnings young Pellissier’s parents apprenticed him in Tournon, a long way from home, where his first employer was a woman called Thomassia, probably a widow.
Even at the start young Pellissier was not outstanding for intelligence, and he made a poor showing beside his colleague, Pierre Maury, who was very bright. Pellissier did not know the surname of his first employer, and could not say exactly how old he was when Thomassia first engaged him. He was just as vague when asked to say how long he worked for her. I stayed with Thomassia five or six years.
When he was about eighteen Jean Pellissier, now established as a shepherd, went home and lived there for an indefinite period, together with his mother, Alazaïs, and his brothers Raymond, Guillaume, Bernard and Pierre. As well as his own domus, he used to frequent four neighbouring or related houses. I never met in these houses any stranger or heretic, he declared.
But while his circle of acquaintances was limited, his wanderlust was boundless. He left home again and was taken on as a shepherd in Niort by Guillaume Castellan, for two years; after that he went for a year to Mompret to work for Raymond Jean (iii.75ff.). These periods of service were short: it appears that in rural Occitania employers and employees could quickly come to agreements concerning work and as quickly terminate them. There is no element of feudal bondage in the relations between them.
After Mompret, Jean Pellissier set out again for Montaillou: it was becoming a habit. There he took employment as a shepherd in the house of Bernard Maurs (iii.75, 76). The Maurs were in a sense related to him, and it was one of their womenfolk’s propaganda which momentarily converted him to Cathar ideas. The social or family distance between a farmer and his hired shepherd was often small.
But to the horror of the shepherd, the thunderbolts of the Inquisition fell on the house of Maurs. As Jean Pellissier related (iii.76), My employer Bernard Maurs and his mother Guillemette1 were at that time imprisoned for heresy. Pierre Maurs, his brother and neighbour, and the other Pierre Maurs (his son) were thrown for a while into the prison at Carcassonne. The other sons of Pierre Maurs the elder – Bernard and Guillaume – were also imprisoned in Carcassonne for heresy. Another Pierre Maurs, son of Bernard Maurs, fled from Montaillou [in 1308] after the raid by the Inquisition on the local heretics, and he settled in Catalonia. He returned to Montaillou two years ago [in 1321] in order to marry one of the daughters of Guillaume Authié of Montaillou (now imprisoned for heresy in Carcassonne). This Pierre Maurs, before setting out again quite recently for Catalonia, lived in the village until the beginning of this winter, and I carefully avoided talking to him. These arrests and acts of oppression (which included the cutting out of Mengarde Maurs’s tongue) demolished the Maurs family, making prisoners or exiles of some and reducing others to social ruin or despair. Pellissier’s evidence is an eloquent witness to the ever more painful and silent tragedy in which existence in Montaillou was shrouded between 1305 and 1320. All around him Jean Pellissier saw the blows of the Inquisition decimating his employers’ relations. So in accordance with his natural vocation as a shepherd, he decided to take off. He went to Prades d’Aillon, a village a league away from Montaillou and almost as badly infected with heresy. After leaving the employment of Bernard Maurs, I was taken on in the village of Prades d’Aillon by Bernard Malet and his sons Bernard, Raymond and André. About two months after I was hired by Bernard Malet senior, he was summoned to appear before the Inquisition at Carcassonne, which then imprisoned him. Bernard later died in prison (iii.76). Jean Pellissier consoled himself as best he could for this new catastrophe, telling Jacques Fournier that at any rate, None of the aforesaid three sons of Bernard Malet senior was ever troubled by the police on the subject of heresy.
But this was poor compensation. Leaving Montaillou only for Prades d’Aillon, Jean Pellissier never really emerged from the family and Cathar-inclined network of the Maurs, the Clergues and the Malets. This network, despite terrible internal dissension, connected village to village in a web of complicity: Bernard Malet junior of Prades, son of Bernard Malet senior (the imprisoned employer of Jean Pellissier), had married one of the nieces of Pierre Clergue the priest, who set himself up as the young couple’s protector (iii.77). In the Pays d’Aillon all roads, even those of the shepherds’ migration in search of employment, sooner or later led to Clergue the priest.
Finally, after many years of wandering, Jean Pellissier came back for good to Montaillou, his native village. He was absorbed into the life of his community, where he had his own family house. We glimpse him from time to time, unwell and lying in the sun at his own front door (iii.79, 104 – his health was in general not strong).
But most of the time he was out and about, whether in the spring before the sowing of the meadows, or in summer after the hay harvest (iii.84). He was now quite well off and had sheep of his own. But – and this indicates the limits of his modest success – it was on other people’s grass that he looked after his own sheep. A typical scene shows him in the meadows and demonstrates that his eyes were sharp even if his chronological sense was dim. He begins with the usual vagueness about time (iii.84): Was it the year [1308] when all the men in Montaillou were picked up by the Carcassonne Inquisition, or was it the year before? I can’t remember very well. Was it during the summer, after the hay had been cut, or in the spring, before the meadows were sown? I can’t remember that very well either. I was with my own sheep at Combe del Gazel, in the meadow belonging to Guillaume Fort and his brothers. [Guillaume Fort was burnt in 1321 for having lapsed into heresy.] I myself was on the left of the meadow by the path which leads to the mountain pastures of Montaillou. To the right of the said path was Pierre Bailie, son of Raymond Bailie of Montaillou. Pierre Bailie was grazing sheep in the meadow belonging to Bernard Marty (known as ‘Goat’). There also was Jean Marty of Montaillou ; he was grazing his sheep in the meadow belonging to him, and adjacent to that of Raymond Marty. It might have been noon when there appeared upon the said path, coming from Montaillou, Arnaud Vital of Montaillou, wearing a blue surcoat over his tunic and with an axe hanging round his neck and balancing a big faggot of beechwood which he was carrying round his neck also. With him were two men, each dressed in a brown hooded mantle over a blue or green garment; and they too carried axes over their shoulders. Arnaud and his companions approached through the field belonging to the Belots. Once there they saw me and my associates, Pierre Bailie and Jean Marty. Arnaud came up to Pierre Bailie, greeted him and was in turn greeted by him … And since at that time Arnaud was assistant bailiff of Montaillou, he reprimanded Pierre Bailie and Jean Marty for letting their sheep stray over the sown fields. As a joke, Jean said to Arnaud: ‘Do those two woodcutters come from Lavelanet?’
The scene reveals the small world of the Montaillou shepherds in the fourteenth century, distinguishing between their respective meadows devoted to hay and pasture, divided between the sown infield of the parish and the distant outfield of the mountain pastures. A social stratification emerges between the shepherds who grazed their own sheep (and other people’s) on other people’s meadows and the shepherds who were also farmers and owners, who kept their sheep on the family meadow which was their own property. But these more or less subtle differences did not prevent the formation of teams or informal co-operatives between associated shepherds (socii) from various different layers in the stratification. In addition to these little groupings, our text shows the communal services involving the village as a whole. Grazing was regulated by the sowing of the meadow for hay; the meadows when sown were guarded by a communal crop-watcher, or assistant bailiff, who worked half-time, and also mended shoes and ran after the girls. The chronology of the village universe was uncertain, and divided by the catastrophies of the Inquisition or the work involved in pasturing or the hay harvest: Jean Pellissier’s vague temporal bearings were derived from the round-up of 1308, the sowing of the grass and the hay-cutting. His field of vision also gives us a momentary glimpse of the little-known world of the woodcutters. But from this point on, it is all sham. For the two woodcutters are not real foresters but parfaits! As they pass briefly through our text they are about to take to the maquis after a brief time in hiding in the house of the Belots. One of them is Prades Tavernier, often met with along the paths of the Pays d’Aillon. The other is Guillaume Authié, the famous and valiant notary of Ax-les-Thermes, directly linked with Montaillou by marriage and family ties. His wife, Gaillarde, was the daughter of Arnaud Benet, himself a member of the Benet clan of Montaillou.
The career of the shepherd Jean Pellissier was thus bound up over and over again with the various families of his own village. Or the other hand that of Pierre Maury, also a shepherd, was completely at the mercy of long journeys, adventure, passing love affairs and above all friendship. The story of his life is worth going into, for it closely reflects the great cycle of transhumance on which the Pyrenean economy was based in those days.1
Pierre Maury
Pierre Maury, born around 1282 or 1283, was the son of Raymond Maury, a weaver of Montaillou, and of his wife Alazaïs. The Maurys’ was a traditional domus, like a number of others in the village. Raymond and Alazaïs had six sons – Guillaume, Pierre, Jean, Arnaud, Raymond and Bernard. There were also at least two daughters – Guillemette, who made an unsatisfactory marriage to Bertrand Piquier, a carpenter of Laroque d’Olmes, and Raymonde, who married Guillaume Marty of Montaillou. Both daughters married at the age of eighteen, or even earlier.
The documents concerning Montaillou, like others, exhibit both male and adult chauvinism, omitting to mention the existence of some daughters, the presence of young babies or the death of children who perished very early. So the eight births which we do know about in the Maury family must be considered a minimum. Despite Raymond Maury’s theoretically non-agricultural occupation of weaver, his family’s way of life was mixed, based on stock-raising, farming and handicraft. By the time he reached the age of eighteen, Pierre Maury was still only a young Montaillou shepherd. Guillaume Maury, his brother, was a woodcutter: Twenty-three years ago, said Pierre Maury in the deposition he made in 1324, I kept the sheep of Arnaud Fauré of Montaillou, and of Raymond Maulen, of Arques, on the land belonging to Montaillou. Guillaume Maury, my brother, and Guillaume Belot of Montaillou, who are now dead, used to go to the wood at Ausa to cut laths.2 It was at this period that Pierre Maury had his first contacts with heresy. They came from his brother Guillaume and from the Belot clan, always a decisive factor in spreading Catharism in the village. The contacts took the form of a kind of sermon – half evangelical and half Kantian before its time – delivered to Pierre by the two woodcutters. Guillaume Belot and Guillaume Maury, Pierre’s deposition went on, came up to me and said: ‘The good Christians have come into this land; they follow the path of Saint Peter, Saint Paul and the other Apostles; they follow the Lord; they do not lie; they do not do to others what they would not have others do to them.’
In those days Pierre Maury was still a young man, devoted to the worship of the saints. I had just shorn my sheep, and had given a fleece to Saint Anthony and another to the Virgin Mary of Montaillou. I still had a little wool left to make myself some clothes. Then my brother and Guillaume Belot said to me: ‘The good people [the heretics] are not well clad. Give them some of your wool. They can use it to make clothes. You will thus be doing them a great charity, greater than what you did when you gave to Saint Anthony, for many give to Saint Anthony and few give to the goodmen. Yet the goodmen pray to God for their benefactors … and with effect! For they walk in justice and truth.’
Thrilled at the idea that the holy men would pray for him, young Maury finally let himself be persuaded. They spoke to me to such effect that I gave them the value of a fleece to take to the heretics.
Shortly after these first relations with heresy, towards 1300 or 1301, Pierre Maury, aged eighteen, fled from the paternal roof (iii.110). It was not that he was on bad terms with his parents, but already a whiff of brimstone surrounded the Maury domus, which the Inquisition suspected of being heretical. It was better to be off. So the following winter Pierre Maury went down to what is now the department of Aude, where he intended to winter sheep in the warm lands of the Val d’Arques, between Razès and Fenouillèdes (iii.121).1 In Arques, Pierre Maury became the hired shepherd of his first cousin Raymond Maulen (kinship and economic ties linked once again). Soon after that, when he was about twenty, Pierre Maury fell in love (iii.110, 121). The following winter I grazed my flock in the Val d’ Arques. I lived in the house of my first cousin, Raymond Maulen, of Arques. I fell passionately in love with a girl in the village, Bernadette den Esquinath. And for two years no one spoke to me of heresy, because they could see that I was passionately in love with this girl. It seems that pretty Bernadette was not unkind to Pierre Maury. One day, talking to him in his sheepfold, Raymond Pierre, who was soon to become Pierre’s new employer, rebuked him angrily over this affair, going so far as to call Bernadette a whore. ‘You, Pierre,’ said Raymond (iii.121), ‘You, Pierre, who used to be so fond of the goodmen, you no longer care about them. And instead you are converted to whoredom. You are looking for a wife. Well, we’ll give you one. One who will have good understanding of the faith [the heretical faith]. And if you have a wife like that, it will be better for you than to have one who does not share our beliefs. For if you have a wife who has our faith, you can receive the goodmen in your house. You can help them. You can even talk with your wife in safety about such things as the understanding of good, and so on. Such prospects might be highly attractive. To have subjects of conversation with one’s wife when they were so often lacking in some of the strangely silent households of old Occitania – it was tempting, at least.
So no more was heard of Bernadette den Esquinath, with whom Pierre Maury had been so passionately in love. Another Bernadette, Bernadette Pierre, made her entrance. Pierre Maury now became her father’s hired shepherd. Pierre himself, by means of his meagre savings and small speculations, had amassed enough money to buy some land in Arques. Bernard Bélibaste, another stock-breeder in the region, who appointed himself negotiator of the marriage, could describe the match in glowing terms. ‘If you really want to find a wife who has understanding of good,’ said Bernard (iii.121), ‘I know a little girl who will be just right later on. She is so rich that with what her father will give you and with what you have already at Arques, where you have bought land, you will be well enough off not to have to work with your hands any more … For Raymond Pierre, who will thus become your future father-in-law, will adopt you as a son; and he will give you to wife his daughter Bernadette Pierre, who must now be about six years old; and you will live in the domus of Raymond Pierre, who has understanding of good.’
Bernard Bélibaste’s harangue is interesting in that it incidentally underlines the fundamental values of these Occitan sheepfarmers: the close connection between the domus and heresy; the importance of the domus itself, with its possible extension into other institutions such as the adoption of the future son-in-law, co-residence, the giving of dowries; and the practice by which the father, taking a son-in-law as an adopted son in order to ensure the continuation of his line and domus, enters into a genuine treaty by which his daughter, still very young, will be handed over with a dowry as soon as she is nubile to the young coresident adult whom the father has designated as his heir. The motives behind this diplomacy are quite simple: Raymond Pierre had three daughters – Bernadette, Jacotte and Marquise – but no sons. So he was obliged to find a man who would agree to come and live with him and be a ‘son-in-law’.
But even faced with this dazzling future, Pierre Maury did not lose his head. ‘How do you know in advance, Bernard,’ he said (iii.122), ‘that Bernadette, when she is nubile, will have the understanding of good?’ (iii.122). This was by no means a stupid question. The Fournier Register shows us certain planned marriages where a Cathar believer joyfully wed a girl he thought to be a heretic, hoping she would entertain him for the whole of his married life with agreeable Albigensian fireside chats. And then the unfortunate fellow, shamefully deceived by his father-in-law, found himself married to a Catholic shrew, with whom, because of the dangers of the Inquisition, he had to live shut up in the silence of the grave for nearly a quarter of a century (iii.322).
But Bernard Bélibaste had an answer for everything. ‘Raymond Pierre,’ he answered (iii.122), ‘will nurture his daughter Bernadette so well that with the help of God she will have the understanding of good. And if by chance she has it not when she becomes nubile, then, Pierre, all you will have to do is leave Raymond Pierre’s house, taking your own property with you. All you will have to do is simply leave the girl, for it would be absolutely bad for you, Pierre, to take to wife someone who had not the understanding of good.’ (This passage shows that in the Pyrenees and their foothills in the fourteenth century, as in the Cévennes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a young man intended as a future son-in-law and already co-resident in the house brought his own property into the family, and took it away with him if the projected marriage was broken off.)
Pierre Maury, tempted by these plans, decided to get to know the goodmen. They were at the centre of the matrimonial plot by means of which Raymond Maulen and Raymond Pierre, who were as thick as thieves, wanted to draw Pierre into the camp of the understanding of good (iii.110). So Pierre Maury asked Raymond Pierre – and also Bernard Bélibaste, who as we shall soon see had important connections with heresy – the crucial question (iii.122). ‘What sort of men are these goodmen I hear so much about?’
Their answer was enlightening. ‘They are men like the others! Their flesh, their bones, their shape, their faces are all exactly like those of other men! But they are the only ones to walk in the ways of justice and truth which the Apostles followed. They do not lie. They do not take what belongs to others. Even if they found gold or silver lying in their path, they would not “lift” it unless someone made them a present of it. Salvation is better achieved in the faith of these men called heretics than in any other faith.’
A fortnight after this conversation Pierre Maury was to have his first, and decisive, interview with a parfait. This is the first recorded contact in that long ‘quest for the goodman’ which was to make up this shepherd’s life. It was 1302, and Pierre was about twenty.
The first interview took place at a big dinner given by Raymond Pierre (iii.122). Raymond was, as has been indicated, a substantial farmer and stock-breeder in Arques. His flocks moved seasonally between the Val d’Arques and the mountain pastures of Aillon, his house had a solier (ii.17, 404) and at this period he had at least two permanent employees (perhaps because he had no grown-up sons). One of the two servants was a shepherd (at that time Pierre Maury himself) and the other was a muleteer. This second post was filled first by one Arnaud from the area of Sault, who was suddenly dismissed because he was not a Cathar; and then by Pierre Catalan of Coustaussa, who was a believer in the heretics (iii.135).
The dinner at Raymond Pierre’s naturally took place in the kitchen: with certain exceptions, the distinction between kitchen and dining-room did not exist among the rich peasants of Occitania in those days. Present at the dinner were the master himself, Raymond Pierre of Val d’Arques, also called Raymond Pierre of Sabarthès because of his original place of residence (iii.100, 121). Also present were his wife, Sybille, and her mother, whose co-residence with her son-in-law made it a moderately extended family (iii.122). The two women had prepared a meal. Other more or less local stock-breeders, often from the Pays d’Aillon or the Ax-les-Thermes area, both linked by transhumance with the Val d’Arques, had come as guests or neighbours. Among the guests that day were Raymond Maulen, cousin and first employer of Pierre Maury, and Bernard Vital, who lived in the Val d’Arques but was from Montaillou, where he was cousin of Arnaud Vital, cobbler and crop-watcher, girl-chaser and notorious Cathar. Other guests were Guillaume Escaunier – stock-breeder of Ax-les-Thermes, in Arques on. business connected with transhumance – and Marquise Escaunier, Guillaume’s sister. The Escauniers, brother and sister, were friends of the Authiés; it was at Marquise’s house that Guillaume, that same day, had come across Pierre Authié calmly frying himself some little fish (ii.12, 13).
There was no difficulty about Pierre Maury himself being invited. In fact, his position as servant-cum-shepherd meant that he didn’t even need to be asked, since he was a full member of the household like all farm servants at the time. This position was so assured that he did not hesitate, when the occasion arose, to insult his master’s wife, thus merely echoing his master. ‘Bad mother, devil!’, he was sometimes to call Sybille Pierre (ii.415).
So at this dinner in the kitchen of a domus in the Aude there were, in addition to Pierre Maury, members of four major heretical peasant families of the Val d’Arques and the Pays d’Aillon: the Vitals, the Maulens, the Pierres and the Escauniers. In the next room, the room beside the kitchen, Pierre Authié, the ‘lord’ of the heretics, and two men, also heretics, from Limoux, were eating fish; every so often they sent some dainty tit-bits to Raymond Pierre in his foganha. In the course of the evening Pierre Maury fell victim to the prevailing atmosphere. Up till then he had been fond of the Catholic preaching of the Minorite friars, of which he had heard a good sample in the church at Arques a few days before (iii.123), but now, overcome by the festive warmth, he began to feel his Roman faith vacillating. And so he was made into a believer in the heretics by Pierre Authié, who addressed him with the familiar ‘tu’ while Maury himself continued to say ‘vous’ to the Cathar missionary. The evening ended with joyful carousings, in the course of which the company celebrated the admission of a new member.
Pierre Maury was never to see Pierre Authié again. But every week he came down from the local pastures where he kept his own and his employer’s sheep, and went to stock up with bread at the house of Raymond Pierre in Arques, where he would often meet some heretic or other. One day when he was in the kitchen, where his employer’s mother-in-law was preparing bacon and eggs for him, he learned that in the next room, prudently locked, was Prades Tavernier, the ubiquitous heretical ex-weaver from the Pays d’Aillon. Tavernier for his part was enjoying a Cathar repast of bread, fish and wine. When he learned of the shepherd’s arrival, Tavernier sent for him, stood up in his honour, sat down again and gave him a piece of bread which he had blessed. Pierre Maury was delighted: his collection of bits of bread blessed by various different parfaits soon became famous throughout the Pyrenees.1 After that, said Maury, I took my leave and went back to my sheep, bearing my stock of bread, the blessed and the unblessed.
A week later Pierre Maury came down again for a fresh supply of bread (the shepherds were great bread eaters). In his employer’s house he met Guillaume Bélibaste, a rich farmer from Cubières and the father of Guillaume Bélibaste junior, the parfait or pseudo-parfait for whom Maury was later to entertain so ardent and constant an affection (iii.194). Guillaume Bélibaste the elder and Pierre Maury the shepherd then left Raymond Pierre’s house and went to that of Raymond Maulen. There they found Prades Tavernier, who that week was hiding with Maulen, behind the barrels in the cellar. The various conversations concerning this encounter, in the course of which Guillaume Bélibaste addressed his melioramentum to Prades Tavernier, provide a lively description of the arrangements and customs practised in the domus of Raymond Maulen, who it will be remembered was Pierre Maury’s first employer after he left Montaillou (iii.128–9 and see P. 78).2
Pierre Maury’s decisive though unique interview with Pierre Authié, the heretical notary soon afterwards burned, was followed by another important encounter, this time with Jacques Authié, Pierre Authié’s son. By now it was May and the flowers had long been in bloom. One day when Maury was with his sheep in the pastures at Arques, Raymond Pierre sent a poor child to fetch him. Pierre Maury went down once more to Raymond Pierre’s domus, where he found two well-known heretics warming themselves by the fire: they were Jacques Authié and Pierre Montanié of Coustaussa. Sitting with them were Raymond Pierre, his wife and his mother-in-law.
After a while Pierre Maury, Jacques Authié and Pierre Montanié left the house and set out in the dark for the village of Rieux-en-Val. Authié, a local dignitary, rode on a mule; his two companions walked. It was the ever-obliging Raymond Pierre who had lent and equipped the mule for the preacher. And Jacques Authié continued to preach throughout the journey from up there on his mule, while Pierre Maury acted as audience and foil, and Pierre Montanié played the non-speaking crowd. This was a typical sample of Cathar preaching, specially designed by the Albigensian militants for use with the shepherds. We shall return later to the Cathar myths which were propagated in this manner.
When they got to the end of their long journey Master Jacques Authié stopped preaching and Pierre Maury, overwhelmed by his eloquence, seemed converted once and for all to the dogmas of Albigensianism. Converted, that is, as far as this naive but wily shepherd could be converted: all his life he kept two strings to his bow, one Cathar and one Roman. When he had left Jacques Authié and gone back to Raymond Pierre’s house in Arques, Pierre Maury met three men from Limoux who had come there to see Authié. But the three men had arrived too late and missed him, so they were staying overnight with Raymond Pierre, who offered them compensation for their disappointment in the form of an early breakfast of fried bacon and eggs. After that they went back to Limoux. As for me, concluded Pierre Maury philosophically (iii.135), I went back to my sheep.
In the course of this same memorable summer, Pierre Maury took his sheep to a place called La Rabassole in Arques (iii.135), together with seven other shepherds, who included the brother and father-in-law of his former employer Raymond Maulen, two members of the Garaudy family from the neighbourhood of Arques, and three other shepherds also from Arques, but who as far as we know were not related to the other families represented in the group or to one another. The group of shepherds, taken together, formed a cabane, or hut, at the same time a temporary home and a sort of cooperative. I was the hut leader or cabanier, said Pierre Maury. I was in charge of the cheese-making … I gave cooked meat, cheese, milk, and bread to passing believers in heresy.1 There is nothing surprising about the leading role played by Pierre Maury, whose professional virtues were generally recognized.2 We shall return in more detail to the cabane, a fundamental institution which was to the world of the shepherds what the domus was to the world of the sedentary. For the moment, let us simply note that it was during this phase in Pierre’s life that he renewed his connection with the Bélibaste clan. Raymond Bélibaste, a believer in the heretics, and Amélien de Perles, a parfait, came up to the hut during the cheese-making and Pierre Maury gave them cooked meats and dairy produce. The parfait, a vegetarian of course, refused the meat, but both men took Pierre Maury aside behind the hut and asked him for a present. Pierre gave Amélien de Perles a silver tournois and, as he had hoped, Amélien said (iii.136), ‘I will pray for you.’
At the end of that year Pierre Maury, accompanied by his cousin Raymond Marty, brother or perhaps half-brother of Raymond Maulen, wintered his sheep in other pastures, though still in the Val d’Arques. One Sunday Pierre and Raymond, still faithful to Catholic routine despite their heterodoxy, attended Mass in Arques. When they came out of church they went to Raymond Maulen’s house. Here, in the cellar (cellier), they found the heretic Prades Tavernier, once again solemnly hiding behind a barrel. Maury greeted the parfait and then went up to the solier to get some bread. (In this house, a typical dwelling for someone who combined stock-raising with wine-growing, the kitchen was on the first floor, above the cellar, which was next to the sheep-fold; this was quite a different layout from that of the domus in the Pays d’Aillon, with their kitchen on the ground floor.) In the solier the shepherd found a number of people sitting around the fire having a meal. Among them was a short fellow with blue-green eyes. This brown-clad stranger was a villager from Coustaussa or Cassagnes. He was acting as guide to Prades Tavernier. Beside the guide sat Raymond Maulen, the master of the house, flanked by his mother-in-law Bérengère and his wife Eglantine. So there were five people altogether sitting around the fire. Having got his bread, Pierre Maury went down again to the cellar, to Marty and Tavernier (iii.136–7). The three swiftly put up a table, a plank set on trestles, for their meal. For Maury and Marty it was bacon or meat supplied by the Maulen household, and for the vegetarian Prades Tavernier it was lentils, oil, wine and nuts. Courtesies passed between the table in the cellar and the table in the solier. At one point Maury was sent up to the first floor with a piece of bread or biscuit blessed for the purpose by the heretic Tavernier. In return, Raymond Maulen brought a piece of bacon to his three guests eating in the cellar. But he had not reckoned with the dietary orthodoxy of Prades Tavernier. ‘Take away this horrid wild meat,’ said Prades to Pierre, marking his authority by the use of ‘tu’. The incident was enough to set Prades off preaching. Having no books or manuscripts to read to the rustics, who in any case were illiterate, the parfaits were in the habit, as we have seen, of preaching to them in all kinds of circumstances – walking, on horseback, on muleback or while they were having their meals. Now, in the cellar, the preacher treated his audience to a few variations on the theme of abstinence from meat, quoting sayings which he attributed to Christ in person. ‘My children,’ said Christ, according to Prades (iii.137), ‘do not eat any kind of meat, neither that of men nor that of animals, but only that of fish from water, for that is the only flesh which is not corrupt.’ There followed a thinly disguised appeal to his audience’s purse, an appeal which, at least as far as Pierre Maury was concerned, did not fall on deaf ears. Then Prades, well away, recounted a myth about metempsychosis.
After all this speechifying, Pierre Maury said goodbye to Prades and withdrew. He was never to see him again. But a little while later, to thank him for his edifying sermon, the shepherd, through his brother Guillaume Maury, sent the parfait a gros tournois, a silver penny and four silver farthings. With these Prades Tavernier was able to buy himself a pair of shoes. One wonders whether up till then he had gone barefoot.
The following Easter Raymond Pierre charged Pierre Maury with a confidential mission: the shepherd was to go to Guillaume Bélibaste the elder, a rich farmer at Cubières, and bring back some money which the old man was either giving back or perhaps lending to Pierre’s master.
The elder Bélibaste was a paterfamilias well provided with farm premises and possessing very good connections. He had a domus in Cubières in which he co-resided in an extended family with his three sons and the wives and children of two of them. One of the wives was called Estelle. The Bélibaste family also had a barn for straw built independently of the main house and a sheep-fold out in the country.
The evening Pierre Maury spent at the Bélibastes’ house followed the model frequent in his social activities, and fell into two different parts. Those at supper included Pierre Maury, Guillaume Bélibaste, his three sons and his two daughters-in-law. (The Bélibastes seem to have been a very united family: they were welded together by co-residence and the fact that they cooked their meals together, by working in common on the family land and by heresy, which was common to both the men and the women.) It seems the children of the two married couples had gone to bed by supper time. The guest of honour was Pierre Girard, proxy of the Archbishop of Narbonne. Girard was sufficiently distinguished for his presence to lend the occasion a certain lustre, but in Occitania in those days social distances were sufficiently small for the presence of such a guest not to be unusual in the house of a rich farmer like Guillaume Bélibaste. Despite his official position, which in theory ranged him on the side of the established Church, Girard was perhaps vaguely sympathetic, either in ideas or in friendship, to the Cathars. Or maybe he was merely tolerant. Anyhow, he knew how to shut his eyes to what people would prefer him not to see. During the meal he took no notice of the comings and goings of suspicious characters whose headquarters were in the neighbouring barn. The indulgent attitude of Pierre Girard was to stand Pierre Maury in good stead some time later when he was tried in Fenouillèdes on a charge of complicity in heresy. The meal, despite the master’s wealth and the prestige of one of the guests, was of antique sobriety and consisted of meat, milk and cheese – a meal fit for the shepherds of Virgil. When supper was over Pierre Girard went to bed. As for Pierre Maury, he, together with several members of the Bélibaste clan, crept out to the nearby barn to greet, on Raymond Pierre’s instructions, all our friends, i.e. the heretics who were Guillaume Bélibaste’s guests that night among the straw. Then the shepherd too went to bed. Next day he set out again for Arques.
A few months later, in August, the middle of the summer, Pierre Maury was keeping Raymond Pierre’s sheep at a place called Pars Sors, near Arques. Helping him were some typical representatives of his old group from Aude and Sabarthès: Jean Maulen, brother or perhaps step-brother of his former employer Raymond Maulen, and the two Guillaume Martys, father and son, from Montaillou. One evening at the time when people have fallen into their first sleep, two men came to see Pierre Maury among his pastures. They were Raymond Bélibaste, son of Guillaume Bélibaste the elder, and Philippe d’Alayrac, the parfait, originally from Coustaussa. They had come from Limoux (iii. 140–42). As we have seen, Pierre Maury had known Raymond Bélibaste for a long time. He offered the two men a typical meal of meat, goat’s milk, cheese, bread and wine. Raymond ate it (iii.141). But Philippe d’Alayrac as a perfect parfait refused the meat, and would only drink the wine out of his own cup, being allergic to receptacles soiled by contact with the mouths of those who had eaten meat. After the meal the shepherd, at the request of his guests, led them through the darkness up steep and dangerous paths over the fifteen or so kilometres to the Bélibastes’ sheep-fold (courral) at Cubières, some distance from their family house. On the way Philippe stumbled and slipped so much on the rough paths that he lost any inclination for preaching. Every time he fell he exclaimed: ‘Holy Spirit, help me!’
After these various incidents and visits given or received, Pierre Maury soon broke with Arques and its inhabitants. Jacques Authié was taken by the Inquisition in 1305. At that the heretics of Arques, who included many local families, took fright, and at great expense went to the Pope to confess and abjure their heterodoxy. Either because he did not want to spend all his possessions on the journey or for some other reason, Pierre Maury did not accompany these pilgrims. He merely did them the favour of looking after their sheep during their absence. Once they were back, he decided to make off. He was afraid his kindnesses towards the Authiés, unredeemed by papal absolution, might cost him dearly. So he took his stocks of wheat and the cloth he had had made from his own wool by a weaver called Catala and set off. At Christmas 1305 he was in Montaillou, celebrating the feast with his brothers and father in the family house. But even his native soil was uncomfortable. He was suspect, and his fellow-villagers steered clear of him. So he went and hired himself out to one Barthélemy Borrel. Borrel was the brother-in-law of yet another native of Montaillou, Arnaud Bailie senior (iii.148), and his maid, Mondinette, was also from Montaillou.