As was normal under the ancien régime, the peasant family in Montaillou was a large one. Mengarde and Pons Clergue had four sons and at least two daughters known to us. Guillemette Belot had four sons and two daughters. Guillaume and Guillemette Benet had at least two sons and three daughters. Raymond Baille had four sons, but no daughter is mentioned. Pierre and Mengarde Maurs had four sons and one daughter. There were four Marty brothers. Alazaïs and Raymond Maury had six sons and at least two daughters.
There were smaller families. Bernard and Gauzia Clergue had only two known children, a son and a daughter. Two couples, Guillemette and Raymond Maurs and Bernard and Guillemette Maurs, had two sons each, as well, probably, as daughters unknown to us in name or number. From the information available, eighteen couples emerge who were in the process of completing, or had completed, their family in the demographic period 1280–1324, the time roughly covered by the Fournier Register. These eighteen families, complete and incomplete, gave birth to a minimum of forty-two boys and twenty girls. The number of girls is clearly under-estimated or under-recorded. The figure for boys certainly does not take into account losses from infant mortality, the deaths which occurred between birth and the end of the first year of life. It also leaves out an indeterminable fraction of juvenile mortality, especially between one and five years of age. Even so, this gives us a mean of 2.3 boys per couple. So, taking into account various imponderables, it is reasonable to assume 4.5 legitimate births, including boys and girls, per family, complete or incomplete,1 a fertility rate equal to that of the prolific inhabitants of Beauvaisis in modern times. The illegitimacy rate in Montaillou was higher.
One explanation of the size of Montaillou families is the early age at which girls married. Moreover our figures are chiefly concerned with the Cathar and endogamous group of big farming families, allied among themselves, which dominated Montaillou around 1300. For reasons which are perhaps fortuitous, the few Catholic families in the village, for example the Azémas, recorded fewer children and fewer marriages than the heretics.
There were limits to this fecundity. The richest family, the Clergues, in Pierre and Bernard’s generation, seem to have practised certain kinds of birth control (magical herbs, or perhaps coitus interruptus). Pons Clergue’s many sons left several bastards but no legitimate child, though there were other Clergues in the village to carry on the name. As for the lower ranks, the shepherds tended not to get married. More generally, the last generation with which we are concerned, that which married between the round-up of 1308 and the interrogations of 1320–25, was greatly disturbed. Many people were put in prison and the circumstances may have led some couples to practise abstinence or contraception. At all events, during the decade beginning in 1310, which was also economically unpropitious, fertility in Montaillou seems to have declined.
Between 1280 and 1305, however, there was in Montaillou, as elsewhere, a baby boom. Large groups of two brothers or even four all living together were very common (i.193, 203). A high birth rate was taken for granted. If you lost one child and were not too old, it was very likely that you would have more and these, according to a far-fetched Cathar interpretation of metempsychosis, might be the means of restoring to a mother the souls of her previously lost children (i.203).
My fellow-sponsor, Alazaïs Munier, says Guillaume Austatz, bayle of Ornolac, was sad; in a short time she had lost all her four sons. Seeing her desolate, I asked her the cause.
‘How could I be other than unhappy,’ she asked, ‘after having lost four fine children in so short a time?’
‘Don’t be upset,’ I said to her, ‘you will get them back again.’
‘Yes, in Paradise!’
‘No, you will get them back again in this world. For you are still young. You will be pregnant again. The soul of one of your dead children will enter into the new foetus. And so on!’
We see that Guillaume Austatz did not think it strange that a woman should have eight pregnancies in all.
The countrymen of this period were well aware of the population pressure of the 1300s, resulting from, among other things, the high fertility rates discussed above. Where, it was asked (i.191), would there be room to put all the souls of all the men who are dead and of all those who are still alive? At that rate the world would be full of souls! The entire space between the city of Toulouse and the Mérens Pass would not be enough to hold them all! Fortunately, explained Guillaume Austatz, God had found a simple remedy. Every soul was used several times. It emerged from a human body which had just died, and entered almost immediately into another. And so on.
In theory the Cathar dogma professed by many of the people of Montaillou, though little known to them in detail, was hostile to marriage and procreation. The most sophisticated Cathar peasants, and parfaits or pseudo-parfaitslike Bélibaste, were acquainted with this point. Bélibaste himself (ii.48), who wanted through virginity to transport the seed of this world into the next, would not have any man join himself carnally to a woman; nor would I have sons or daughters born of them. For if people would hold to barrenness, all God’s creatures would soon be gathered together [in heaven]. That is what I should like. Similarly, we have seen Pierre Clergue of Montaillou making use of contraception, perhaps magical. But how many people in the village of the yellow cross were capable of such refinements? In any case, the duty of barrenness was incumbent only on the goodmen, not on mere ‘believers’. So the peasants of Montaillou, even when they were sympathetic to heresy, continued to produce numerous children. There was enough land, especially pasture, to provide them with employment when they grew up. Moreover, Catalonia, which as Bélibaste said (ii.42) lacked neither pastures nor mountains for the sheep, welcomed surplus youth from Montaillou with open arms. They easily found jobs there as shepherds and muleteers. In these circumstances, why worry? A domus rich in children was a domus rich in manpower; in other words, rich, pure and simple. This explains the large number of sons produced by the big farming families of Montaillou – the Belots, the Maurys, the Martys and so on. Only the last generation of Clergues, wealthy enough not to have to descend to manual labour, were not interested in producing a large number of workers. So, both in theory and in practice, they could afford views favourable to contraception and hostile to marriage.
The large number of children produced by most Montaillou families were not immediately profitable. First they had to be brought up, fed and, to begin with, suckled.1 In rural circles it was rare to put a child out to nurse. Wet-nurses were employed only by the well-off nobility: one of the ladies of Chateauverdun, who joined the heretics, entrusted her child to a wet-nurse. At one stage of her career a peasant girl might quite naturally become a wet-nurse to noble infants: Rousse Gonaud, a girl from the mountains, was first servant maid to a nobleman, then wet-nurse to the wife of another nobleman. Betweenwhiles she must have been made pregnant. Subsequently she became the mistress of a village bayle, with whom she lived. She ended up as the lawful wife of a farmer.2
In Montaillou itself, as far as we know, wet-nurses were only resorted to by poor girls forced to get rid of their babies in order to work as servants. As we have seen, Raymonde Arsen transferred her baby from one country wet-nurse to another before going to take up employment at the Belots’. There she from time to time looked after a child of one of the Belot daughters.1 Anyhow the commercial demand for milk was not very great in Montaillou, and might sometimes be exceeded by supply. One day in about the year 1302, around Easter, Alazaïs Rives went to see Brune Pourcel, a poor, rather stupid bastard girl already referred to (i.382): Alazaïs told me to take my son Raymond to her house. I was nursing him at that time, and he was about half a year old.
‘In my ostal,’ said Alazaïs, ‘there is a woman from Razès who has too much milk …’
‘Never,’ I answered. ‘Her milk would be bad for my son.’
Finally, giving way to my neighbour’s insistence, I took my son to her house and there, indeed, I found a woman from Razès: she was sitting warming herself by the fire.
But apart from such special cases, it was usual for mothers to nurse their own babies in Montaillou, as in similar villages. This was true even among the richest farming families. The nursing period might be quite long. Perhaps children were not weaned until after they were two years old as with some peasant children in modern times. Sybille Pierre was the wife of a rich arable and sheep-farmer, and her son was still being fed at the breast at the age of one or two years (ii.17). Breast-feeding produced temporary barrenness, and thus caused longer intervals between births, but whether this was due to physiological processes or merely to sexual taboos during lactation we do not know.
After marriage, pregnancy was accepted as normal, natural and a thing to be desired. Outside marriage, feelings towards a prospective bastard were ambiguous but not necessarily devoid of affection. Pierre Clergue’s first impulse was to say, ‘I am a priest and I do not want a child.’ Béatrice’s answer: ‘What should I do if I become pregnant? I should be dishonoured.’ And then gradually their feelings change: the priest ends up by saying to his mistress, ‘After your father’s death, we’ll have a child’.2
In many Montaillou families, a child started its life as a Cathar foetus. It soon became possessed of a soul, and thus took on considerable value, including emotional significance. For, as the Albigensian Vulgate known among the peasants of the Pays d’Aillon said, ‘The world is full of old souls running madly about’. If these souls came from the body of someone who had been wicked, they immediately entered through the opening in the belly of any female animal – bitch, rabbit or mare – who had just conceived an embryo not yet supplied with a soul.1 But if the wandering soul came from the body of someone whose life had been innocent, it could enter into the womb of a woman, and take possession of a newly-conceived human foetus.
So, in Cathar Montaillou, a foetus was bound to be good since it was immediately provided with an innocent soul. This was one more reason why it should be loved by its mother from the womb. ‘But I am pregnant. What should I do with the fruit I bear, if I ran away with you to the heretics?’ said Béatrice de Planissoles to her steward (i.219). This sentiment was not exclusive to ladies nobly born. Alazaïs de Bordes, a simple peasant of Ornolac, says (i.193): The other day we were crossing the Ariège in a boat, and the river was in flood; we were very frightened of being wrecked and drowned. Especially me; for I was pregnant. The subsequent dialogue shows clearly that Alazaïs’s fear was not for herself but for her unborn child. Is it by chance that the Fournier Register mentions contraception but never deliberate abortion?2
In such conditions the birth of a child could become a matter of care and anxiety. But, culturally and emotionally, it was still felt as a fundamental happiness: Jacques Authié, in a homily delivered to Pierre Maury (iii. 130), makes the Devil say, ‘You will have children. And you will rejoice more for one child, when you have one, than for all the peace you now enjoy in Paradise.’ Satan is supposed to be speaking to angels in Heaven, doomed to fall. But what he says reflects the spontaneous attitude of the villagers, who were in favour of birth and friendly towards infants, an attitude against which official Catharism laboured in vain. Pierre Maury himself, and many others with him, knew that a baptism was a source of merriment and joy, transmuted into solid friendships (iii.185).
Babies in Ariège were made a great fuss of by their mothers from their earliest days. Raymond Roussel, a country steward, described clearly practices which were not regarded as new in the first half of the fourteenth century. Alicia and Serena were ladies of Chateauverdun. One of these ladies had a child in the cradle and she wanted to see it before leaving [she was going to join the heretics (i.221)]. When she saw it she kissed it; then the child began to laugh. She had started to go out of the room where the infant lay so she came back to it again. The child began to laugh again; and so on, several times, so that she could not bear to tear herself away from the child. Seeing this she said to her maidservant: ‘Take him out of the house.’
Her journey was to bring her to the stake.
Despite what some writers have said about love of children being a comparatively recent phenomenon, this was undeniably an ambiance of affection, and the death or even illness of a young child, or separation from it, could be a source of sorrow and real suffering for parents. Especially, of course, for the mother. In our village, says Pierre Austatz, bayle of Ornolac (i.202), there lived in her house a woman called Bartholomette d’Urs (she was the wife of Arnaud d’Urs, of Vicdessos). She had a young son, who slept with her in her own bed. One morning when she woke up she found him dead beside her. She started to weep and lament.
‘Do not weep,’ I said. ‘God will give the soul of your dead son to the next child you conceive, male or female. Or else his soul will find a good home somewhere else.’
For offering this easy consolation, the bayle of Ornolac was to spend eight years in prison, and then to be condemned to wear the double yellow cross (i.203, 553).
There are many examples in upper Ariège of the sorrow of country parents at the death of their offspring. It is true that within the framework of the domus system, love for children was not, in the last resort, entirely disinterested. Bélibaste suggested as much when exhorting Pierre Maury against remaining a bachelor (iii. 188). Alazaïs Azéma was more precise still, reporting on the feelings of Guillaume Benet, a farmer of Montaillou, on the loss of his son (i.321). When Raymond Benet, son of Guillaume Benet, died, I went after a fortnight to Guillaume Benet’s house. I found him in tears.
‘Alazaïs,’ he said, ‘I have lost all I had through the death of my son Raymond. I have no one left to work for me.’
All Alazaïs could say was: ‘Cheer up; there’s nothing we can do about it.’
But if a male child meant a strong right arm to Guillaume Benet, he also meant much more. Guillaume loved Raymond for himself. And he was somewhat consoled to think that Guillaume Authié had hereticated his son before he died. So the son was in fact happier than his father, left behind in this vale of tears: ‘I hope,’ said Guillaume, ‘that my son is in a better place than I am now.’
When Guillemette Benet of Montaillou lost a daughter and was weeping for her, Alazaïs Azéma tried to console her (i.320). ‘Cheer up, you still have some daughters left; and anyhow you can’t get the one that is dead back again.’
To which Guillemette replied: ‘I would mourn even more than I do for the death of my daughter; but, Deo gratias, I have had the consolation of seeing her hereticated on the night before her death by Guillaume Authié, who hurried here in a blizzard.’
Sincere as all this affection was, it was also ritualized, socialized and shared. So were the condolences offered to a bereaved parent by friends and neighbours. The difference there might be between a father’s and a mother’s love is shown in the story of the Pierre family, an episode which has the additional interest of dealing with a little girl less than one year old. Despite the infant’s extreme youth, it was undoubtedly the object of emotion. Raymond Pierre was a sheep-farmer in the village of Arques, a terminus on the migration route used by the people of Montaillou. He had one daughter, Jacotte, by Sybille his wife (iii.414–15). Jacotte, not yet a year old, was seriously ill, and her parents decided, so much did they love the child, against all the rules of heresy, to have her hereticated before she died. In theory it was not right to hereticate anyone so young: Jacotte did not have the understanding of good. But Prades Tavernier, the parfait who undertook the ceremony, was laxer than the Authiés and thought there was nothing to be lost by it.1 So he started to administer the consolamentum: He performed a lot of bows and elevations, and placed that rare object, a book, on the child’s head. Once these rites were accomplished, Raymond Pierre could say to his wife, ‘If Jacotte dies, she will be an angel of God. Neither you nor I, wife, could give our daughter as much as this heretic has given her.’
Full of joy and disinterested love, Raymond Pierre left the house to see Prades Tavernier on his way. Before going, the parfait told Sybille not to give the baby any milk or meat. If Jacotte lived, all she was to have was fish and vegetables (ii.414). For a child of that age, and in the dietetic conditions of the period, this was risky. In fact, what it amounted to was that after the father and the parfait left, Jacotte would be doomed to imminent death by a process similar to the endura, or final fast.
But there was a hitch. Sybille Pierre’s love for her little girl was essentially warm and physical, not spiritual and sublime like that of Raymond. So, relates Sybille, when my husband and Prades Tavernier had left the house, I could not bear it any longer. I couldn’t let my daughter die before my very eyes. So I put her to the breast. When my husband came back, I told him I had fed my daughter. He was very grieved and troubled, and lamented. Pierre Maury [Raymond Pierre’s shepherd] tried to console his master. He said to my husband, ‘It is not your fault.’
And Pierre said to my baby, ‘You have a wicked mother.’
And he said to me, ‘You are a wicked mother. Women are demons.’
My husband wept. He insulted and threatened me. After this scene, he stopped loving [diligere] the child; and he also stopped loving me for a long while, until later, when he admitted that he had been wrong. (Raymond Pierre’s change of heart occurred at the same time as all the inhabitants of Arques decided collectively to renounce Catharism.) My daughter Jacotte, Sybille concluded (ii.415), survived this episode for a year; and then she died.
All this shows that there was not such an enormous gap, as has sometimes been claimed, between our attitude to children and the attitude of the people in fourteenth-century Montaillou and upper Ariège. Another example is the case of Raymond Benet’s new-born son, who was not expected to live. Perhaps his mother was already dead. Guillemette Benet, who lived in the same village as her brother, tells the story (i.264). Raymond Benet of Ornolac had a new-born son who was dying. He sent for me when I was going to the woods to gather firewood, so that I could hold the dying child in my arms. So I did hold it from morning until evening, when it died.
There are, of course, some differences between our attitude to our children and the affection felt by the peasants and especially the women of Montaillou towards their offspring. But they probably loved their children just as intensely as we do, and perhaps even spoiled them too.1 Of course, parental love had to be divided up among a greater number of children than today. It also had to adapt itself to a higher rate of infant mortality. Lastly, many couples seemed to be comparatively indifferent to very young infants.2 But this indifference was less marked than has recently been claimed.3
The first stage of childhood in Montaillou and the neighbouring villages covered the period from birth to weaning. We do not know whether weaning took place between one and two years, or nearer the age of two. Nor do we know whether children were swaddled. A cradle is mentioned in connection with the child of a noble family in Chateauverdun (i.221). It is worth recalling that at a time when there were no perambulators or bottles, the links of dependence between infants and their mother, wet-nurse or the maidservant who looked after them, were much closer than they are nowadays. Infants were usually breast-fed, and in general spent much more time in their mother’s arms. For example, Guillemette Clergue says (i.335), One holiday I was standing in the square at Montaillou with my little daughter in my arms when my uncle Bernard Tavernier of Prades came up and asked me if I had seen his brother. Raymonde Arsen remarks (i.371), At a family reunion organized for the wedding of Raymond Belot, I was standing by the hearth holding in my arms the baby daughter of Alazaïs, Raymond’s sister. This dependence continued in other forms after weaning. It is probable that infants under a year old did not sleep in their parents’ bed for fear of their getting smothered. But children of over one or two might spend many nights in their parents’ or their mother’s bed. Sybille Pierre, the wife of a rich farmer, relates (ii.405): It was the time at which people generally go to bed. I myself was in bed with my daughter Bernadette, who was about five years old. We have just seen how Bartholomette d’Urs, a peasant woman, burst into tears on waking one morning to find beside her the corpse of her little son, who had died in the night (i.202).
Country children in general did not go to school; there were few schools and no reason why they should go to them. But there was one schoolboy in the area: Jean, who was under the tuition of the priest (i.243). The boy’s chief function was to act as Pierre Clergue’s messenger, or as go-between for his rendezvous. But in the little villages of the lowlands and the Ariège valley some schools functioned fairly regularly, catering for the sons and daughters of noblemen or leading citizens. The ecclesiastics who ran these establishments were often subjected to severe temptation by the pupils’ mothers (i.251–2). There were schools of a higher intellectual level in comparatively important towns such as Pamiers.
If the peasants had no access to schools, how was their culture handed down? First of all, through work performed in common. The boys would dig the turnips with their father and the girls would reap the corn with their mother. As they all laboured together, the older people would talk to the youngsters. Tongues were equally active around the family board. It was in his own house that the weaver Raymond Maury recounted the Cathar myth of the Fall to his children, who were shepherds. Children were often used to take messages, denounce people or supply information. This obliged them to take responsibility and exercise their memories.
Raymond Pierre, related Pierre Maury, sent a poor child to fetch me. The boy’s Christian name was Pierre; I don’t remember his surname. Pierre said to me: ‘Come to Raymond’s house. He wants you.’
Elsewhere Pierre Maury says (ii.39): A little boy showed me the house of the Moslem fortune-teller whom I wanted to consult on the subject of Guillemette Maury’s sheep.
Mengarde Buscailh relates: One day around Easter, when I came back from the fields to have the midday meal in the house where I lived with my husband and brother-in-law, I noticed that someone had been kneading dough in the trough. I asked a little girl of eight, called Guillemette, who came from Mérens and whose surname I do not know, ‘Who has been kneading dough?’
And the little girl, who lived with us, answered, ‘It was Brune, Bernard de Savignan’s wife, who was kneading bread for two men.’ One of the two men was none other than Prades Tavernier, the parfait.
Another instance of a youthful messenger being sent some distance and having to make use of his memory is given by Barthélemy Amilhac (iii. 129). The Monday after the Feast of St James, Béatrice de Planissoles sent a child from Belpech [in present-day Aude] to look for me, and he came to Mézerville, where I was then living [as serving priest]. And the child said to me, ‘A lady in Belpech who is your friend sent me to ask you to come and see her there.’
But I, said Barthélemy, couldn’t think of any lady I knew in Belpech. So I asked the child, ‘Can you describe the shape of the woman who sent you?’
And the child began to describe what the woman looked like. And I understood from his description that it must be Béatrice. So right away I went to Belpech, where I found Béatrice in her house near the château.
Béatrice was used to employing children as go-betweens. It was Jean, Pierre Clergue’s young pupil, who had earlier escorted her on a very dark night to the Church of Saint Peter in Prades, in the sanctuary of which the priest had installed a bed for them to make love in (i.243).
Children were usually sent to bed early. When a family had guests to dinner and then entertained them round the fire, the children were not to be seen. Bernadette, Raymond Pierre’s six-year-old daughter, was put to bed before the meal (iii.122, 129).
From birth to two years of age the documents refer to a child as infans, or more usually filius or filia. From two to twelve years, the word puer was applied generally. Towards thirteen or fourteen at the latest, the records switch to the term adulescens or juvenis. In Montaillou this corresponded to an occupational change. At twelve or soon after, Jean Pellissier, Jean Maury, Pierre Maury and Guillaume Guilhabert began to keep their fathers’ sheep, or those of an employer who took on the boy as an apprentice.1 Twelve years was also the age of reason, according to the Cathar missionaries. ‘It is at twelve years of age, and more especially at eighteen, that a man may have the intelligence of good and of evil and receive our faith,’ said Pierre Authié to Pierre Maury (iii. 124). Pierre Maury himself confirmed this point of view (iii. 143). Gaillarde, Guillaume Escaunier’s sister, and wife of Michel Leth, and Esclarmonde, his other sister, aged about twelve, were believers in the heretics.
The Inquisition rounded up everyone in Montaillou over the age of about twelve.
But although boys might enter a profession at this age, when girls grew to be twelve or so they did not become shepherdesses. In Occitania, unlike the Lorraine of Joan of Arc, all the shepherds were male. Sooner or later they would have to migrate with their sheep and that was not a woman’s job. But, of course, there was a rite of passage into adolescence for girls as well. When menstruation began, a mother would talk frankly to her daughter. Béatrice de Planissoles looked her daughter Philippa straight in the eye and asked her what was the matter (i.248). Philippa’s friends and relations then began to look for a husband for her.
In Prades d’Aillon, a bigger and more cheerful village (more advanced, too, for the people there played chess), young people of fifteen and over formed a specific age group, with their own dances and games at festival times. It may well be that the young men and women of Montaillou also formed one or two groups of their own. But under the stifling domus system, such groups could not have much independent existence. There was nothing like the confraternities of young people which flourished in Provence in the seventeenth century. Moreover, the girls married too young to remain long in such groups. As for the young men, after the age of eighteen they were soon incorporated in the group of adult males. This group, although divided against itself, was the predominant group in Montaillou.
When it came to old age, there was a different pattern for men and women. In their thirties, men were in their prime. In their forties, they were still strong. But after about fifty a man was old in those days, and his prestige, unlike that of an elderly woman, did not increase with time.
Old men were rarer than old women, and the few who did survive in Montaillou were not surrounded with the respect and affection lavished on such old ladies as Na Roqua, Guillemette ‘Belote’, Mengarde Clergue and many another stout old dame in the Pays d’Aillon or the Catalan diaspora. Old Pons Clergue had no authority over his son the priest, and though he might deplore, he could do nothing about his activities as an informer. When he died, Pons Clergue had long since ceased to be the head of his domus. Pons Rives too trembled before the grown-up son who had taken command of the ostal. When his daughter wanted to borrow a mule, he could not grant her request without asking his son’s permission (i.339–40).