The Fournier Register does not provide many statistics on mortality. Madame B. Vourzay has worked out the way twenty-five exiles in Catalonia met their death. None of them was old. Almost half were from Montaillou. All twenty-five lived in Catalonia between 1308 and 1323, the limits of our information about them. Out of the total of twenty-five, nine (36 per cent) died of some illness – a higher proportion than normal. One died in a work accident. Eight were arrested by the Inquisition, and of these two died at the stake. The other seven survived, but we do not know what became of them afterwards.1 If we concentrate on the twelve people out of this group who came from Montaillou, we find that four of them died of illness, four were arrested and four survived. But the rates and causes of mortality among the emigrants in Catalonia does not necessarily reflect the pattern among the people of Montaillou itself.
Unfortunately, no Catholic records were kept at that time which might enable us to see how death was distributed, by age, among the population as a whole. We have to make do with the partial data relating to the consolamentum, the Cathar ceremony administered to believers on their deathbeds. As far as I can tell, eleven people of Montaillou were ‘consoled’, or, as it says in the records, hereticated on their deathbed. We do not know the age of three of them – Raymond Banqui, Raymond Bar and Raymond Maurs. Five others were young or quite young and their names were as follows:
Guillemette Fauré, née Bar, Pierre Fauré’s young wife.
Esclarmonde Clergue, daughter of Bernard Clergue (the bayle’s namesake) and of Gauzia his wife; she fell ill and was hereticated in her father’s house where she subsequently died, in the presence of Guillaume and Raymond Belot and of Guillaume and Guillemette Benet, all stalwarts of local Catharism.
Alazaïs Benet, daughter of Guillemette Benet and young wife of Barthélemy d’Ax; mortally ill, she was hereticated in her mother’s house by Guillaume Authié, in the presence of Guillemette Benet and of Guillaume and Raymond Belot (i.473). She died during the night.
Raymond Benet, young son of Guillemette Benet (i.474). He too died in his father’s house, a few months after his sister. He was hereticated with his own full consent by Guillaume Authié, in the presence of Guillaume and Guillemette Benet, his father and mother, and of Guillaume and Arnaud Belot and Arnaud Vital (the latter three had escorted the parfait to the house).
Guillaume Guilhabert, a shepherd about fifteen years old. He had been spitting blood, and was hereticated in the presence of his mother, together with three other women of the village, and Guillaume Belot. Then there were three older, or definitely elderly people:
Guillaume Benet, husband of Guillemette Benet, who died in his own house ‘on the Feast of Saint Michael in September’, his daughter having died in the winter and his son at Whitsuntide. He was hereticated by Guillaume Authié in the presence of his wife Guillemette Benet and his son Bernard, and of Guillaume and Raymond Belot and Bernard Clergue. The ceremony took place in the part of the house where the cattle slept and where the sick man’s bed had been brought, probably for the warmth (i.474, 401).
Na Roqua, an old matriarch of Montaillou. She was seriously ill, and her heretication took place in the presence of Guillaume Belot, Guillaume and Raymond Benet, and Rixende Julia, who may have been related by marriage to the Benets (i.388). After Na Roqua had been hereticated, three of the village women (Brune Pourcel, Rixende Julia and Alazaïs Pellissier) watched over her deathbed. She refused to take food, and died after two days. Alazaïs Pellissier and Brune Pourcel prepared her for her shroud, and then she was buried in the graveyard of the local church.
Guillemette Belot, mother-in-law of Bernard Clergue, the bayle.1
Most of the people in this short list – five as against three – were still young. This confirms the suggestion, seen in the figures relating to the Catalan refugees, that illness took a heavy toll of young people in Montaillou.
A more complete count, including all those from Montaillou and other places who died a natural death and were hereticated at an age which can be roughly assessed, gives a proportion of eight ‘young’ to seven ‘old’. Thus Esperte Cervel of Tarascon saw nothing unusual in her own experience (ii.454). I had three children. Two of them were boys. They died in Lérida. And the third, Mathena, was about three when her brothers died. When my sons died, one was about eleven, the other about seven. The elder aied six or seven years ago. My husband died the same year. In Montaillou itself, Guillemette Benet lost her husband and two children within a year. Alazaïs Munier, the young fellow-sponsor of Guillaume Austatz, bayle of Ornolac, said (i.193), I lost four children in a very short time. In a very brief space Jeanne Befayt, her mother and her husband all died; the women were both struck down by infection (iii.213) after the man had been killed in a work accident. In Junac, a certain Fabrisse, whose surname is unknown, and her daughter nicknamed ‘Bonne femme’, who was hereticated and therefore could no longer have been a baby, both died in the same year, 1303 or thereabouts, in an epidemic, one at Epiphany and the other at the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin (iii.267–8). A number of deaths in upper Ariège between 1300 and 1305 seem to have been caused by infection, perhaps transmitted in time of famine and weakness.
Pierre Goubert tells us that in Beauvaisis under Louis XIV out of every four children born one died before reaching the age of one year, and another died between one and twenty-one. Thus infant and juvenile mortality combined amounted to 50 per cent. We have no such figures for Montaillou in the fourteenth century, and all we can say is that mortality among children, adolescents and young adults was probably high.
The Register does not reveal whether between 1300 and 1320 people in Montaillou died of hunger. It speaks only of exodus, not of death, as the consequence of food shortage. I left the country because of famine, said Esperte Cervel (ii.453). Because things were so dear, our family had no longer enough to live on.
On the other hand, the records do give evidence of epidemics. Several people might died almost simultaneously in the same family, especially in the early 1300s.1 But epidemics are never referred to as such. Perhaps it was not until after the wave of plagues after 1348 that the rural consciousness was gripped by the dread of contagion. The classification of illness was very elementary and based merely on the symptoms which affected different parts of the body – and, even then, usually the external parts. It was a matter of symptomatology rather than etiology. When her children died, Guillemette Benet was suffering from ‘ear-aches’. Raymonde Buscailh, according to her daughter-in-law, died of a ‘flux of the womb’. The shepherd Raymond Maurs fell ill after eating some chitterlings. He got a barber to bleed him, recovered slightly, walked fifteen kilometres, fell ill again and died a few days later. The young shepherd Guillaume Guilhabert was gravely ill and spitting blood. Guillemette Clergue says: I had the disease commonly called ‘avalida’ in my right eye. Aude Fauré of Murviel suffered from the falling sickness of Saint Paul, which may have been epilepsy or convulsionary hysteria. Raymonde, Bélibaste’s concubine, had a bad heart, and was threatened (by a Saracen soothsayer) with rabies and the falling sickness. The shepherd Bernard Marty, after spending a fortnight in the house of his employer Guillaume Castel, was ill with fever; no further details are given. Arnaud Sicre’s elderly aunt had gout and could not walk. The vocabulary of insult includes scrofula, fistulas of the thigh, ulcers and abscesses.
Skin diseases were rife and included the itch, ringworm, scabies, leprosy, St Anthony’s Fire and St Martial’s Fire, which could be treated at the sulphur baths at Ax-les-Thermes. They might even serve as a pretext for a pilgrimage to upper Ariège, theoretically in search of a cure, in fact in order to meet the parfaits. I would have liked to go to Sabarthès, to meet the goodmen in secret, says Bertrand de Taix, a noble of Pamiers and a long-term sympathizer with Catharism (iii.313). So I scratched my arms as hard as I could, as if I had scabies; and I lied to people and said, ‘I ought to go to the baths at Ax.’
But my wife [she was very anti-Cathar] said, ‘No, you’re not going to the baths.’
And she would say to people who came, ‘Don’t go praising the baths at Ax. It will make my husband want to go there.’
If anyone disappeared suddenly from the uplands, local rumour had three possible explanations for his flight: either he was in debt, or he was a heretic or he was a leper. In the latter case, he had to go down to Pamiers or Saverdun and enter one of the leper colonies there.
Doctors might visit Montaillou from time to time. Or patients would go down to consult them in the town. My daughter Esclarmonde had seen many doctors since she fell ill, but not one of them has cured her, said Gauzia Clergue, though she was only a simple peasant woman who dug her own turnips (iii.360–61). Having ruined herself for her daughter’s sake with doctors of the body, Gauzia decided to send for a doctor of the soul, a parfait.
The nearest ‘real’ doctor to Montaillou was Arnaud Teisseire, in Lordat. He acted as a kind of intellectual-of-all-work. He had patients as far away as Tarascon, but he also acted as a notary, ranging the countryside to make people’s wills, which he kept in an office which also served him as a bedroom. He was Pierre Authié’s son-in-law and was regarded in upper Ariège as a man who had had a good life and never failed to enjoy himself (ii.219). Nevertheless he did not do much to lower the mortality rate up in the mountains. The people of Montaillou resorted to a village healer, Na Ferreria of Prades d’Aillon, when they had something wrong with their eyes.
But it was not really illness that mattered in upper Ariège; that was only an epiphenomenon. What mattered was death. Death unadorned, without fine phrases, falling like an executioner’s knife, without warning – or at least without any warning recorded by our witnesses.1
In a region as divided as this one was, fanatical and contradictory religious convictions continued their battle right up to the gates of death. Dying Catholics would try to drive away any passing parfait, while he would do his best to hereticate them before they died. ‘Stop harassing me, you devils,’ Arnaud Savignan of Prades d’Aillon said three times to the over-zealous local Albigensians who tried to take advantage of his weakness and administer the consolamentum (ii.140). Jean Maury, a vacillating Catholic but not a Cathar, had to defend himself even more firmly against Guillemette Maury, who, when he was gravely ill, tried to have him ‘consoled’ by Bélibaste. She then intended to have him embark on the endura (ii.484). But Jean said to Guillemette: ‘It is for God to decide the day of my death, not me. Stop talking to me in this way or I shall have you taken [by the Inquisition].’
We have already seen how a dying Cathar sent away the priest who tried to administer the Eucharist to him on his deathbed (i.231). Guillemette Belot, though dying and enfeebled by the endura, cried out when she saw the priest of Camurac bringing her the Sacrament (i.462), ‘Sancta Maria, Sancta Maria, I can see the Devil.’ In upper Ariège, whether you were a Cathar or a Catholic, you were always the devil to somebody.
Death in Montaillou was, of course, attended by certain prescribed social activities. These mainly concerned the women, and were organized in terms of the domus system. They entailed ritual laments on the part of daughters and daughters-in-law when their mother or mother-in-law was dead or dying or even merely in danger. The Mediterranean lamentu is much older than Catharism, or even Christianity. But in Montaillou it was structured by the domus, and so did not include the women of the village as a whole. The parfaits tried to end this practice, which conflicted with their own salvationary myths. When Guillemette Belot, an old woman enfeebled by the endura, was on the brink of death, the village people expected to hear the ritual complaints of her daughters. But they heard nothing. Two women of the parish, Raymonde Testanière and Guillemette Azéma, expressed their astonishment (i.462). ‘If Guillemette Belot is so weak and near to death,’ they said, ‘how is it we do not hear her daughters weeping?’ To which Guillemette Benet replied: ‘Silly fools! Guillemette “Belote” doesn’t need to he wept for – her son-in-law has seen to it that she lacks for nothing.’
As we have seen, Bernard Clergue had his mother-in-law hereticated and saw that she entered upon the endura.
Sometimes the women’s wailing, which might of course be sincere, accompanied the mere prospect of death. Béatrice de Planissoles’s daughters, at the family ostal in Varilhes, set up a clamour when they learned that she was in danger of being arrested (i.257). The laments of daughters and daughter-in-law continued after the death and followed their mother to the graveyard.1 Mourning might be purely ritual, without tears, or genuine, with tears. In either case, the mourning was expressed in socialized forms. When my mother-in-law died, said Mengarde Buscailh (i.490), I went to the funeral and uttered loud laments. But my eyes were dry, for I knew that she had been hereticated before her death.
As elsewhere, women watched over the dying. They played a major role in preparing the dead for burial, and in preserving locks of hair and nail-parings from the corpse. After the burial, which took place soon after death and was attended by a large crowd, they would comment and gossip on the matter. The funeral itself was an illustration of the contrast between men and women in upper Ariège. The toll for the dead was different according to whether the deceased was a man or a woman. Local Catharism, which was very anti-feminist, tried to make death into a masculine affair. We have already seen how the people who attended the consolamentum, apart from the sick person and the parfait, were often men, pious local Cathar militants, such as the Belot, Clergue and Benet brothers. But one day a good Catholic rounded on the son of a Cathar doctor and told him that women too had a right to resurrection after death (ii.202).
Death also offered an opportunity to remind people of rank. Mengarde Clergue, who was ‘rich’, was buried in the church, under the altar of the Virgin of Montaillou. But the vulgar herd were buried in the graveyard outside the walls, which was occasionally allowed to lie fallow to prepare space for further batches of dead.
Over and above the social structures surrounding death, there was the primordial anguish which haunted the dying person and his nearest and dearest. This dread was not concerned so much with death in itself as with salvation in the after-life.
For good Catholics (and there were such, even in Montaillou, though the Fournier Register is not concerned with them), to make a good end was to throw oneself on the will of God. We have seen how Jean Maury the shepherd, almost on the brink of death, refused to lend himself to the virtual suicide of the endura.1
The Cathars of Montaillou were not very different from the Catholics when it came to preoccupation with salvation. They differed about means rather than ends; about earthly intercessors rather than about the heavenly object to be attained. According to Pierre Maury, the mendicant friars could not save souls. All they were fit for, after having given a man the last sacraments, was to sit down at table and guzzle (ii.29, 30). Pierre Maury concluded: ‘Let us resort to the parfaits! They at least can save souls.’ The same belief is repeated on every page of the Fournier Register, whenever it is a question of consolamentum or endura. And the parfaits were always there to supply the demand whatever the weather, except in heavy rain.2
So the peasants of Montaillou were able to prepare themselves consciously for imminent death, on condition that illness left them a minimum of awareness. They accepted in a spirit of responsibility the risks inherent in the consolamentum, in other words, the prospect of a painful endura which added to the natural suffering of illness the pangs of hunger and, for those who were toughest and held out longest, of thirst.3
Raymond and Guillaume Benet, son and husband respectively of Guillemette Benet (i.474), both willingly agreed to be ‘consoled’, and, if they survived, to ‘endure’ on their deathbeds. But in each case a mercifully rapid death supervened: both died during the night after being ‘consoled’ by Guillaume Authié.
Guillemette Belot and Na Roqua, old peasant women of Montaillou, were not so lucky. But they were equal to their ordeal. In the middle of her endura, Guillemette Belot refused the help of a priest who brought the Eucharist (i.462). Na Roqua held out heroically against hunger and thirst. Fifteen or seventeen years ago, said Brune Pourcel (i.388), one dusk, at Easter, Guillaume Belot, Raymond Benet (the son of Guillaume Benet) and Rixende Julia, of Montaillou, brought Na Roqua to my house in a bourras [a rough piece of canvas]; she was gravely ill and had just been hereticated. And they said to me: ‘Do not give her anything to eat or drink. You mustn’t!’
That night, together with Rixende Julia and Alazaïs Pellissier, I sat up with Na Roqua. We kept on saying to her, ‘Speak to us! Say something!’
But she would not open her lips. I wanted to give her some broth made of salt pork, but we could not get her to open her mouth. When we tried to do so in order to give her something to drink, she clenched her lips. She remained like this for two days and two nights. The third night, at dawn, she died. While she was dying, two night birds commonly called gavecas [owls] came on to the roof of my house. They hooted and when I heard them I said: ‘The devils have come to carry off the late Na Roqua’s soul!’1
Equally edifying was the deathbed of Esclarmonde Clergue of Montaillou. She was the daughter of Bernard Clergue, the bayle’s namesake, and of his wife Gauzia, a peasant couple. While Esclarmonde was still young she married a certain Adelh of the village of Comus in Ariège. Guillaume Benet, godfather and protector of the young woman and a fellow-sponsor of Gauzia, said: It is a good marriage, and Esclarmonde has made a good beginning. But unfortunately Esclarmonde fell seriously ill. So, as was the custom, she came back to her father’s domus to die. Her bed was put by the fire in the kitchen; her mother tended her devotedly and slept with her at night while the father slept alone in the bedroom next door. Gauzia loved her daughter, but in the end she wanted God to take her, for she had ruined herself paying for medicine and doctors.
As Esclarmonde’s godfather, Guillaume Benet regarded himself as responsible for her salvation, and he persuaded Gauzia to have her hereticated. All that remained was to ask for the young woman’s consent. She gave it willingly. Too weak to speak much, she lifted up her arms towards her godfather. The parfait Prades Tavernier was, with some difficulty, sent for. As always, the heretication ceremony was attended by men and women of the Belot and Benet clans. The consolamentum took place in the kitchen on a Friday evening, at the time when people were usually in their first sleep. Esclarmonde’s father, snoring in the next room, did not know what was going on. Raymond Belot, following the rule, brought a wax candle with him, so there was no need to light the kitchen fire in order to be able to see. It was Lent, and the room where Esclarmonde lay dying was cold. But the well-being of the soul was more important than that of the body. The consolamentum was administered and the parfait was rewarded with a tip (iii.364–5); he then left. There now arose the problem of the endura. Gauzia Clergue’s reactions were the normal reactions of a loving mother. She protested against the masculine rigours of a fast which, in the case of her daughter, would mean suicide.
‘Do not give your daughter anything more to eat or drink, even if she asks for it,’ said Raymond Belot (iii.364).
‘If my daughter asks me for food or drink, I shall give it to her,’ said Gauzia.
‘In that case you will be acting against the interests of Esclarmonde’s soul,’ she was told.
Fortunately the question did not arise. Esclarmonde Clergue died the next day, towards the hour of terce, without asking for food or drink. Was this due to heroism? Or to weakness? We do not know. But before her consolamentum and death, the young woman showed a touching concern for her salvation.
A similar concern, similarly tempered by a mother’s love, is to be found in the case of Guillaume Guilhabert, a young shepherd of Montaillou.1 At fifteen, an age when most young shepherds were scrambling over the mountains more nimbly than their fathers, Guillaume Guilhabert had to leave his flock. He was spitting blood; perhaps he had tuberculosis. He took to his bed, where friends older than he was, such as Guillaume Belot and Raymond Benet, both Cathars, had a strong influence over him. Guillaume Belot, a militant Albigensian, was connected in a number of ways with the Guilhabert domus, which welcomed the influence of his strong personality and of the Belots in general. The links between the two families were reinforced, as was usual in Montaillou, by fellow-sponsorship and, indirectly, by concubinage. Guillaume Belot was the fellow-sponsor of Arnaud Fauré, recently married to Alazaïs Guilhabert, young Guillaume Guilhabert’s sister (i.429). Alazaïs herself, in her giddy youth, just before her marriage to Arnaud, had been the mistress of the shoemaker Arnaud Vital, great friend and frequenter of the Belot brothers. Arnaud Vital was to be an ideological as well as a sexual link between the Belots and Guilhaberts (i.413).
All the circumstances conspired to bring about Guillaume Guilhabert’s heretication. He was already very much weakened by illness. (Incidentally, his family in general seem to have been afflicted by bad health. Guillemette, Guillaume’s sister and the wife of Jean Clement of Gébetz, was also ill in bed in her father’s domus, having left her husband’s ostal (i.329). She was sleeping in the Guilhaberts’ kitchen, on a bed not far from her brother Guillaume’s deathbed. And her baby was sleeping with her!) Guillaume Belot did all he could to persuade young Guillaume to be ‘consoled’. Alazaïs, Arnaud Fauré’s wife, also wanted her brother to be hereticated, both because of her own beliefs and because it was a way of ending a family quarrel between her husband and her father, Jean Guilhabert. Jean had not handed over Alazaïs’s dowry. Arnaud Fauré supported the pleas of his wife, Allemande Guilhabert (his mother-in-law) and Guillaume Belot (his fellow-sponsor). But the mother, Allemande Guilhabert, though she loved her son dearly, was also thinking of the future of her domus, which would be endangered if her son’s consolamentum was betrayed to the Inquisition.
‘Comrade [socie],’ said Guillaume Belot to Guillaume Guilhabert (i.422–3), who was visibly growing weaker, ‘would you like me to go and get a doctor to save your soul?’
‘Yes,’ answered Guillaume, ‘I should like that very much. Go and find a good Christian who will receive me into his faith and into his sect, and who will help me to make a good end.’
‘My son,’ said Allemande, ‘do not do that; it’s enough that I should lose you, for I have no other son. I don’t want to lose all my possessions as well because of you.’
‘Mother,’ said Guillaume, respectfully addressing his mother as ‘vous’ though she addressed him as ‘tu’, ‘I beg you, let a good Christian come and save my soul.’
‘My son, do not do it!’
‘Mother, I implore you, agree to what I ask; do not put any obstacles in the way.’
Finally Allemande gave in. Guillaume Belot told her that thanks to the powerful protection of Pierre Clergue the priest, who was secretly a Cathar, the Inquisitors would not bother any people in Montaillou who were involved in heretication (i.414).
So Guillaume Guilhabert was ‘consoled’ by the parfait Prades Tavernier in the presence of all his relatives – his sisters, his mother and his brother-in-law. He died soon afterwards. Prades Tavernier was rewarded with a jar of oil and a few sheepskins.
Na Roqua, Guillaume Guilhabert and others like them extended the frontiers of courage. But such idealism caused tension. As we have seen, some of the women of Montaillou put up a certain amount of protest: ‘Am I to let my child die of hunger?’ ‘If my son’s heretication is discovered, shall I lose everything I possess?’ But Catharism was very strong in Montaillou, and elsewhere defection from the ideal was even more marked. Villages like Quié, Arques, Junac and even Prades were not so united in their heresy. Some individuals there might be temporarily won over to the consolamentum, but they afterwards rebelled against the rigours of the endura. As we have seen in the case of Sybille Pierre of Arques, mothers were particularly apt to protest (ii.414, 415). And a league away from Montaillou, in the village of Prades, when Mengarde Buscailh’s two- or three-month old baby was very ill and her brother-in-law, Guillaume Buscailh, suggested that the child should be ‘consoled’ and then subjected to the endura ‘so that he should become an angel’ (i.499, 219; iii.144), Mengarde replied, ‘I will not refuse my child the breast, as long as he is still alive.’
At Ax-les-Thermes the mother of Guillaume Escaunier, a farmer, was given the consolamentum and then consigned to the endura. This was her children’s doing, and she rebelled against it (ii.15, 16). She was a farmer, and loved meat more than heaven (iii. 143). She demanded food and insulted the daughter who thought it her duty to refuse it. At Junac, Bernard Marty, seriously ill, was ‘consoled’ by Guillaume Authié and managed to last out through the endura for two days and two nights, taking nothing but water. But on the third day he gave up. His brother and sister, who had been supervising his fast, also yielded and let him have bread, wine and meat (iii.264–6).
Sometimes, when the demands of heresy were too rigorous, a Catholic death seemed to offer a solution. Mengarde Buscailh considered it for a moment for her baby. And Raymonde, Mengarde’s mother-in-law, was besieged on her deathbed by the parfait and the priest alternately (i.494–507).
To return to Montaillou itself, all the cases of heretication known to us among countrymen and countrywomen, young and old, show the same attitude towards death. The main problem is that of salvation; the dread of annihilation, as such, does not seem to arise. Sometimes the concern with the soul’s salvation is socialized, as in the case of Guillaume Guilhabert, who was hereticated in the midst of his friends and relations. In the case of Na Roqua, the struggle for salvation was apparently carried on in solitude. This attitude to death was cultural in origin, emanating from the group of domus, and under the virtually collective pressure of the villagers, Prades Tavernier was even forced to break the Cathar rule and give the consolamentum to people no longer in possession of their faculties and even to infants.
But while this concern with salvation was both cultural and collective, it was also Christian, and even Catholic in the traditional sense of the term. And this despite the difference in the choice of mediators. These country folk were no Huguenots to speak direct to God for themselves. They needed a mediator, a priest for those who remained orthodox Catholics, a goodman for those who no longer had confidence in the rectors and Minorite friars they considered to be corrupt. If possible, everyone, Cathar and Catholic alike, died surrounded by the members of his domus and of his family. The great thing was not to die alone – and to be saved.