For information about the mental outlook of the peasants of Montaillou the Fournier Register, though not entirely comprehensive, is of outstanding value. One reason for this is the fact that it focuses on one village, though at the same time it throws important corroborative light on neighbouring parishes. Another reason for the Register’s importance is sociological: the Cathar heresy, one of the reasons for Fournier’s inquiries, was no longer, in the years 1300–20, an urban or noble phenomenon. It had withdrawn into the country, among the peasant people of the mountains. There it hid and survived, fostered by an anti-clericalism exacerbated by the growing burden of tithes. Catharism here existed in a state of hibernation because of a tradition of cultural transmission by which children took over their parents’ ideology. Because of this, for a quarter of a century Catharism experienced a modest revival in the country which would have been impossible in the towns, vigilantly watched over by the mendicant orders, the Minorites and the myrmidons of the Inquisition. In this rural concentration the Albigensian heresy provides an opportunity for the study not of Catharism itself – that is not my subject – but of the mental outlook of the country people. The concentration of heterodoxy among the peasants was very marked at the beginning of the fourteenth century: so much so that those engaged in non-agricultural activities, especially artisans, often regarded as the supporters par excellence of new ideas, only occasionally played this role in Montaillou and other villages in the Comté de Foix. The shoemaker Arnaud Sicre, who makes the best shoes in the world out of a single piece of leather (ii.184), was only a false Cathar, though a genuine informer. As for the weaver Prades Tavernier, who became a parfait, he chose this dangerous career partly because, among other reasons, he was tired of weaving (fatigatus de texando).1 But between 1300 and 1320 in upper Ariège, heresy was no longer the province of weavers and spinners; it had become, like cheese, a product of the land. It was also encountered often among blacksmiths’ families, such as those of the Cervels and the Martys in Tarascon and Junac. Although Bélibaste might describe as gavets (mountain people from the north) the naive believers in the idols and miracles of the Roman faith, it was (apart from a few country artisans who did act as leaders) peasants like himself, shepherds like Pierre Maury, and important peasant domus like those of the Benets, the Belots, the Forts and the Clergues, who together provided the social soil on which heresy experienced its last flowering. And this last flowering acts as a kind of photographic developer, revealing the mental attitudes of a whole rural community.
It acts all the more strongly because in Montaillou itself, from 1300 to 1320, the heretics contaminated the major part of the population. Elsewhere, in other ‘infected’ villages – in Sabarthès, in Capcir and in the southern Narbonnais – the heretics were only a minority, sometimes a very small one. Even so they might polarize the general anti-clerical frustration and thus influence the community as a whole.
So this entire peasant culture is refracted or at the best reflected by the Fournier Register. There is no need to underestimate this evidence because those who provided it were mere peasants. As we have seen, the word ‘peasant’ might be used in moments of anger as an insult, but the Register as a whole shows the country folk as by no means stupid, fond of abstract thought and even of philosophy and metaphysics. We see them conversing quite freely with heretic missionaries and jurists from the town, in exchanges which bring out the agility of Occitan speech and, despite differences in wealth, the lack of social distance between the countryman on the one hand and, on the other, the nobleman, the priest, the merchant and the master craftsman, in a world where manual labour, especially craftsmanship, was not despised.1 (Craftsmen acted as cultural intermediaries and interlocutors in general between the peasants and other, higher social groups such as the nobles, the legal profession and the merchants.) Moreover, even between themselves the villagers were always talking and discussing things, in the fields, at mealtimes and above all around the fire at night, sometimes until cockcrow.
It was a very live culture despite, or perhaps because of, the attacks, the searches and the round-ups of the Inquisitor. But it was endangered when it emigrated to the towns of Catalonia, for there it was menaced not so much by harassment pure and simple as by disintegration as the result of distance, solitude and the dispersal of the faithful. These were in danger of getting stuck there and growing old without young children and sometimes without resources. The danger of deculturation came above all from the blandishments of the surrounding society, steeped in Catholicism. The younger generation of emigrants, born in the old country but brought up in Catalonia, were not immune from these rival attractions and sometimes engaged in bitter conflict against their parents, even descending to blows, a state of affairs which would have been unthinkable in upper Ariège. Peasant Catharism was rapidly eroded in Catalonia, threatened by a radically different ambiance and by the urbanization of the emigrants.1 So it is in Montaillou itself that we can best study the mentality of its people in all its genuine freshness.
How far was cultural transmission in Montaillou and other villages of the same type due to books and writing? The preaching of the Authiés, decisive for Montaillou, was essentially based on the influence of books.
Pierre and Guillaume Authié, says the peasant Sybille Pierre (ii.403), were clerks; they knew the law [as notaries]; they had wives and children; they were rich. One day, Pierre, in his house, was reading a certain passage in a book. He told his brother Guillaume, who happened to be present, to read the passage.
After a moment, Pierre asked Guillaume: ‘How does it strike you, brother?’
And Guillaume answered: ‘It seems to me that we have lost our souls.’
And Pierre concluded: ‘Let us go, brother; let us go in search of our souls’ salvation.’
So they got rid of all their possessions and went to Lombardy, where they became good Christians; there they received the power of saving the souls of others; and then they returned to Ax-les-Thermes.
We can only guess what the book was that lay behind the Authiés’ Cathar vocation. But one thing is certain: in the legal circles which gave rise to the economic and juridical renaissance of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, books were not entirely absent. There were even small libraries, some of them incubating heresy. The spread of the use of paper and the wide written use of the Occitan language could only favour these dangerous tendencies, also stimulated by the professional activity of the notaries, among them the Authié clan which exercised so much influence in Montaillou.
Fourteen years ago, related in 1320 Pierre de Gaillac of Tarascon-sur-Ariège (ii. 196), once employed as a clerk by Arnaud Teisseire, doctor at Lordat and son-in-law of Pierre Authié, I lived for half a year in the house of Arnaud Teisseire, writing out the contracts deposited in his office; one day when I was looking through his papers to find his books of notes, I found a certain book written on paper in the vulgar tongue and bound in old parchment. I spent some time reading it. In it I found arguments and discussions in the vulgar tongue concerning the theories of the Manichean heretics and of the Catholics. Sometimes the book agreed with the views of the Manicheans and disagreed with those of the Catholics; and sometimes the opposite. While I was reading the book, my employer, Master Arnaud Teisseire, came in; suddenly, and in a fury, he snatched the book out of my hands; he hid it; and during the following night I heard him beating his wife and Guillaume, his bastard son, because I had managed to find the book. Whereupon, blushing and ashamed, I went back home to Tarascon-sur-Ariège. The third day Master Arnaud came to fetch me; and took me back with him.
This passage reveals the danger inherent in books themselves. Some peasants ended up thinking that everything which was written down must be heresy. One night, said the stock-farmer Michel Cerdan (iii.201), during the night before full moon, I got up before dawn, in summer, to lead my cattle to pasture; I saw some men in a meadow behind the house of Arnaud Teisseire reading something written, by the light of the moon; I am sure they were heretics.
In the region of Aude and Ariège there was a small ‘socio-economic base’ for the making of books. Leaving aside Pamiers, which was an intellectual centre, quite unimportant villages like Belpech (in present-day Aude) and Merviel (Ariège) might contain a parchment-maker or a ‘scriptor’ of books (i.256; ii.91). Small as their production was, it sufficed, through the agency of the goodmen, to ‘infect’ Sabarthès and the Pays d’Aillon. The process was speeded up when paper arrived to supplement parchment. So there were some links between learning and popular culture, and these were helped by the circulation of a few books, though of course such interaction was much slower and more fortuitous than nowadays.
Nevertheless, books remained rare and precious. The respect felt for them by the illiterate people of the village paralleled their touching reverence for learning and for people who were educated. Guillemette Maury of Montaillou, exiled in Catalonia, was overcome with admiration for the parfait Raymond Issaura of Larcat (ii.63): He can preach very well, he knows many things about our faith. Urged on by Guillaume Bélibaste, she actually adored the Cathar Bible itself, composed by God in Heaven.1 And so a goodman without his books was a soldier without his gun. The parfait Raymond de Castelnau – he was about forty, tall, of a ruddy complexion, white-haired and with a Toulouse accent – told the shepherds of Montaillou how sorry he was because I have left my books at Castelsarrasin (ii.475).
One of the reasons why books were so highly regarded was that almost no one had access to them. Apart from the goodmen themselves, only the priests owned or borrowed books or were able to read them. The priest Barthélemy Amilhac owned a book of hours which, when he was in prison, earned him the mockery of the Albigensian Bernard Clergue (ii.283). it was this book that Barthélemy thought of pawning or selling to finance his flight to Limoux with his mistress (i.247). Pierre Maury met a Gascon priest, of whom all we know is that he came from a rich family, was thirty years old, had grey-green eyes and brown hair and owned the book of the faith of the heretics bound in red leather (ii.188, 383, 483, 484). In Junac, a village of peasant farmers and mountain blacksmiths, the perpetual vicaire, Amiel de Rives, possessed a book of homilies, or at least read such a book, though it might have belonged to his parish church (iii.7–10). He extracted from it heretical views which he subsequently used in his sermons, in the presence of his parish priest, the local lord, and a large number of his parishioners. In Montaillou itself part of the prestige and charismatic power of the priest Pierre Clergue derived from the fact that for some time he had in his possession a ‘calendar’ called, again, the book of the heretics, or book of the holy faith of the heretics, lent to him by Guillaume Authié (i.315, 375; i.292; ii.504). The various names by which this one book was referred to suggests that it was some kind of calendar ‘followed or preceded, within the same binding, by a short edifying text’.1 The popular literature of the early eighteenth century was to include many ‘little blue books’ which similarly mingled calendar, almanac and religious text. At all events, this one book, part of the circulating library of the Authié brothers which contained three volumes (i.375, n.159), did not remain long with the priest. After giving various public lectures from it around the fire in people’s homes, Pierre Clergue returned the book through Guillaume Belot to its rightful owners. But its temporary presence in the Clergue ostal was an event in the village of Montaillou, and attracted the attention of four witnesses, among them Raymonde Arsen, an illiterate servant maid. The shepherd Jean Maury, for his part, suggests that it was this ‘calendar’ which brought about the complete conversion to Catharism of the four Clergue brothers, the priest chief among them (iii.504). Indeed, the impact of such a book could not have been negligible in the house of Bernard Clergue, generally regarded in Montaillou as a learned man (i.302). For his brother the priest, who by definition had a certain amount of intellectual equipment, the influence of the written word was something which went without saying.
Sometimes other books circulated among the people of Montaillou, thanks to goodmen such as the ex-weaver Prades Tavernier. One day, says Guillemette Clergue (i.340–41), I intended to take my mule to the fields to collect turnips; but first I had to give it some hay. So I went into the barn where my mother kept hay and straw, to get some. But I hid from my brother, for he might stop me. And right at the top of the said barn I saw Prades Tavernier sitting: by the rays of the sun, he was reading in a black book the length of someone’s hand. Prades, taken by surprise, got up as if he meant to hide, and said: ‘Is that you, Guillemette?’
And I answered: ‘Yes, Monsieur, it’s me.’
But the reading of suspicious books was not only practised in solitude in Montaillou. Now and then the goodmen would share the benefits with the illiterate peasants around the fire of their domus. One evening, said Alazaïs Azéma (i.315), widow and peddler of cheese, at the time when I used to frequent the heretics, I went into the house of Raymond Belot not knowing that there were heretics there that day. In the house, sitting by the fire, I found the heretics Guillaume Authié and Pons Sicre; also present were Raymond, Bernard and Guillaume Belot, the three brothers, together with their mother, Guillemette ‘Belote’. Guillaume Authié the heretic was reading a book and also speaking to those present … He referred to Saint Peter, Saint Paul and Saint John, the Apostles; so I sat down on a bench beside Guillemette; the Belot brothers were sitting on another bench; and the heretics on a third. Until the end of the sermon.
In slightly larger, more urban and more distinguished villages than Montaillou there were sometimes, beside the priest and the parfait, some ordinary laymen who were literate and could read Occitan or even Latin. Nineteen or twenty years ago, said Raymond Vayssière of Ax-les-Thermes (i.285), I was sunning myself beside the house I then owned in Ax (I later sold it to Allemande, the mistress of the present priest at Junac); and four or five spans away, Guillaume Andorran was reading aloud from a book to his mother Gaillarde. I asked: ‘What are you reading?’
‘Do you want to see?’ said Guillaume.
‘All right,’ I said.
Guillaume brought me the book, and I read: ‘In the beginning was the Word….
It was a ‘Gospel’ in a mixture of Latin and Romance, which contained many things I had heard the heretic Pierre Authié say. Guillaume Andorran told me that he had bought it from a certain merchant.
The number of books in circulation in the fourteenth century was of course infinitely smaller than in the eighteenth. But the contrast between town and country later noted by Nicolas Rétif was already marked. In the local town of Pamiers the homosexual Arnaud de Verniolles read Ovid; there were Jewish refugees, Waldensian residents and schoolmasters, each with his own small but daring library. But only a few works of edification, Catholic in the lowlands, Cathar in the mountains, ever penetrated as far as the villages. And indeed it was the new presence of the occasional Albigensian volume that encouraged the modest triumphs of heresy in upper Ariège.
In Montaillou there were several strata of literacy. At the top there was a literate and ‘charismatic’ élite, whose only representatives were the Authiés and a few other parfaits like Issaura or Castelnau who circulated among the Catalan diaspora. These men had access to what Jacques Authié called the double scripture: the bad scripture which emanated from the Roman Church, and the good scripture, the scripture which saved, known to the goodmen and proceeding from the Son of God (iii.236; ii.504).
A literate élite, constituting the second stratum, knew something of Latin but possessed no specific charisma. The Register contains quite good descriptions of this élite in villages other than Montaillou but similar to it: in Goulier (Ariège) one Bernard Franc, a farmer (i.352), who planted his millet just the same as everyone else, was also a clerk in minor orders and knew some Latin. One Sunday four years ago, said Raymond Miégeville of Goulier (i.351), Mass had just been said in the church of Saint Michael in Goulier. I had remained behind in the sanctuary by the altar, together with Arnaud Augier, Guillaume Seguela, Raymond Subra, Bernard Maria and Bernard Franc, all of Goulier. Then Bernard Franc and Arnaud Augier, who were clerks, began to argue in Latin; and the rest of us, the laymen, whose names I have just given, could not understand what they were saying to one another. Suddenly, after the discussion in Latin, Bernard Franc started to speak in the vulgar tongue; and he said: ‘There are two Gods! One good, the other bad.’
We protested.
Thus for a peasant like Raymond Miégeville the distinction between Latin and the vulgar tongue corresponded quite simply to the contrast between cleric and layman. Similarly, in Ax-les-Thermes, the local people assumed that the priest was able to write (in Latin) to his bishop (ii.358). The same was true in Montaillou for Pierre Clergue the priest, and his successor or substitute, Raymond Trilh (ii.239).
Below the latinist clerics, who might well be only ordinary farmers, there was another cultural level – that of the more cultivated laymen, able to read a text so long as it was written in the vulgar tongue, Occitan. These people were described as sine litteris, without letters (i.e. Latin letters). Ordinary people regarded them as distinctly inferior to the Latinists. Witness the condescending tone in which the sheep-farmer Raymond Pierre speaks of the ex-weaver Prades Tavernier (ii.416; i.100), elevated to the rank of parfait though no one was very sure that he had the requisite knowledge. Pierre, Guillaume and Jacques Authié, said Raymond Pierre, are wise men; many people are very fond of them. Anyone who makes them presents does himself good. So the Authiés are overwhelmed with presents, and lack for nothing. On the other hand, André Prades Tavernier is not so highly regarded; he is ignorant of letters. He has much less knowledge and fewer friends than the Authiés. That is why he is poor; so people have to give him presents in order that he may have clothes, books and all the rest.
A final barrier separated the few individuals who were literate in the vulgar tongue from the common herd of illiterates. This barrier, too, was a cultural reality, but it appears not to have caused friction or to have wounded anyone’s pride: the people on both sides of the frontier all really belonged to the same world.
But the number of actual illiterates raises problems about the transmission of ideas derived from books. Out of some 250 inhabitants in Montaillou, no more than four were definitely literate;1 even an ex-châtelaine like Béatrice was illiterate, unlike her daughters. She was unable to write love-letters to her sweetheart, who knew how to read and write, and was reduced to sending him messages by word of mouth through a little boy.
All this being so, the purely oral transmission of books was of supreme importance. Out of some dozens of heretical meetings that we know of in Montaillou and elsewhere, only two are clearly seen to have been held by parfaits actually using books. The other meetings were entirely ‘verbal’, the parfait speaking to the believers and sympathizers without any reference to written matter. Most of the time, books only appeared at Montaillou in order to be placed for a few minutes on the head of someone dying, in the last stages of the consolamentum. Outside Montaillou there is evidence of books being used as objects upon which witnesses, friends or fellow-conspirators pledged their truthfulness.1 In the absence of written records the memory, both visual and auditory, was highly developed among the people of Montaillou. Hence also the importance of preaching and of eloquence in general. When you have heard the goodmen speak, said Raymond Roussel (i.219), steward of the château of Montaillou, you can no longer do without them, you are theirs for ever. Pierre Authié, like his son Jacques, was said to have the mouth of an angel, though their pupil, Guillaume Bélibaste, was thought to be completely undistinguished in this respect (ii.406, 28–9).
There were other connections between what was written and what was oral. For example, an idea in circulation in peasant and artisan circles of upper Ariège asserted that the world was eternal. There was of course a basis for this notion in folklore, but it also owed something to written culture, both literary and philosophical, retransmitted to the people by such instructors as the quarrier Arnaud de Savignan of Tarascon-sur-Ariège, who flouted Christianity by claiming that the world had no beginning and would have no end. He quoted two sources: the local proverb about men always sleeping with other men’s wives, and the teaching of his master, Arnaud Tolus, overseer of the schools at Tarascon (i.163, 165). Tolus’s teaching was probably based on books.
Another example is the way the influence of the troubadours was passed on. According to the Fournier Register, though this evidence is only negative, Montaillou and similar villages were not directly affected and, apart from noblemen’s castles, troubadour influence is seen only in Pamiers. But even in this urban context poems were transmitted chiefly by word of mouth: people whispered Pierre Cardenal’s cobla to one another in the choir of the church at Pamiers (iii.319).
Attitudes and ideas were also transmitted directly: from father to son, mother to daughter, aunt to nephew, or older brother or cousin to younger brother or cousin and so on. Pierre Maury remarks (iii. 174): My father’s house in Montaillou was destroyed three times for heresy; and there is no question of my making up for it; I must remain faithful to the beliefs of my father. Similarly Jean Maury, Pierre’s brother, says (ii.470): I was then twelve years old, and looked after my father’s sheep. One evening, going back to my father’s house, I found sitting by the fire my father, my mother, my four brothers and my two sisters. In the presence of my mother and brothers and sisters my father said to me: ‘Philippe d’Alayrac and Raymond Faur are good Christians and goodmen. They are men of good faith. They do not lie.’
Another instance of a parent passing on religious attitudes to his child is offered by the case of Pierre Maury and his proposed marriage, later, to a little girl at that time aged six.
‘And how do you know,’ asked Pierre (iii.122), ‘that Bernadette, when she is grown up, will have the understanding of good?’
‘The little girl’s father,’ answered Bernard Bélibaste, ‘will bring her up so well that, with the help of God, she will have the understanding of good.’
Guillaume Austatz was won over to heretical ideas partly through the influence of his mother, who had been subject to direct propaganda on the part of Pierre Authié (i.203–04). Mother and son used to discuss the Cathar missionary’s ideas during long evenings round the fire, or on the way to and from Carcassonne. And many others, like Jean Pellissier and Vuissane Testanière, had been exposed to heterodox influences on the part of an aunt, a mother, a husband and so on (i.461, 469; ii.86, 87).
Generally speaking, cultural transmission rarely operated through a peer group. As we have seen, it is doubtful whether there was an effective group of young people as such in Montaillou. Basically, the right to transmit or retransmit culture was something acquired either through age or through social superiority (the priest vis-à-vis his parishioners; an employer vis-à-vis his employee; the owner of a pasture vis-à-vis the lessee). The older generation in general taught the younger generation.
It could be a father, mother or aunt who in this respect enjoyed the privilege of age; but it could also be a husband, an older person or merely an employer. My cousin Raymond Maulen, said Pierre Maury (iii.110), came to an agreement with Raymond Pierre [a sheep-farmer] that I should live with him [as a shepherd] in his house so that the said Raymond Pierre could bring me to share in the belief of the heretics. The brothers Belot, still young bachelors, taught Catharism to their younger comrades (socii) such as Pierre Maury and Guillaume Guilhabert, aged between fifteen and eighteen.
Raymond de l’Aire of Tignac gives an example of the ideological respect paid by youth to age (ii.129): Twenty years ago or thereabouts I had bought some standing grass or hay from a meadow situated near Junac and belonging to Pierre Rauzi of Caussou. We arranged to meet on a certain day in the meadow in order to cut the grass. When we met there, he coming from Caussou and I from Tignac, Pierre Rauzi began to whet his sickle to cut the grass. And as he whetted his sickle, he said: ‘Do you believe that God or the blessed Mary are something – really?’
And I answered: ‘Yes, of course I believe it.’
Then Pierre said: ‘God and the Blessed Virgin Mary are nothing but the visible world around us; nothing but what we see and hear.’
As Pierre Rauzi was older than I, I considered that he had told me the truth! And I remained in this belief for seven or ten years, sincerely convinced that God and the Virgin Mary were nothing but this visible world around us.
Raymond de l’Aire was in the habit of accepting what older people told him. One day when he was looking after the mules with his namesake and fellow-citizen Guillaume de l’Aire of Tignac, Guillaume sent one of the mules to graze among the corn (it was the month of May and the corn was already quite high). When Raymond objected, Guillaume replied (ii.129): ‘There’s nothing wrong with that. The mule has a good soul, just like the owner of the field. So it might as well eat wheat, just like him!’
Raymond must have been a child or adolescent at the time. I believed all that, he said later, because Guillaume de l’Aire was older than I.
There was no intrinsic reason why Raymond should not believe Guillaume. Raymond, an unwitting materialist, believed that the souls of animals were just as good as those of men, since all souls were merely blood.
It was rare for cultural transmission to act in the other direction, from the younger to the older. We have already seen how Jeanne Befayt, reconverted to the Roman faith during the exile in Catalonia, met with little sympathy from her mother, Emersende, an old Albigensian peasant woman from Montaillou. Cathar mother and Catholic daughter actually came to blows. Even when a male child was a priest and thus endowed with a certain cultural superiority, his influence on his mother and father might be extremely limited. One holiday, in Montaillou, said Guillemette Clergue (i.335–6), I was standing in the village square with my little daughter in my arms … Near my father’s house, in the sheepfold adjoining it, was Guillemette Jean, wife of Pierre Jean of Prades, and my mother’s sister. She called me … and said: ‘I would have liked to speak to my brother Prades Tavernier [the parfait] … The heretics or goodmen save souls … But the priests persecute the goodmen.’
Then my aunt said: ‘If ever my son Pierre Prades, who is a priest and who now lives at Joucou [present-day Aude], knew that I had come here to speak to Prades Tavernier, he would never set eyes on me again or do me any good turn.’
And indeed, said Guillemette Clergue, the priest Pierre Prades later sent for his mother, Guillemette Jean, to come to Joucou, and there she ended her life. The priest did so because he had realized that otherwise my aunt would join the heretics.
In this case the influence of the son, although he was a priest, could only be effectively exercised by force.
In the case of Raymond de Laburat, a peasant farmer of Quié, the influence of the clerical son did not even achieve so much. Raymond, who had Cathar contacts, was violently anti-clerical, largely because of his objection to the tithe on sheep. In a moment of exasperation he cried (ii.328), I wish all clerics were dead, including my own son, who is a priest.
The general rule, by which the influence of a father on his son prevailed over the prestige usually attaching the clergy, operated in the case of the elderly Cathar Pons Clergue, who would have nothing to do with the ultimate pro-Catholic machinations of his son Pierre. Even though an elderly father might let himself be bullied by his sons, he would not be converted to their ideas when they differed from his own. A peasant might let himself be led by the nose ideologically by his wife or mother-in-law. But never by his son.1
Perhaps this pattern, based on that of the domus where the authority of the older generation was sacrosanct, was one of the reasons for the great success of the Authiés’ propaganda. The Cathar missionaries from Ax-les-Thermes did not act as young men trying to convert people of the same age or older. The three of them, Pierre and Guillaume Authié (brothers) and Jacques Authié (Pierre’s son), together formed a distinguished travelling phratry-cum-domus going about to convert other domus, less distinguished but sure of their rights. Thus the process of conversion preserved the principle which subordinated sons to fathers and the younger to the older.
Social life was very active in the Montaillou of the early fourteenth century, but Montaillou itself, little affected by the influence of the Minorites which was more evident in the lowlands to the north and in Catalan villages like Puigcerda in the south,1 had none of the lay fraternities common in Toulouse and other large towns. Pierre Clergue, the parish priest, carried out his professional duties with a certain amount of conscientiousness. He administered the sacraments, but was too absorbed in extra-curricular activities among his lady parishioners to have either time or inclination to organize any religious confraternities. Nor is there anything to show that the priests of neighbouring villages, less extravagant in their behaviour than Pierre Clergue, set up any such organizations in other villages in upper Ariège. This sort of activity was more in the line of the mendicant friars, conspicuous in this part of the world by their absence. So, for want of other outlets, social exchanges operated chiefly, though not entirely, through the domus. And, in the domus, the chief occasion for social exchanges was round the fire at night.
An example of such a gathering at Ascou near Ax-les-Thermes is an exact parallel to similar gatherings in Montaillou itself. One evening Raymond Sicre, of the village of Ascou, who had just had a particularly successful row with his wife – he had called her an ‘old sow’ (truiassa) – calmed down and went out to cast an eye over his sheep (ii.365–6). He went by the house of Jean-Pierre Amiel, probably the head of the domus, who lived there together with his mother, Rixende Amiel. (Six years previously Rixende had left the village together with her husband Pierre Amiel: rumour had it that this was because Pierre was a leper, though others said that both of them were heretics. However that might be, Rixende had returned some time later alone, to live without her husband in her son’s house. Pierre Amiel had vanished, none knew where or how.)
Raymond Sicre saw lights burning in the Amiel domus, which meant there must be guests. Raymond had not been invited, so to satisfy his curiosity he opened the door. He could not see who the guests were because of a rough curtain (bourrasse) hanging behind the door, so he went in and eavesdropped on what was going on. The subject of conversation at the moment was food, and in particular bread.
‘I am afraid you did not like the bread I made for you,’ Rixende Amiel was saying to her guests. ‘We mountain women have no fine sieves. And we don’t even know how to knead good bread!’
‘Nothing of the sort,’ replied an unknown guest, ‘your bread was extremely good.’
‘I am delighted you enjoyed it,’ answered Rixende.
Raymond Sicre had to know who the Amiels’ unknown guests were. His method of finding out shows the ramshackle nature of the cottage where the party was being held.
I went to the corner of the house, which was near the door. And with my head I lifted up a part of the roof. I took good care not to damage the roof covering. I then saw [in the kitchen] two men sitting on a bench. They were facing the fire, with their backs to me. They had hoods over their heads and I could not see their faces.
‘This is excellent cheese,’ said one of them.
‘They make very good cheeses in these mountains of ours,’ said Jean-Pierre Amiel.
‘No,’ said the other, not very politely, ‘there are better cheeses in the mountains of Orlu and Mérens.’
Then the other stranger said: ‘The fish you gave us was just as good as your cheese! Really excellent!’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said the other visitor, ‘better and fresher than those I usually get in the valley of Ascou and the valley of Orlu.’
‘The person who sent me that fish did a good deed,’ said Rixende. ‘And Gaillarde d’Ascou has been very kind to me too. She prepared the oil for the fish. She prepared it in secret, and in great fear! She would be a very good woman, better than all the other women in the village. But she is terribly afraid of her husband.’
‘Gaillarde is an excellent woman,’ agreed one of the men in blue hoods. ‘But her husband is a miserable peasant, a lousy crop-eared hypocrite.’
‘Gaillarde’s husband is an excellent man,’ said Rixende. ‘He is very pleasant to talk to. And he is a good neighbour; he doesn’t harm anyone else’s crops, and he won’t let anyone else harm his.’
After a pause, during which wine was handed round, the two visitors began to guide the conversation towards their own propaganda.
‘It would be a good thing if the people of Ascou and Sorgeat had a church. Then they wouldn’t need to go down to the church in Ax-les-Thermes,’ said the first.
‘No,’ said the second, ‘I don’t agree. It’s better if the people of Ascou have only the church at Ax. Otherwise it would be too expensive. Anyhow, the priests at Ax and in other places don’t teach the inhabitants of Ascou as they should. They make them eat grass, as a shepherd makes his sheep eat grass when he gathers them under his crook.’
‘The priests teach the people very little,’ rejoined the first visitor. ‘Not half of their parishioners go to hear them preach or understand anything of what they say.’
We do not know any more of what passed between the two Amiels and the two hooded visitors. Fifteen years later, Raymond Sicre had forgotten, and in any case he soon left his observation post in the corner of the roof to go and see to his sheep (ii.367). But the scene shows what an evening round the fire was like in Ascou and Montaillou. There was talk of food, and gossip about the neighbours and the parish. The two hooded guests were Cathar missioriaries. One was none other than the notary Pierre Authié, who was well versed in people, manners and customs. He was something of a peasant himself, since he had his own herd of cattle. So he found no difficulty in taking part in popular conversation and orienting it towards anti-clerical themes, leading up to a Cathar sermon.
Homilies of this kind were common at evening gatherings both in Montaillou and among the exiles in Catalonia. In the little Cathar colony south of the Pyrenees there might be social exchanges among peasants and artisans at various times of the day. Ordinary meals or snacks in the morning or at noon, and dinners with twelve or fifteen guests might provide an opportunity for conversation tinged with ideology. Someone would unhook the ham from the rafter, someone else would hurry to the market to buy some fish for the parfait. Then the woman of the house would set about scaling the fish, and the rest would turn towards Bélibaste and demand: ‘A speech! A good speech!’
But the evening meal was ideologically the most important. As in the New Testament parable of the wedding at Cana, the best wine would be put aside for the evening.
We ate the smallest of the fish, said Arnaud Sicre (ii.37), and the heretic [Bélibaste] said to Pierre and Guillemette Maury: ‘Keep the biggest fish for dinner, when Arnaud and Jean Maury, Guillemette’s sons, and Pierre Maury, Guillemette’s brother, will have come to join us.’
Another evening Jean Maury, the shepherd’s brother, arrived carrying a dead sheep over his shoulder. He had stolen it for the reunion dinner at Guillemette Maury’s.
After dinner there would begin the long country-style evening around the fire. Those present included the hostess’s two grown-up sons when they were not out keeping their sheep, together with her friends and relations, including Pierre Maury. There would also be a little group of passing parfaits, or some merry priests with their women, some poor beggars, or some women card-combers employed by Guillemette in the little carding shop which she had set up. The newcomers, to create a good impression, brought their own wine with them (ii.24).
Discussion would range over various topics. When only friends were present, the subject could be heresy. The veterans of Catharism would go over old memories: tricks played on the Inquisition by some woman heretic cleverer than its myrmidons; plots to murder a traitor or a bad daughter like Jeanne Befayt; or merely the problems of marrying off a son, questions of health or of removing a spell from some sheep which had been bewitched. The evening lasted until the embers were covered with ashes. The weaker brethren, remembering that they had to get up before dawn to go back to their sheep, would already have retired long since, two or three to a bed.
But it is in Montaillou itself, and in other villages in Aude and upper Ariège, that we see most clearly the regional customs prevalent at such evening gatherings. In the domus of the Belots (i.319 and passim), the Authiés were frequent visitors and often enlivened an evening with their eloquence, sitting with their hosts on benches round the fire. There were merry evenings, too, in the house of Pierre Maury’s parents; together with their many children, they enjoyed themselves greatly at Christmas in 1304 or 1305 (iii.147 and n.451). In Raymond Pierre’s house at Arques, the Aude terminus of the migration route, Pierre Maury attended a big dinner in the kitchen, followed by an evening to which a parfait contributed (iii.122, 124). Master Pierre Girard, proxy of the Archbishop of Narbonne, made no bones about sitting down to dinner with rich farmers at the Bélibastes’ house in Cubiéres (iii. 139). The dinner at the Bélibastes’ was followed by an evening with a heretic, Master Girard having previously been invited to go to bed.
The best descriptions of such evening gatherings in Montaillou are those of Jean Maury, Pierre Maury’s brother (ii.469 ff.). It was because the meetings he relates were honoured by the presence of a goodman that they were made the subject of inquiry by the Inquisition. Apart from that they were typical, not particularly grand occasions. In 1323 Jean Maury told of two dinners followed by evening sessions which took place at his home in Montaillou around 1307 or 1308. On the first occasion, Jean’s mother and father were present, together with his four brothers, Pierre, Arnaud, Bernard and Guillaume (all four of whom were, like Jean himself, to have a taste of prison sooner or later). Jean Maury’s two sisters, Guillemette and Raymonde, were also there, both destined to marry very young, one in Laroque d’Olmes, and the other in Montaillou. The party was completed by two parfaits, Raymond Faur of Roussillon and Philippe d’Alayrac, who had arrived at the beginning of the evening. We recognize the typical work method of the goodmen, whose propaganda was effected ‘intra-domus’, among the members of one or two families at the most.
At the time, Jean Maury himself was twelve years old and kept his father’s sheep. He arrived in the kitchen when the others were already there. At dinner only the grown-up men of the family – the father and his eldest son, Guillaume – sat at table with the two parfaits. The mother and daughters looked after everyone. The younger sons sat by the fire, respectfully munching the bread (probably blessed by the heretics) which their father sent across to them from time to time. The two parfaits were offered a modest repast of round loaves of bread and cabbage seasoned with oil. After dinner the men sat on a bench. The mother of the family, impure because she was a woman, sat on another bench. The children went to bed early, leaving the grown-ups to their serious discussions. One of the defects of education in Montaillou was that the young were thus excluded from general debate. Before he went to bed, Jean Maury just had time to notice that the conversation was monopolized, first by his father, then by the parfait Philippe d’Alayrac. Jean had to get up at break of day. Next morning he rose before it was light, and went off to tend his sheep.
There was another similar evening at the Maury house in Montaillou at about the same time (ii.469, 471). It took place in a very snowy January. The people present were much the same as before, and included the visiting Philippe d’Alayrac and Jean Maury himself, back as usual from a day spent keeping his sheep. There was the same segregation by seating: the parfait Philippe, Maury senior, his eldest son and their neighbour Guillaume Belot, who had escorted the heretic through the snow, all dined at table. The younger sons, the mother and the daughters ate and warmed themselves around the fire. Pieces of bread, blessed by Philippe, were passed from the table to the young men by the master.
There was no problem about lighting on such evenings. Since they took place in the kitchen, the fire provided light enough. Only when heretications took place in other rooms at night was it necessary to use a torch or a candle (i.436, 437). Heating too was provided by the kitchen fire, as late as Whitsuntide if necessary (iii.99).
The natives of Montaillou habitually drank water rather than wine. But they did take wine during these evening gatherings. It was predominantly the men who drank; the women and especially the girls pretended to be reluctant. Often the wine wasn’t even offered to them. But things were easier in town and in the Catalan diaspora among the vineyards, and there it was a common thing, though usually restricted to men, to go to the local tavern for a drink and to fetch wine (ii.29, 33) to accompany a chat or celebrate a friendship. Evening gatherings in the mountains never degenerated into drunken orgies. The few cases of insobriety mentioned in the Fournier Register are urban, individual and sometimes merely simulated (iii.209; iii. 14–50).
Convivial evenings in Montaillou were devoted to words rather than wine. The peasants of Ariège were connoisseurs of eloquence, even if they were no great orators themselves. We have seen how the exiles in Catalonia called on the parfait Bélibaste for a speech – though Pierre Maury noted that Bélibaste’s skill at rhetoric was nothing beside that of Pierre and Jacques Authié. With his usual modesty, Pierre rated himself lowest of all. After a good fish dinner, Guillemette Maury and her guests would sometimes, for want of a parfait, ask Pierre to oblige them with a speech (iii. 180): ‘Come on, Pierre, a speech, a good speech!’ But Pierre always answered: ‘You know I am no orator. I can’t preach fine sermons.’
This sort of cultural action in depth, practised on little groups of five to a dozen people, was not confined to artisan and peasant circles. Country priests had their own evening gatherings among themselves, with bitter battles of ideas. Both laymen and priests from various villages used to come and spend the evening around the fire with Amiel de Rives, perpetual vicaire of Junac. They talked about everything – the arguments in a book of homilies on the Resurrection of the body, whether or not the body survived after Judgment. Alazaïs, the priest’s servant, was present at these discussions: despite differences in economic and social status, the social distance between employer and domestic was very much reduced during such evening gatherings. This was a world where a single room served as kitchen, dining-room and reception room.