There was no question of aesthetic appreciation in fourteenth-century Montaillou. The peasants of upper Ariège had a feeling for beauty, but it was essentially associated with desire, pleasure and the agreeable sensations which come from the senses or from the heart’s affections. They spoke of a beautiful girl, a fine fish pie, of handsome men, of beautiful singing in church, of fine orchards in Heaven. But they did not thrill at the contemplation of nature or the surrounding mountains. Nature and the mountains presented them with too many concrete problems.
But the village and the region had the feeling – a feeling tinged with anthropocentrism – that they shared in surrounding nature. The microcosm (man and his domus) was part of the macrocosm, in the centre of which was the ostal. The macrocosm stretched out to include the stars. As we have already seen, people kept bits of fingernail and locks of hair from a deceased head of the family in order to preserve the domus’s good fortune (astrum vel eufortunium). Men should not swear by Heaven, said Bélibaste (ii.200), for they cannot cause a star to be large or small.
The individual had his own fatum or destiny (iii. 179). Catharism did not introduce the idea of fate into upper Ariège. But it so happened that popular theories on this subject fitted in very well with the goodmen’s teaching on metempsychosis. Thus Bélibaste expounded his denial of free will to the Maury family (iii. 179): ‘When a man steals away someone else’s possessions or commits evil, that man is none other than an evil spirit which enters into him: this spirit makes him commit sins and makes him abandon the good life for the wicked. Everything is full of souls. All the air is full of good and evil spirits. Except when a spirit has been dwelling in the body of a dead person who when he was alive was just and good, the spirit which has just escaped from a dead body is always anxious to be reincarnated. For the evil spirits in the air burn that spirit when it is among them; so they force it to enter into some body of flesh, whether of man or of beast; because as long as a human spirit is at rest in a body of flesh, the evil spirits in the air cannot burn it or torment it.’
A similar conception of the world is expressed by Bernard Franca, of the village of Goulier in the parish of Vicdessos (i.350–70). Bernard Franca was a priest and served Mass, but he was also a true peasant. He grew his own fields of millet and, jointly with his brothers, owned a house in the village street. He used to debate with his co-parishioners while working at the harvest; he took part in the informal gatherings outside the church on Sundays and feast-days. His sociability earned him a denunciation, a trial in Pamiers and a sentence which forced him to wear the double yellow cross.
Bernard Franca believed that everything that happened to anyone was bound to happen to him from all eternity. Human beings were not free, and consequently could not sin. Conversely, so-called good works were of no merit. Bernard Franca had professed his heterodox opinions for forty years. He had derived them simply from the local peasant philosophy of Sabarthès.
‘Was it some learned doctor who inspired these errors in you?’ asked Jacques Fournier in 1320 of Franca, now in his sixties (i.356, 357).
‘No,’ replied Franca. ‘But it is commonly said in Sabarthès, when some good or some evil happens to someone, that “it was promised him” and that “it could not have happened otherwise” … Moreover, when I was taken prisoner I said: “What has to be will be” And then I added: “It will be as God wishes.”’1
The moon, though not so important as the stars or as the air and its spirits, was important in Montaillou when it came to arranging one act essential to the survival of the domus. This act was marriage.
Sixteen or so years ago, said Raymond Vayssière of Ax-les-Thermes in 1320 (i.291), I was in the house of Raymond Belot of Montaillou; and we were talking (in general) about the time when marriages should be celebrated. Raymond said: ‘When we wanted to give our sister as wife to Bernard Clergue, we went to see Guillaume Authié the heretic to ask his advice on the following question: when will the moon be propitious to marry our sister to Bernard? Guillaume Authié told us to fix the wedding on a day which he indicated to us. And so we did.’
The people of Montaillou had recourse not only to the goodmen but also to ordinary soothsayers in order to choose the best time for a wedding or a journey, and so on. Béatrice de Planissoles made use of spells supplied by a converted Jewess (ii.40). The exiles in Catalonia consulted a soothsayer who found his predictions in a book written in Arabic characters (iii.207). This soothsayer used the swinging of a stick or the intervals between footsteps in order to make predictions about illness in men or beasts, or about marriages. Less sophisticated were the premonitions derived from the flight of birds of ill omen – owls and magpies, for example. The sight of two magpies flying across his path was enough to deprive Bélibaste of what little courage remained to him: he lost the use of his legs, and foresaw the tragic fate awaiting him (ii.78; iii.210).
The relationship between men and animals in general was not always a good one in Montaillou. The shepherds had dogs, which migrated along with the sheep (ii.485). Isolated farms were sometimes guarded by big noisy hounds (iii.257). Ordinary, everyday relations between men and dogs may have been pleasant and affectionate – we do not know. But the word ‘dog’ was commonly used as an insult. Dogs might give you rabies. When the shepherd Jean Maury was afraid that he might have been poisoned, he gave the dishes prepared for him by his hostess to his own sheepdog to taste (ii.485, 288).
Cats were sometimes regarded as creatures of the devil. When Geoffroy d’ Ablis, the Inquisitor of Carcassonne, died, said Guillemette Maury (ii.69), he died at night and there was no witness of his death. But next day the people who found the body also found two black cats by his bed, one at each end. They were evil spirits keeping the Inquisitor’s soul company.
Rats also were often regarded with repugnance (iii.221). Bélibaste and Tavernier forbade the killing of all animals except rats, snakes and toads.
Grazide Lizier, a young peasant girl of Montaillou, made a distinction between different kinds of animals.
‘Grazide,’ said Jacques Fournier (i.304), ‘do you believe that God made all the physical objects which we see in the world?’
‘I believe,’ answered Grazide, ‘that God created the physical things which are good for human beings to use, such as men themselves and animals that can be eaten or that are useful to man, such as oxen, sheep, goats, horses, mules; and also edible fruits of the earth and trees. On the other hand, I do not believe that God made wolves, flies, lizards and other creatures harmful to men; nor do I believe that he made the Devil.’
Similarly, Bernard Franca (i.358): On the one hand there are the works of the good God, Heaven, the earth, the water, fire, the air and the animals useful to men for food, for carrying, for work or for clothing; including edible fish! On the other hand, the bad God has made devils and harmful animals, such as wolves, snakes, toads, flies and all harmful and poisonous beasts.
The horse was in the first rank of animals which might serve as a receptacle, according to the Cathar prophets of Sabarthès, for the successive reincarnations of the soul. In this respect a horse, or rather mare, came after a woman, but definitely before a female rabbit or bitch, and before an ox (or a cow). Bélibaste says (ii.35): ‘When the spirits come out of a fleshy tunic, that is a dead body, they run very fast, for they are fearful. They run so fast that if a spirit came out of a dead body in Valencia and had to go into another living body in the Comté de Foix, if it was raining hard, scarcely three drops of rain would touch it! Running like this, the terrified spirit hurls itself into the first hole it finds free! In other words into the womb of some animal which has just conceived an embryo not yet supplied with a soul; whether a bitch, a female rabbit or a mare. Or even in the womb of a woman.’
The predominance of the horse is underlined by a myth of which the people of Ariège, whether resident or in exile, left behind at least four versions (ii.36, 408; iii. 138, 221). Two very simplified versions are recounted by Pierre Maury, who heard them from Bélibaste and Prades Tavernier. A third is related by Sybille Pierre of Arques, who had it directly from Pierre Authié. The fourth and most complete comes down through Arnaud Sicre, who, like Pierre Maury, had it from Bélibaste, who, like Sybille Pierre, probably had it from Pierre Authié in person.
A man had been wicked, and a murderer. When he died, his spirit entered into the body of an ox. This ox had a harsh master who did not feed him properly and who covered him with pricks from a big goad. But the spirit of the ox remembered that he had been a man. When the ox died, the spirit entered into the body of a horse. This horse was the property of a great lord, who fed him well. One night, the lord was attacked by his enemies; he got on his horse and rode across some rough rocky ground. At a certain moment the horse caught its hoof between two stones; it had great difficulty in getting it out again, and lost its shoe, which remained caught between the two stones. Then the lord went on riding throughout part of the night. As for the spirit of the horse, it still remembered that it had once dwelt in a human body. When the horse died, its spirit entered into the body of a pregnant woman and was incorporated into the embryo of the child she was carrying in her womb. When the child grew up, he achieved the understanding of good. Later he became a parfait.1 One day, with his companion, he passed the very place where the horse had lost its shoe. Then the man, whose spirit had been in a horse, said to his companion: ‘When I was a horse, one night I lost my shoe between two stones, and I went on unshod the whole night.’
Then they both began to search between the two stones; and they found the shoe and took it with them.
Even after death, the knights of the Comté de Foix were still accompanied by their faithful steeds. Three years ago, said Arnaud Gélis, sacristan of a church in Pamiers (i.132), two dead squires from the village of Dun appeared to me. They were cloven down to the navel because of the wound which had caused their death; yet they continued to ride their two cobs, which had followed them into the other world!
Sheep, despite their stupidity, enjoyed a certain esteem. ‘My son-in-law is inhabited by a good spirit, and is as gentle as a sheep,’ said Emersende Marty, referring to Bernard Befayt (ii.65). There was one mythical creature who was popular in upper Ariège and in the Pyrenees in general. Its story was told by a man from the diocese of Palhars to a man from Sabarthès, who passed it on in his turn (i.357, 363).
‘There is a bird called the pelican: its feathers shine like the sun. And its vocation is to follow the sun. The pelican had some young. It left them in the nest, so as to be able to follow the sun more freely. During its absence, a wild beast got into the nest and tore off the nestlings’ claws, wings and beaks. After this had happened several times, the pelican decided to hide its radiance and to hide among its young so as to surprise and kill the beast when it next came into its nest. And this the pelican did. And the little pelicans were delivered. In the same way Christ hid his radiance when he was incarnated within the Virgin Mary; thus he was able to take the bad God prisoner and shut him up in the darkness of Hell. And thus the bad God ceased to destroy the creatures of the good God.’
As for fish, the Cathars did not consider the flesh to be corrupt. Nor could they lend themselves to metempsychosis, since they did not carry their young in the womb. Opinions differed about plants. Some peasants considered that it was God himself who made the wheat ‘flower and swell’. They thought the Devil produced hail, thunder and storms. But other peasants were equally sure that when crops flourished it was due to Nature itself, or to the fertility of the soil, or to the presence of the parfaits, or to human labour or to dung.
The people of Montaillou and Sabarthès in general did not share the absolute dualistic belief that nature was the work of the bad God. They saw the hand of the bad God at work in cats, owls, wolves, reptiles, thunder and lightning. But they did not systematically regard the whole creation as Satanic. There was no definite distinction between the Creator and bountiful Nature (regarded by some as creature and by others as creator). This attitude adapted itself as required both to Catharism and to orthodox Catholicism.
The assignation of positive or negative roles to animals recalls an interesting paper by Edmund Leach1 in which he compares insults based on the names of animals with the taboos arising out of the prohibition of incest. The people of Montaillou were in fact making similar comparisons when they praised a parfait for abjuring all relations with women and refraining from eating any kind of meat: they themselves abstained only from women who were close relations and from the meat of more or less domestic animals (dogs, cats, rats). There was, so to speak, one circle of animals, such as dogs and cats and pigs, which lived in an emotional, residential and even almost physical community with human beings. These, with the exception of pigs (the eating of pork nevertheless presented some problems), provided material for food taboos, insults and sometimes allusions to the Devil. Then came the circle of farm animals and those of the stable. These were slightly less close to man, whose relations with them were distant enough to be correct or even cordial, and in any case positive. The poultry yard, and even the kitchen garden, belonged to this circle: hens were well regarded in Montaillou, and even today the list of French endearments includes ‘mon poulet’ (hen), ‘mon lapin’ (rabbit), ‘mon canard’ (duck) and ‘mon chou’ (cabbage).
A second fundamental dividing line marks off nature in the wild. Animals like wolves and vipers and even flies live in a state of more or less real hostility with man and his domestic beasts. Sometimes the hostility, though felt as real, was in fact purely mythical, as in the case of harmless snakes, toads, owls, magpies and so on.
Outside these categories the rest of nature, both vegetable and aquatic, was regarded as neutral or even positive towards man. Leach is certainly right in saying that insults and other pejorative expressions occur at various points of rupture between man and his zoological or natural environment: for example, the dog, in the circle of domestic animals, the one closest to man’s ego and domus, and, in the circle of wild animals, the wolf, then much more of a practical reality than nowadays. Thus zoological insults and similar modes of abuse constituted a very useful procedure in Sabarthès, introducing strategic divisions into the continuum between man and nature.
The collective unconscious was indeed ‘structured like a language’. Animal insults were part of a whole series of equivalences between beliefs about the family, society and brute creation. As to the latter, the people of Montaillou did not regard animals as machines, but as creatures with faculties that made them fit to be compared with human beings. In later centuries Rétif de la Bretonne and the curé Meslier, both connoisseurs of peasant philosophy, give examples of village attitudes to animals. ‘Try and tell the peasants their cows are only machines’, says Meslier. ‘They’ll just laugh at you.’1
The table opposite shows the system of implicit equivalences at work in upper Ariège.
A widespread current opinion holds that peasant and village religions are very strongly marked with magic, various kinds of pagan fall-out and thaumatergic and fertility rites.2 There are glimpses among the inhabitants of Sabarthès of this practical kind of religion – the religion concerned with abundant harvests and the avoidance or cure of disease – but they are rare. Is this because the culture here was centred on the ostal rather than on the soil? Was it because the people’s professed religion was concerned with meditation on the after-life rather than with earthly existence? Whatever the reason, in Ax, Prades and Tarascon, God was the master of salvation rather than the power who brought rain or banished typhoid and tempests. We have no evidence of rogation processions designed to bring down the blessing of the Lord upon the fields.
| LEVEL A (zoological) |
LEVEL B (in relation to family and domus) |
|---|---|
| I | |
| Close domestic animals: pejorative, insulting, even diabolical, allusions (dogs, cats, pigs, etc.) | Family circle, governed by prohibition of incest; this circle is itself diabolic: The devils are our brothers (ii.200). |
| II | |
| Good animals of farm and stable. Cattle providing (aphrodisiac) butcher’s meat. | Surrounding society, in the village and in Sabarthès as a whole: i.e. outside the family, and where the prohibition of incest does not apply (in Sabarthès, this freedom begins with second cousins). This area is populated by ‘aphrodisiac’ characters (those inviting sexual intercourse). |
| III | |
|
Nature in the wild. – Hostile and negative circle: wolf, owl, etc. – Other animals, and vegetable and aquatic creatures (neutral or favourable) |
More distant world, beyond the borders of Sabarthès: – World (hostile) – World (neutral or favourable) |
True, a villager of Bédeillac might see the hand of God in a good harvest (ii.51): ‘See’, he said to his friends, ‘this year we were afraid we would have no corn, because it scarcely appeared above the earth, and then suddenly, thanks to Almighty God who does everything, our corn has prospered and we will again have enough this year.’ But such assertions were theoretical. They appear not to have entailed any special ceremonies designed to invoke God’s aid.
Such fertility and similar rites as existed belong to magic rather than religion. ‘Your beasts perish’, Guillemette Maury was told by a soothsayer from the region of Téruel (ii.39, 40), ‘because a spell has been cast on them by someone who is jealous of your success as a farmer … but next year your flock will do very well.’ The soothsayer got his information from a book written in Arabic characters. The peasants of Montaillou believed in such divination precisely because Islam was not their own religion. They would not have dreamed of making the same use of either Catharism or orthodox Christianity. Béatrice de Planissoles is one example of many of the way they drew a line between what was magical and what was sacred. She distinguished between her devotion to the Virgin Mary, which she regarded as specifically religious, and the little purely magical devices, learned from some witch or baptized Jewess, which she used to help her win her lawsuits, to make her daughters’ love affairs prosper and to cure epilepsy.
Religion and magic were not, however, entirely separate. It was easier for a priest than for a layman to bewitch a woman and make her fall in love with him. Baptism prevented a man from being drowned or being eaten by wolves. A goodman contributed to the fertility of the soil. Saint Anthony and Saint Martial were responsible for, and perhaps cured, certain skin diseases (iii.234). But the people of Sabarthès did not confuse the functions of a village healer like Na Ferreria of Prades d’Aillon with those of religion itself. Pierre Maury refused to believe in the old wives’ tales which in his view had nothing to do with religion. This robust scepticism did not prevent him from having a keen sense of the divine and a permanent preoccupation with the salvation of his soul. He shared in the collective unconscious which was always, though often silently, concerned with ancient rural beliefs; but his conscious energy was directed towards Heaven and salvation.
To ensure their salvation in the other world, some of the inhabitants of Montaillou remained faithful to traditional Roman belief, while others regarded it as inadequate and turned for a time towards Catharism. But if there were differences of method, the main preoccupation was the same.
Bernard Gombert, a Cathar of Ax, expounded his attitude to Bernadette Amiel, his cousin (ii.32): ‘The goodmen follow the path of God … they alone can save souls. And all those who are received into their sect before death go straight to Heaven, whatever wickedness or sin they have committed. The goodmen can absolve people of all their sins. As for the priests, they cannot absolve a man of his sins. Only the goodmen can do this.’ Bernard Gombert lived in a town, but the same view was found in the villages. ‘A woman of Montaillou,’ said Béatrice de Planissoles to her lover (i.254), ‘was gravely ill. She asked her children: “Please go and find the goodmen for me, so that they may save my soul.”
‘“If we go and find the goodmen for you,” answered the children, “we shall lose all our possessions.”
‘“So,” said their mother, “you prefer your possessions to the salvation of my soul!”’
The parfaits themselves were categorical. ‘We goodmen,’ said Guillaume Authié to Raymond Vayssière of Ax-les-Thermes (i.282–3), ‘can absolve anyone of his sins. Our power of absolution is equal to that of the Apostles Peter and Paul. Whereas the Catholic Church does not possess this power, because it is a bawd and a whore.’
The shepherd brothers, Jean and Pierre Maury, were complex cases: in various degrees and at various times they accommodated both Catholic and Albigensian beliefs. But they never ceased to be out-and-out Salvationists. Pierre introduced the subject in connection with a pair of excellent shoes he had bought at great expense for his friend Bélibaste. ‘A pair of ordinary shoes would have done for Bélibaste,’remarked Arnaud Sicre to Pierre (ii.38–9). ‘He works sitting down in his workroom. Whereas you are always travelling up hill and down dale.’
Pierre replied with a long speech on the soul, his own, Bélibaste’s and others. He pointed out that in the building of a tower, more trouble is taken strengthening the base (the immortal soul) than the top (the mortal body). ‘That is why I have given shoes, tunics, hose and cloaks to thirteen goodmen, of whom some are already before the Holy Father, so that they might pray for me … When he dies, Bélibaste’s soul will certainly be saved; it will ascend to Heaven, borne up by angels.’ Pierre then went on to deal with the best way of absolving sin. ‘It is no good confessing to the priests. They keep whores, and all they want to do is eat us up, as the wolf destroys the sheep … It is better to be received into Bélibaste’s sect just before death … Then you are absolved of your sins, and in three days, after you are dead, your soul ascends to the Heavenly Father.’
This point of view was of course challenged by the orthodox Catholics in Montaillou. Raymonde Guilhou, delousing Mengarde Clergue, cross-examined the Albigensian matriarch on the subject of salvation (ii.224).
‘What are the goodmen like?’
‘They are blessed and holy men,’answered Mengarde, ‘People cannot be saved except at their hands?
‘And how can that be?’ asked Raymonde. ‘Aren’t men better saved at the hands of a priest who utters good words and who handles the body of Christ, rather than at the hands of the goodmen?’
Some people expressed themselves crudely enough on this serious subject. Pierre Sabatier was a weaver of Varilhes, who despite certain vacillations had remained a Catholic; Varilhes was in the lowlands, and had been won back by the Roman Church. About twenty-five years ago or thereabouts, said Pierre Sabatier in 1318 (i.457), I was talking to Bernard Massanes of Varilhes, now deceased (he later became my brother-in-law, and it was I who taught him the weaver’s trade).
‘Why,’ asked Bernard, ‘do they hold a lighted candle over the mouth of those who are dying?’
‘The candle,’ I answered, ‘is to show that the souls of the dying who have confessed and repented of their sins are as bright as light; and so will go to God. But if the dying have not confessed or repented of their sins, you might as well put a candle up their arse as in their mouth.’
In terms of the Roman faith, absolution of the dying and the redemption of sin were inseparable from Christ’s passion. Raymonde Testanière, known as Vuissane, a maidservant of Montaillou, when asked by the Cathar shoemaker Arnaud Vital what she believed, answered (i.457): ‘I believe in God and in the Virgin Mary, his mother. God endured suffering and death for the redemption of our sins.’
We note that Vuissane’s belief in the Redeemer does not involve any differentiation between Christ and ‘God’ in general. Her belief came to her from her mother, who warned her that the goodmen could not save souls (i.461): ‘Do not believe, daughter, that a man of flesh, who produces excrement, can save souls. Only God and the Virgin Mary have that power.’
The figure of the redeeming Christ was at the centre of all preoccupations with salvation. The relationship of a believer to Christ, fundamental for the understanding of the nature and intensity of religious sentiment in a community like that of Montaillou, might be meaningful, and based on fervent prayer, or might be almost imperceptible. Historians of Christian feeling have pointed out the change which took place in the Middle Ages in the attitude towards the figure of the Son of God. As Georges Duby has said, the Christ of the Roman age was the hero of the Parousia, ‘Jesus returning on the Last Day, in all his glory, to judge the living and dead. In the thirteenth century there appeared the more learned figure … of Jesus the wise man. But the preaching of St Francis emphasized the Passion, and the theme of suffering developed throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, so that the royal crown was replaced by the Crown of Thorns.’1 Similarly, Alphonse Dupront: ‘Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries we pass from a religion of God triumphant and executor of justice to a Christie religion of God suffering, a religion of the Passion … anxiously centred on Christ and his mother.’2 For Delaruelle, this evolution is due to the original character ‘of a religion which was anthropocentric, more concerned with salvation, however it was conceived of, than with the praise of God.’3
The ‘Christie religion of God suffering’ had certainly, by this period, reached the villagers of the Comté de Foix. In Merviel, almost at the same latitude as the Labarre Pass, which separated Sabarthès from the northern half of the Comté de Foix, a rich village woman, Aude Fauré, lost the ability to pray to Christ, and even to look at Him, at the precise moment when the priest elevated the consecrated Host before the altar. Aude confided her woes to her aunt, Ermengarde Garaudy.
‘Aunt, how do you pray to God, and what prayer do you say when the priest elevates the body of Christ above the altar?’
‘At that moment,’ answered Ermengarde (ii.87), ‘I say the following prayer [given in Occitan]: Lord, true God and true man, Almighty, you who were born of the body of the Virgin Mary without sin, and who accepted death and passion on the tree of the true cross, you who were nailed by the hands and the feet, you whose head was crowned with thorns, you whose side was pierced with a spear, letting forth blood and water, by which we were all redeemed from sin, give me a tear of that water brought forth from you: so that it may cleanse my heart of all ugliness and all sin … [The rest is in Latin] Lord God of truth, you have redeemed me.’
But the pious Ermengarde Garaudy of Merviel (she said another brief prayer in Occitan every morning when she got out of bed) was very much more advanced than the ordinary peasant population of the Comté de Foix. Common practice was limited to making the sign of the cross over food before eating and over the bed before sleeping, the reciting of the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave Maria, and ‘other prayers’, genuflecting in church, the Easter communion and fasting during Lent (for the most zealous, on the vigils of certain Apostles).
Pierre Sabatier, the weaver of Varilhes, was more typical. His religious equipment consisted of a few basic elements of Catholic dogma and a few very external practices, though these were conscientiously performed. Sabatier believed in the saving virtue of confession and contrition before death: this was the fundamental common denominator at that time of all religious belief in the Comté de Foix. Despite his attacks on the rapacity of the priests, whom he accused of saying Mass only for the offerings they got out of it, he always believed the sacraments of the Church and the articles of faith to be true. When he wished to show that he lived up to the ideal of an ordinary Christian, or of the general notion of that ideal, he said (i.145): I am a good Christian, Catholic and faithful. I pay tithes and first-fruits, I give alms to Christ’s poor, I go on pilgrimages like a good Christian; last year I went with my wife to the Virgin of Montserrat; and this year, again with my wife, to Saint James of Compostella.
Was Christianity in Montaillou and Sabarthès more like that of Ermengarde Garaudy or that of Pierre Sabatier? It was probably closer to the works of the second than to the prayers of the first. The ‘Our Father’ was often their only prayer, and that was addressed not to Christ but to God the Father.1 Amiel de Rieux, vicar of Unac, taught the Creed, which dealt with the Trinity and accorded an important place to God the Son (iii.9): I expounded the Credo in the vulgar tongue during my Sunday Mass, article by article. Arnaud de Savignan, a cultivated and perhaps heretical stone-mason of Tarascon-sur-Ariège, knew the Creed, the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria and seven Psalms (i.164). But apart from the Pater Noster these seem to have been unknown to the peasants and shepherds of Montaillou.
Whereas the priests made the inhabitants of the towns recite the Paternoster, the Ave Maria and the Miserere as penance for their sins (ii. 111; iii.36), they imposed only the Pater Noster upon the people of Montaillou. As we have seen, there was probably a small élite in the village which understood the Lord’s Prayer. But for most of the people of Montaillou and Sabarthès it was simply a prayer recited by the priest in church, and valid for supporters of all faiths. It is probable that many ordinary believers in the established Church themselves recited the Lord’s Prayer but the exercise was probably more of a repetition than a meditation.
The influence of the mendicant orders was much less strong in Sabarthès than in the lowlands. So the habit of intense, frequent and fervent prayer is rarely encountered in Catholic circles in the uplands of Foix. It is more frequently encountered among the heretics in the region, especially among the parfaits. Bélibaste got up six times each night, in his drawers, to pray. Those who shared his bed in crowded inns made him sleep on the outside so that he would not disturb them. There was no question of their imitating him. He himself did not ask them to follow his example. On the contrary, he told them not to pray, for their mouths were soiled by the impurity of their lives and would stain even the words of the Lord’s Prayer. As Pierre Maury said (ii.37): No one should say the Paternoster except our lords the goodmen who are in the path of truth. The rest of us, when we say the Lord’s Prayer, sin mortally, because we are not in the path of truth: for we eat meat and sleep with women.
In Montaillou, the most obvious manifestation of relationship with Christ was seen in various references to the Cross. Guillaume Maury, Pierre’s brother, had Cathar leanings like all his family. But when, on 15 August 1308, imprisoned with other villagers in the château of Montaillou, he wanted to denounce Pierre Clergue the priest for having given supplies of grain to the goodmen (ii.173), he swore by the cross. The Maurs brothers, also Montaillou shepherds, were not always 100 per cent Catholic, but they did not neglect to make the sign of the cross before eating (ii.181). Pierre Maury, though a heretic, was so lavish with the sign of the cross that Pierre Authié was shocked and suggested a parody (ii.284, 422): ‘In summer, Pierre, you can flap flies away from your face; and as you do so, you can also say: here is the forehead and here is the beard, here is one ear and here is the other.’ The Cathar shoemaker, Arnaud Vital, protested against the respect which the natives of Montaillou showed for the Cross: ‘It is worthless, it is the sign of evil’, he said to Vuissane Testanière (i.457). At the sight of all the wooden crosses scattered over the countryside, Bélibaste cried (ii.53; ii.410), If I could, I would chop them down with an axe; I would use them as wood to boil the pots.
Single or double yellow crosses, made of material, reminded those who had dabbled in heresy and yet been spared prison on what side the true faith was to be found. The Fournier Register shows forty-eight sentences of imprisonment in all, as against twenty-five people condemned to wear the yellow cross. Out of these twenty-five, seventeen had been sentenced to imprisonment in the first instance. In Montaillou itself, seven men and women escaped incarceration only to have to endure the infamy of wearing the yellow cross. It would be a great psychological ordeal, and the victims went to considerable lengths to lighten it. On holidays, said Arnaud de Savignan, heretical stonemason of Tarascon (ii.440), I wear the yellow crosses openly on my cloak, but on other days, especially when I am working, I do not wear the crosses, because I am in my tunic or shirt. When I come home from work, I put on my mantle and therefore wear the crosses; but sometimes I wear them hidden; and other times I walk through Tarascon without wearing them, in my tunic.
The annual fair at Ax-les-Thermes was held on Holy Cross Day (ii.477–8, 363). But frequent as all these references were, for the people of Montaillou the crucifix remained virtually unoccupied. In Sabarthès, only a minority of zealots, supported at a distance by the mendicant monks, went in for macabre meditation upon Christ’s suffering on the Cross.
Christ, more often called ‘God’, was more frequently present in Sabarthès through the Eucharist. The ‘sacrament of the altar’, the ‘body of the Lord’ or the ‘body of Christ’ was a familiar presence in the parish church. The big bell was rung at the moment of the Elevation, and the people in the church fell on their knees, lowering their hoods (iii.60; 235). It was also a familiar presence in the highways and byways, where the priest carried the last sacraments to the dying. The Eucharist was an element of lowland civilization which early penetrated the Pays d’Aillon. As we have already seen, the first communion was an important rite of passage. After the first communion, people used to communicate once or several times a year. Gaillarde Ros, a pious informer of Ornolac, speaking of the local bayle Guillaume Austatz, a rich peasant, former usurer and free-thinker of his village, says (i.192): I have lived in Ornolac twelve years and never seen Guillaume Austatz take communion! Not even during times of illness. Nor on holidays. And yet, at those times, people usually do take communion. But if Guillaume had done so, I would have known. Think, I have often seen him going into the church. And do not forget that I am his mother-in-law’s sister.
The four communions a year – at Easter, Whitsun, All Saints and Christmas – imposed as a penance on Aude Fauré, may be regarded as a maximum (ii.104). In trie ordinary course of events there was no question of frequent communion. There was also a kind of terminal or panic communion, resorted to by individuals when they thought they were on the point of death, and by people in general at times of epidemic.1 In Montaillou itself, the most resolutely Cathar section of the population probably did not go to communion; the priest Pierre Clergue no doubt turned a blind eye. But even if at certain times, as between 1300 and 1307, most of the people in the village might have been regarded as sympathetic to the Cathars, the number who actually abstained from communion was probably only a minority. Believers in heresy did not hesitate to pretend to take communion when necessary, for, as Bélibaste said, To eat a little biscuit never did anyone any harm (ii.55). Elsewhere, the numerous free-thinkers among the peasantry of Sabarthès, and such deviants as homosexuals, might go for twelve years or so without taking Easter communion (iii.46). The refusal to take the last sacrament constituted a moment of great drama in the death-struggle of a Montaillou peasant suffering the endura. The dying person, wishing to be saved only by the goodmen, would try to drive the priests away from his bedside, calling them devils, peasants or boors (i.462).
Paradoxically, one of the most striking examples of the general respect for the body of Christ is the attitude of Raymond de Laburat, an anti-clerical peasant of Sabarthès. He said he would be glad to see all the clergy, from the Pope to ordinary priests, go off to the Crusades to be destroyed by the Saracens. He would be even more delighted to see the churches razed to the ground. Then Mass would be celebrated on the land and in the fields, and the peasants who, like him, had been excommunicated and driven out of the churches, would at last have the great happiness of seeing the body of their divine Master in the open air (ii.311).
Propaganda in favour of the Host made use of all possible resources, including the sort of anecdote made popular by the author of the Golden Legend. Ermengarde Garaudy told Aude Fauré (ii.84) how ‘a woman cooked a girdle cake which a priest then consecrated on the altar. When she saw this, the woman burst out laughing.
‘“It seems the girdle cake I made has become the body of Christ. That makes me laugh.”
‘But she wanted to take communion just the same. So the priest prayed God to perform a miracle: and when the priest gave the woman communion, the cake-cum-Host took on the appearance of a child’s finger and the consecrated wine in the chalice looked like coagulated blood. The woman was terrified! She communicated all the more devoutly.’
Mass, as distinct from communion itself, continued to play an essential role. The many people who had been excommunicated for non-payment of tithes were excluded from Mass, as an example. Former heretics, condemned to various penances, were castigated between the Epistle and the Gospel. People in general came to Mass dressed in their best, especially on feast days (ii.440; i.338).
But people did not worry too much if they forgot to go to Mass – at least from time to time, on ordinary Sundays. Béatrice de Planissoles, after she had moved to the lowlands, where attendance at Mass was more strict than in Montaillou, was surprised to be rebuked by the vicaire of her new parish and told to go to church more regularly (i.214–15). The fact that in a village of considerable size like Unac in Sabarthès there were only about fifty people at an ordinary Sunday Mass shows that there was a certain amount of absenteeism which shocked no one.1 There is nothing surprising about this lukewarm attitude. Specifically Christian piety was always the attribute of an élite in the Middle Ages and even when, in times of panic, this élite grew very numerous, it still remained urban rather than rural, and did not include the mountain dwellers. The love of God as a person was little known and little practised in the uplands of the Comté de Foix. There were a few exceptions, of which Bernard Franca was one (i.352). He was a cleric and a thinker who knew a little Latin; in church he reminded his fellow parishioners that love was at the base of all charity and that only those alms are valid which are given through love and not through fear. He criticized legacies to the poor which were made only from fear of approaching death. But it was very rare for anyone to place chief emphasis on the love of God as such, based on the example and teaching of Christ. Pierre Authié, the parfait, preferred to emphasize the fact that the members of his sect, once received into Heaven, would love each other like fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. Once again, it was the human ideal of salvation which came first.