Jean Chelini1 has summarized the basic principles of the anomy inherent in Catharism: ‘There is a two-tiered morality. For the greater number, no restrictions and total liberty of life and manners. For the parfaits, an ascetic and élitist morality … and the responsibility of reconciling the other believers (sinners), on the brink of death, with the principle of good, this reconciliation being obtained through the consolamentum.’
But until this moment all was permitted: Pierre Clergue told me, said Béatrice de Planissoles (i.225), that both man and woman can freely commit any sin they like during their life. And do whatever they please in this world. Provided only that at the end they are received into the sect or into the faith of the good Christians. Then they are saved and absolved of all the sins they have committed in their life … thanks to the laying on of hands of these good Christians, as it is received on the brink of death.
But Clergue’s interpretation of the Cathar ethic was extreme and over-simplified. The parfaits were much more careful and considered this attitude harmful, for reasons both circumstantial and doctrinal (i.386).
It is difficult for any society to live in a state of anomy or disorder. Underlying current religious opinions in Sabarthès, whether Catholic or Cathar, was a permanent moral system functioning simultaneously as a system of values (ethos) and a body of customary behaviour (habitus).
This morality was only partly based on a deeply felt sense of sin. This feeling did exist, sometimes in such extreme cases as that of the hypersensitive Aude Fauré. But equally influential was the general agreement or interpersonal consensus on what was socially shameful.
Raymond de l’Aire of Tignac said aloud what others thought without always explaining it to themselves. His arguments came under three heads (ii.130):
When he stresses the importance of local custom as distinct from general law, Raymond de l’Aire echoes a widespread feeling affecting both morality and politics: The Bishop exacts tithes from us by virtue of the law; but we, the people of Sabarthès, refuse them in virtue of our customs, said Guillaume Austatz, bayle of Ornolac (i.209).
The idea of shame was equally widespread in upper Ariège. According to Raymond Vayssière of Ax-les-Thermes (i.277–8), Simon Barra had two sisters for mistresses, one after the other. He even boasted about it to Pathau Clergue of Montaillou and to me. I said to him: ‘It is a great sin.’
‘No,’ he answered, ‘it is not a sin; but I admit it is a shameful act.’
Upon these words we sat down at table.
Guillaume Bayard, a magistrate of Sabarthès, went two better than Simon Barra. He told me, said Arnaud de Bédeillac (iii. 155), he had slept with four sisters, each pair from a different family. They were called Gaude, Blanche, Emersende and Arnaude.
‘How could you sleep with twice two sisters?’ I asked.
‘If I had slept with women close to me in blood,’ answered Bayard, ‘I would have committed a shameful act. But with two sisters! No, really. It’s of no importance. Mere trifles.’
Round the fire one snowy day, several people told how Raymond de Planissoles had for a mistress, one after the other, a certain Guillemette of Caussou and then her niece Gaillarde, who was at the same time a servant in Raymonde’s house. What a terrible sin!
‘Not at all! There’s no sin in that,’ said Aycard Boret of Caussou, who was called a peasant for his pains (iii.346–7).
Sometimes I hang my yellow crosses up on a plum tree … It is through shame [verecundia] that I avoid wearing them as much as possible, said a quarry-man of Ax. Poverty, the loss of one’s house, economic failure or merely a descent in the social scale could be a source of shame, ‘confusion’, and loss of honour. They might make your neighbours respect you less: I am generally little esteemed in Sabarthès because of my poverty, said Arnaud de Bédeillac (iii.57). I am impoverished and filled with confusion in our country through the fault of my mother (who caused me to lose my maternal ostal), said Arnaud Sicre (ii.21, 29). When poverty was factual it was a source of shame. But as an ideal, or when it was practised for itself, it was admired.
Values were externalized; morality was based on neighbourliness and reciprocity (ii.107): Do not pick grass from other people’s fields; conversely, do not throw on other people’s fields the weeds you have uprooted from your own field.
A man was expected, especially if he belonged to the élite of the village or region, to be not only a good neighbour but also courteous. He ought to like jesting, which vents the spleen and fosters conviviality. These were the virtues which brought success to men like Pons Bailie and Guillaume Authié. The latter had everything that might be pleasing: a beautiful wife, children, wealth and good humour (i.313). Sometimes, though, in that age of iron, it was necessary to use not the courtesy and respect for others of Guillaume Authié but the cynicism, brutality and truculence of Pierre Clergue.
Was society in Montaillou and Sabarthès especially delinquent? As far as theft and crimes against property went, the externalized ethic of the ostal, which prescribed the mutual respect of possessions, was relatively effective. In confession, people accused one another of minor thefts of fruit and hay. Jean and Pierre Maury were rebuked by Bélibaste and Pierre Authié on a few occasions for having taken a lamb or a few sheep from another flock which had mingled with theirs. The Virgin of Montgauzy was called upon to find an object, perhaps money, stolen in Ornolac. At the fair, a weaver might have some of his cloth stolen (i. 156-7). There is occasional mention of forgers and highwaymen – but there were few highways and little cash. In Montaillou itself, where everyone knew everyone else and strangers were easy to find, crimes against property would have been very difficult to commit. True, mutual trust was far from being total, and doors might sometimes be locked. People and flocks might trample on other people’s fields; the poor women who ‘borrowed’ hay or wood or sieves to sift their flour did not always ask before they did so. But apart from such irregularities, the people of Montaillou on the whole respected other people’s property.
The Clergues and the Azémas might confiscate a field or a flock belonging to someone weaker than they were. But in theory such confiscations had a ‘legal’ foundation, and were effected in the name of the bayle, the Comte or the châtelain, on the pretext of the fight against heresy, though in reality as part of the local conflict between factions.
Crimes against the person – violence and revenge – were more common. Particularly notable are the depredations of local lords, and above all their bayles, against the people they administered, though the records stress the misdeeds of a criminal minority among the powerful.
In Montaillou the Clergues, bayle and priest, had Mengarde Maurs’s tongue cut out as punishment for denouncing them. They were apparently mixed up in the murder of Arnaud Lizier. In Junac the local lords and châtelains strangled, or caused to be strangled, the blacksmith Pierre Marty, suspected of having denounced them as Cathars. Afterwards they were able to set up again as good Catholics, since no one now dared say a word against them. Informers ran a great risk of being murdered by the families of their victims. One was thrown off a bridge, another was threatened with the same fate (ii.65, 423).
Crimes committed by the great often remained unpunished. For years the Clergue family enjoyed impunity, thanks to their powerful connections in Carcassonne. The Planissoles too, guilty of murder by strangling, went scot free.
‘Raymond de Planissoles’, said Raymond Bee of Caussou to Aycard Boret, the accomplice of the Planissoles (iii.347), ‘committed a very great sin when he strangled and killed Pierre Plan, whom he then buried in the garden of his father, Pons de Planissoles. And Raymond ought not to have aggravated the sin by deflowering Gaillarde, his own servant!’
‘Indeed,’ answered Aycard Boret, ‘Raymond and I did murder that man and bury him in unconsecrated ground. But neither Raymond nor I are afraid of having sinned. In fact we confessed it all to the proxy of the Comté de Foix, Guillaume Courtete, and came to an arrangement with him.’ We know, from another deposition, that Courtete was venal (iii.381).
Against a background of inquisition and repression the great were able to murder people when they had the power, in order to avoid being denounced, imprisoned and put to death themselves. It was a question of kill or be killed.
The shepherds tended to fight both among themselves and against the people living along the route of their migrations; sometimes the fighting might lead to a death. But it would be incorrect to talk of any real and fundamental antagonism between the nomad shepherds and the sedentary town-dwellers.
To kill a man was still a very serious matter, especially for people of the lower classes, unprotected by influential relationships. To slay someone usually meant depriving the body of burial in consecrated ground and depriving the victim of the possibility of receiving the last sacraments. This might mean depriving his soul of rest and happiness, condemning it to Hell or wandering and preventing its final resurrection. In such circumstances, corpses were apt to protest. When Valentin Barra was assassinated, said the women and the miller of Ax-les-Thermes (i.151,156), he made such a row at night in Ax churchyard that the local priests dared neither sleep in the church beside the cemetery nor leave the place.
There is only one murder recorded for a whole generation in Montaillou, a village of 250 inhabitants. While men and women of the people were ready enough to threaten death, they were more reserved when it came to putting the threats into execution. Their violence was symbolic rather than factual. People carried knives or swords, but in general did no more than brandish them. Hired assassins were not unknown, but they were poor creatures who pocketed the money and did not carry out the murder. Perhaps they knew that their employers did not really want them to. Except in isolated cases, popular resistance to the Inquisition itself was passive, non-violent, almost non-existent. Between individuals themselves, delinquency directed against property was small and easily controlled, most of the time, through the village bayles.
In this connection we may recall the relative but nevertheless modest sexual permissiveness which reigned in the village of Montaillou. It may have come within the sphere of delinquency, but at the worst it went only as far as a couple of cases of rape or threats of rape. We have also seen that hard work did not rate very high in the scale of values. The actual morality of the domus of Montaillou was very different from that created later by Protestant and Catholic, Puritan and Jansenist Reformations, both kinds intolerant of sex and anxious to make people work. Whether they were Catholics or Cathars or in between, the people of Montaillou were not yet afraid either of sex or of idleness.
The villagers of Montaillou and their brothers in Sabarthès, Christians and Cathars alike, felt a deep, evangelical repugnance towards ‘wealth’. This was in accordance with the society they lived in, where population trends, the small volume and weak growth of net production and the unequal distribution of goods created a permanent fringe of poverty. Condemnation of ostentatious wealth and the power which accompanied it seems to have been general. Clergue the priest, as a good Cathar, criticized marriage because the Church’s wedding ceremonies are nothing but secular pomp (i.225). Temporal power, like women, the world and money, is also a gift of the Devil. One version of the Albigensian myth of the Fall, related by the shepherd Jean Maury (ii.490), has the Devil saying to the good spirits whom he wishes to seduce: ‘I will give you wives whom you will love dearly … with one bird, you will take another, with one animal another animal. I will make certain among you into kings, or counts, or emperors, or lords over other men.’
Ordinary Catholics, just like the Cathars, regarded wealth and the pleasures it brought as an inevitable source of sin. ‘Come, Master Arnaud Teisseire,’ said a Pamiers jailer to the doctor of Lordat, dying in his cell and refusing to confess his sinful life (ii.219), ‘you have wallomed in such opulence! And you have lived in such splendid fashion! And you have had so many temporal pleasures! How could you be without sin?’
In the uplands of Foix, wealth meant possession of temporal goods, and also power, influence, knowledge and a network of friends and dependants. But of course most people were comparatively poor and powerless. When Bernard Clergue, in prison, asked Jacques Fournier to tell him the names of those who had informed against him, Fournier replied (ii.302): ‘Give you the names of those who denounced you? Come, come! It would be too dangerous for the poor, weak men who deposed against you. Think, Bernard, of your power, your knowledge, the weighty threats you have already made against certain people, and of the multitudes of your friends.’
But in Montaillou only beggars, wandering or otherwise, were regarded as actual paupers. The really poor also included those whose personal wealth was less than the value of a house (in other words, less than 40 livres tournois) and who had neither land, nor draught animals, nor a real flock nor an ostal in the real sense of the term, and who did not have any craft or skill to make up for it. The category might also include the head of a family who had lost his house because it was destroyed or confiscated by the Inquisition. Also regarded as poor were those who sought jobs as shepherds or day-labourers; farm servants, domestics, younger sons of rural families; bastard girls and those who worked for wages in the villages. This must have included in all at least 20 to 25 per cent of the local population. 1 But we need to distinguish, like Charles de la Roncière, 2 between those who were ‘poor to themselves’ and those who were ‘poor to other people’. Many among the lower strata of the peasants of Sabarthès regarded themselves as poor, but alms were usually given only to beggars, migrants or peasants reduced to want by the destruction of their houses by the Inquisition. Anyone who was poor but had employment as a labourer or farmer was not regarded as ‘almsworthy’ (iii.356).
Poverty in itself was not an ideal among the mountain folk. But the anti-wealth attitude was very widespread. It distinguished, however, between lay wealth, which was little challenged, and clerical wealth, the subject of great popular protest. Bélibaste to the Maurys of Montaillou (ii.25, 26, 56): ‘The Pope devours the blood and sweat of the poor. And the bishops and the priests, who are rich and honoured and self-indulgent, behave in the same manner … whereas Saint Peter abandoned his wife, his children, his fields, his vineyards and his possessions to follow Christ.’ Bélibaste rounded off his diatribe with the usual references to the clergy’s sexual depravity (ii.26): ‘The bishops, the priests and the Minorite and preaching friars go to the houses of rich, young and beautiful women; they take their money and, if they consent, they sleep carnally with them, putting on appearances of humility the while.’ The parfaits contrasted the Church which fleeces with that which forgives (iii. 123). Against the pomp of Rome, Bélibaste set a minimal organization of a non-militant Church without walls (ii.53): The heart of man is the Church of God, the material Church is nothing.
These ideas found echoes in the villagers of Montaillou and their friends the migrant shepherds. Pierre Maury, for instance, vented his feelings on the subject (i.29–30): The Minorite and preaching friars? No! They call themselves little or ‘minor’, and they are big. Instead of saving the souls of the dead and sending them to heaven, they gorge themselves at banquets after funerals. And then they own too many silks. And do you think that their great houses were built by the labour of their own hands? No, these friars, they are wicked wolves! They would like to devour us all, dead or alive.
The Church was fatter than it looked; its gizzard was bigger than its heart. Instead of adopting Gospel poverty, it devoured the money of the faithful. One means of doing this was through indulgences.
One day, said Pierre Maury (iii.238), I gave twelve Barcelona pennies to a collector from the Hospital of Roncevaux. When he saw me doing this, Guillaume Bélibaste said: ‘Pierre, you have lost your pennies! You would have done better to use them to buy yourself some fish … The indulgences of the Pope cost a lot, but they are not worth much!’ 1
In 1321, Guillaume de Corneillan of Lordat said (ii.121–2): Two years ago, towards the Feast of Whitsun I was warping some linen (or was it hemp?) for Guillemette Vila, wife of Arnaud Cogul of Lordat. A collector came along; according to what he said, he was in a position to give us a lot of indulgences. Afterwards, when he had left us, Guillemette said to me: ‘Do you think a man can give indulgences or absolve anyone of his sins? No, no man! God alone can do so.’
‘But,’ I ventured, ‘perhaps the Pope, the prelates, the priests …’
‘No,’ interrupted Guillemette. ‘No one. Only God.’
On another occasion, Guillemette Vila upbraided the priest for trying to sell a series of indulgences in church at cut prices (ii.122). Bélibaste had no words strong enough to attack the retailers of indulgences who went from door to door with their wares, taking one farthing’s profit for themselves for every thousand pardons, which they had bought wholesale in Rome, where the Pope would sell a few tens of thousands of days of indulgence for 10 to 20 livres tournois, half the price of a house (ii.24–6).
Parallel to the protest against indulgences was the rebellion against excessive begging, and the offerings demanded by parish priests on major feast days. Bernard, vicar of Ornolac, complained that the people of the village made fewer offerings than usual for the feast of Easter. Guillaume Austatz (in the course of a conversation with other villagers, in the house of a woman who lived in Ornolac), declared: ‘The priests can only exact a theoretical offering. It is enough to give them one small coin, and we have done all we have to do’ (i.196).
Similar resistance was offered when the Bishop and the priest ordered the villagers to make a waxen candle for Easter, weighing three pounds. ‘We will make one weighing a quarter of a pound only, with tallow instead of wax,’ answered a few of the bolder peasants (ii.312, 314). As for tithes, they encountered psychological resistance among the people. Last year, said Jean Jauffre of Tignac (i.109), we were in the upper story of a house, drinking and eating almonds, and we got talking about the lawsuits over the tithes between the ecclesiastics of the archiprêtré of Sabarthès and the laymen of the region …
‘I only hope the priests don’t get what they want from us,’ said Arnaud Laufre of Tignac, in the course of our conversation. ‘If only all the priests in the world could be hung up by the jaw!’
In Sabarthès the Church had adopted the disagreeable habit of excommunicating people for debt, above all for debt to the clergy, in other words non-payment of tithes, first fruits or carnelages. Some of the bolder spirits among the people, and sometimes even priests from the diocese of Palhars, where all eccentricities were allowed, would encourage the village protesters by saying (i.318), ‘My good fellow, excommunication breaks no bones.’
Resentment against excommunication for debt was accompanied by occasional animosity against usury. In a world of unequal but co-existing domus, the spirit of capitalist accumulation was comparatively unusual, and looked at askance. In the towns of the lowlands, usurers provoked anti-semitism. But in Sabarthès usury was neither very widespread nor greatly challenged. Guillaume Austatz practised it discreetly in his native village, but avoided doing so in Ornolac, where he was bayle (i.192). There was probably a very small amount of usury in Montaillou itself, but there is no reference to it in the Register. Tithes, debt for tithes, and excommunication for debt for tithes were the chief sources of anti-wealth sentiment in upper Ariège.
In passing we should note that popular protest against tithes and indulgences was not the only thing which linked the conquered Cathars of 1320 to the victorious Reformers of 1520 to 1580, whether German Lutherans or the Huguenots of Languedoc. Both movements were concerned with the Pauline theme of justification by faith.
According to Pierre Maury’s deposition (iii.202), On Christmas night, after we had feasted with Bélibaste, the holy man preached: ‘Baptism of water profits nothing,’ he said, ‘because water has no virtue to save the soul. It is only faith which saves the soul.’
Between 1300 and 1320, ordinary peasants of Sabarthès decried both ‘works’ and ‘good works’ (ii.130; i.356). Thus certain fundamental themes of the distant Reformation were already familiar in the mountains of Occitania in the early fourteenth century.
The hostility of the peasants of Sabarthès towards tithes, indulgences and all other ecclesiastical methods of extorting money was partly due to the frustration felt by country people towards those members of surrounding society who wielded wealth and power. But even the least sophisticated farmer was also moved by the teachings of the Gospel, according to which the rich were excluded from Heaven. As Raymond Roussel said to Béatrice de Planissoles (i.219), ‘A camel cannot go through the eye of a needle; nor can a rich man be saved. So there is no salvation for the rich: nor for kings, nor for princes, nor for prelates, nor for members of religious orders.’ This passage is interesting, in that it belongs to 1294, before the Authiés brought their propaganda to Sabarthès. Later, the shoemaker Vital said to his sweetheart Vuissane (i.457), ‘The only ones who can attain salvation are the poor of the faith and of the sect of the good Christians.’
Guillaume Austatz, bayle of Ornolac, believed that salvation through poverty would bring about the inversion of the social order after death (i.197, 207–08): Those who have possessions in the present life can have only evil in the other world. Conversely, those who have evil in the present life will have only good in the future life.
The rich were sometimes looked on as cowards, who preferred to save their possessions in this world rather than seek after salvation in the next. Master Salacrou of Bouan, said Sybille Pierre (ii.425), liked the heretics well enough. But he moaned and groaned every time he had them in his house. He was rich, and he was afraid of losing his wealth.
Rich and greedy priests were a special case. Not only were they themselves excluded from Heaven because of their deprivations, but they also deprived their parishioners of Paradise, because, unworthy as they were, they could not absolve sins. Sybille Pierre reported what the Authiés had said in a house in Ax-les-Thermes (ii.404): The priests steal all men’s possessions; as soon as they have baptized children, they start to slip away, carrying the oil lamps and the candles. To say Mass, to do anything at all, they want money. They do not live as they ought; that is why they have lost the power to absolve sins, both their own and those of others. Thus poverty and salvation are inextricably linked.
The people of Montaillou did not praise all poverty indiscriminately. While Pierre Maury scorned the amassing of riches, he regarded poverty, from the material point of view, as a disease (ii.30). Raymonde Belot, Arnaud Sicre and Arnaud de Bédeillac are all ‘confused’ and ‘irritated’ because of the condescension shown on account of their poverty to the family of one and the husband of another, while the third is despised in his own person. Poverty itself was not so bad as impoverishment, which meant moving down the social scale. It was better to be poor in the long term, pauper, than to have become poor recently, depauperatus.
What was respected and revered, in contrast to wealth, cupidity and avarice, was the poverty which was voluntary, the state of being poor of the faith. In a conversation with her second lover, Béatrice de Planissoles said (i.255): ‘In Montaillou, people commonly say that one ought to do good to all pilgrims and poor of the faith; and by “poor of the faith” they meant the heretics who were called, in the village, the good Christians.’
To become poor of the faith, in other words a parfait, was to try to become poor in Christ, to follow the example given by Christ in the Gospel. When a man becomes a goodman, that is to say a heretic, said Bélibaste (ii.59), he must send away his wife and children, and possessions and wealth. He thus conforms to the precepts of Christ, who wanted men to follow Him. Needless to say, the problem of salvation was the central preoccupation of the poor of the faith in Montaillou, whether they were professional goodmen or ordinary people on their deathbed. Once they had been ‘consoled’, the dying, too, had detached themselves from all the goods of this world, including food.
Despite the differences between the Catholics of the lowlands and the Cathars of the mountains, the stress on voluntary poverty was a spiritual heritage possessed in common by the most dynamic elements among both groups. Hence the importance attached to giving alms. Whether they were given merely to help the needy, who were not necessarily vowed to voluntary poverty, or to hospices and hospitals, to be redistributed to guests in want, the final object was always a spiritual one, sometimes invoking the love of God. That night, said Pierre Maury (iii. 189), we dined in the house of Guillemette Maury, in company with members of her family … and with a poor man to whom Guillemette had granted hospitality for the love of God. Such attitudes might give rise to violent criticism of wills, ‘passports to Heaven’, in which legacies were designed to promote the testator’s own salvation. According to Bernard Franca (i.352), Legacies and alms which are bestowed by sick men are worthless, because they are not dictated by love but by fear. Only those alms are valid which are given by healthy men. Nevertheless, few people were entirely disinterested, and gifts given to the poor in a spirit of human and divine charity had as their main object the subsequent welfare of the donor’s soul. As always, some people were sceptical. Guillaume de Corneillan the younger, of Lordat (ii.121) recounted how one Sunday last January, I was sitting up by the fire in his house with my father-in-law, Guillaume de Corneillan the elder. He told me that Bor of Tignac had spoken to him as fellows: ‘The priests talk nonsense when they tell us to give alms for the salvation of souls. All that is rubbish! When a man dies, the soul dies too. It is just the same as with animals. The soul is only blood….’
Those who did believe in the survival of the soul and the existence of another world – and this was the case with the great majority of the country people – were concerned by the question of alms-giving. I have sometimes doubted the value of indulgences, said Pierre Maury (iii.238), but I have never had the slightest hesitation about the value of alms. Conversely, Guillemette Benet of Ornolac, who disbelieved entirely in the immortality of the soul, began to laugh when told that she ought to give alms for the salvation of her soul (i.262). Those who did believe, and who had the means to be lavish, might be almost excessive, like the overscrupulous Aude Fauré. ‘Madam,’ said a farm woman to her when she was rolling about in bed with convulsions and begging the Virgin to restore her faith in God (ii.98), ‘what sin have you committed, then? Your alms-giving supports all the poor of the village!’
To whom was one to give alms? Aude Fauré, the Catholic, gave to the local poor. Guillemette Maury, the Cathar, who was not so wealthy, invited a poor traveller to dinner. For those who stayed at home in Montaillou and were steeped in Albigensian orthodoxy, the best solution, while giving something to the local poor – beggars, migrants or heads of families ruined by the Inquisition – was to give chiefly to the poor of faith, the goodmen. As Rixende Cortil of Ascou said (iii.307): The goodmen, thanks to the heretication they bestow, can send a soul directly to the Kingdom of the Father after death; to give alms to them is to obtain a great reward in exchange, far superior to what one obtains when one gives to other men. Arnaud Vital of Montaillou expressed a similar view (i.457): Alms for the goodmen, yes. For the Catholics, no. And Alazaïs Guilhabert of Montaillou, too (i.124): The goodmen saved the soul of my brother Guillaume the shepherd, who later died; in exchange it seems to me right, though my mother does not agree, to give them alms. In Montaillou it was sometimes the really poor, the poor of life, who took the bread out of their own mouths to give it to the poor of the faith, though these might already be gorged with the gifts of the faithful. Alazaïs ‘Maurine’ of Montaillou, wife of Raymond Maury and mother of Pierre Maury, told Béatrice de Planissoles (i.235–6), ‘Poor as we are, my husband and I give alms to the goodmen. We abstain from food in order to give it them. We send them flour, the best flour.’
Béatrice was astonished and asked Alazaïs whether the goodmen would accept food given in such circumstances. Of course, was the reply. Béatrice then decided to send some flour to the parfaits herself. Pierre Maury, Alazaïs’s son, gladly deprived himself and sold a sheep in order to give six sous tournois to the goodmen he met in his travels (ii.416).
It was believed that the poor of the faith, laden with presents by the poor of the real world, ended up by becoming very rich. When the parfait Guillaume Authié collected gold and silver coins on his pastoral journey, he put them away in his chest, and from time to time he and his wife Gaillarde would amuse themselves by putting their heads inside the box and watching the money glitter in the dark (ii.417).
Often, however, alms-giving did relieve the genuinely poor. It also called down divine blessing upon the houses and crops of those who had been generous. To empty one’s house to relieve the want of others was to fill one’s barn.
The people of Montaillou were fond of having a nap, of taking it easy, of delousing one another in the sun or by the fire. Whenever they could, they tended to shorten the working day into a half day. Some, backed up by a comfortable dowry, neglected their manual tasks, or dreamed of neglecting them, in order merely to manage their estate. 1 But reality forced manual workers, in other words the great majority of people, to put their backs to the wheel at certain seasons of the agricultural year and at various stages of the transhumance.
At all events, work in itself was not a source of earthly consideration. For a peasant to farm his own land well was merely to show that he was not mad (ii.126). The head of a household was expected to be a good neighbour, but not to kill himself with work.
Alms-giving and work tended to be mutually exclusive. ‘One does not acquire merit by giving alms to me, because I am capable of working,’ said Emersend Marty of Montaillou to Gauzia Clergue, who gave her bread for All Saints’ Day (iii.356). Alazaïs Fauré made a slightly different distinction (i.424): Whoever does good to the goodmen gives alms of great value. For they are afraid to work lest they be taken prisoner [by the Inquisition].
At the same time, the parfaits were also honoured because, unlike the good-for-nothing clergy, they worked. Pierre Maury said to Arnaud Sicre (ii.29–30): ‘Do you think the preaching friars built their great houses with the toil of their own hands? No, of course not, but our lords [the goodmen] live by their own work.’ He was perhaps alluding to the fact that his friend Bélibaste earned a living by making combs. The people of Montaillou were vastly impressed by the fact that Guillaume Authié, though he had to lead a furtive existence, worked as a tailor, mending the tunic of Pierre Clergue the priest and making him a pair of trousers (i.315). Bélibaste even locked himself up and worked as usual during the feast days celebrated by the Roman Church (ii.53). Pierre Authié made a direct connection between work and salvation: ‘We work and take pains,’ he said to Sybille Pierre (ii.406), ‘not because we might otherwise be poor, but in order to save our souls.’ Jean Maury, during one of his heretical phases, would eat only what he had earned with his own hands, because the Son of God said that man must live by the sweat of his brow (ii.73). Guillemette Argelliers of Montaillou heard two parfaits say, in Raymond Maury’s house (iii.95, 96, 97): ‘The priests ought to live by the work of their own hands, according to the commandment of God. And not off the work of the people, as they do in fact. The priests, who expel people from the path of salvation, do all that in order to be well dressed and well shod, in order to ride on horseback and to drink and eat well.’ Guillemette was so struck by the Cathars’ description of the priests’ misdeeds that she told the two parfaits: ‘If I was only sure you could do it better than the priests, I would let you save my soul.’1
In general, there was nothing revolutionary about the idealization of poverty in Montaillou. The praise of poverty was quite compatible with the efficient management of a domus, with the gifts made by a rich to a poor domus, with living by the sweat of one’s brow, though without giving up the luxury of the siesta or a spell of relaxation in the sun. In one particular, however, the idealization of poverty was subversive. By setting up a poor Church as an image of salvation, it threatened the claims of the tithe-exacting priests. This idealization spared the establishments of wealthy laymen and noblemen, but turned against the established Church, which cost a lot of money yet did not save the soul. Sometimes the condemnation included recent capitalist accumulation, which undermined the domus hierarchy and was embodied in the practice of usury. Criticism was particularly severe against the mendicant orders; the preaching and Minorite friars came to symbolize the oppression of the innocent countryside by Pamiers, the Babylon of Foix. Wealth in itself was not the real object of attack. What the people of Montaillou hated was the unhealthy fat of the undeserving rich, clerics and mendicants, who exploited the village without giving in return any spiritual aid or even those services of help and protection habitually provided by a well-to-do domus or by wealthy local nobles.