Montaillou

James Fournier, meanwhile, was continuing to interrogate afresh people who had been questioned ten years earlier by Geoffrey d’Ablis (who had died in 1316). Fournier was a much more thorough inquisitor, and managed to extract a wealth of new information. In particular, he found that the situation in Montaillou was much graver than had originally been thought. Almost everyone there had been, or still was, a Cathar, which instigated a fresh wave of arrests. A number of factors had allowed Catharism almost to take over the entire village. There was no lord to keep an eye on things, as he had died in 1299, and his widow, Beatrice de Planisolles, seems to have been converted — at least for a time — to Catharism by Peter Clergue, the village’s rector. Although a Cathar, Clergue was still outwardly a Catholic priest, saying mass, hearing confessions, performing baptisms and funerals. He was also notoriously promiscuous, bedding many of the women in the village, including Beatrice, with whom he once had sex in the church. Peter’s brother Bernard was the village’s bayle — effectively an agent for the local count of Foix — and was also a Cathar. Together the two men effectively controlled the village, and had the power to keep unwelcome visitors out.

The early 1320s were a legalistic marathon, with Fournier sentencing hundreds of people. Beatrice de Planisolles was sent to prison, but her sentence was later commuted to the wearing of yellow crosses. Various members of Belibaste’s group were jailed, including Peter Maury and his brother John, who were sentenced to ‘perpetual prison’ on 12 August 1324. Peter Clergue, the randy rector of Montaillou, died before he could be sentenced. On 16 January 1329, he was pronounced a heretic, and his remains were dug up and burnt.

It was the end of Catharism in the Languedoc. What Believers there were left had all been forced to confess and recant. There were to be no more consolings, or ‘holy baptisms’, as the ritual of the consolamentum phrased it, a tradition which, the Cathars believed, had come down to them ‘from the time of the apostles until this time and it has passed from Good Men to Good Men until the present moment, and it will continue to do so until the end of the world.’ Now that there were no more Good Men left, it seemed that the end of the world had truly come.