SC - Languedoc/Cathar (Long)

[Terri Spencer]

In response to the recent question on Cathar food habits, I just read 
Montaillou, and kept some notes.  I saved them more as food info for a
14th century mountain village than for Cathar food culture, but they
might be of some interest.  

Modern Source: 
Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy,  Montaillou, Cathars and Catholics in a
French Village 1294-1324, Translated by Barbara Bray, Penguin Books,
NY, NY, 1980.  ISBN 0 14 00.5471 5

Original Source:
The Inquisition Register of Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers in
Ariège in the Comté de Foix 1318-1325.  Latin MS. 4030, Vatican
Library.  

Jacques Fournier was a Cistercian monk, a doctor at the University of
Paris, Abbot of Fontfroide 1311, Bishop of Pamiers 1318.  There, in
addition to the Inquisition, he imposed tithes on cheese, beets and
turnips, and enforced those on livestock.  Became Bishop of Mirepoix
1326, Cardinal 1327, and Pope Benedict XII 1334 (Avignon).

 Montaillou is a little village in the Pyrenees close to the frontier
between France and Spain. In the diocese of Pamiers, the old medieval
Comté de Foix, once an independent principality, annexed by France in
the 13th-14th centuries. 

Montaillou was the last holdout of the Cathar heresy known as
Albigensianism, which appeared in the 12-13th centuries in Languedoc,
in northern Italy, and, in slightly different forms in the Balkans. 
Catharism saw God and Satan as opposing deities.  They  believed in
metempsychosis, circulation of souls between birds, mammals and men.  
The élite (perfecti, parfaits, bonshommes or hérétiques), initiated by
the Albigensian sacrament (consolamentum, consolation or heretication)
of baptism by book and words (not water), remained pure, abstaining
from meat and women.  Ordinary believers (credents) could lead a normal
life until they received the consolamentum near death.  After this they
must (in the late Catharism of the 1300s) fast totally of meat and
women (endura) until they died, of the original cause or the endura.   

The village of Montaillou was built in tiers overlooking a plateau of
meadow and forest, château at the top of the hill and a Romanesque
parish church below the village.  In 1320 there were 200-250
inhabitants.  The surroundings were a checkerboard of small, roughly
rectangular terraced plots of land, 20-30 acres, arable or pasture.  It
was too high and cold for vines,  so they produced oats and wheat (not
barley or rye), turnips, hemp, flax, and perhaps forage for fodder,
harvested green.  Oxen, cows, mules or donkeys pulled the
swing-ploughs, other livestock included pigs, chicken and geese, and
many sheep, including large flocks led by migrant shepherds to and from
winter pastures of Lauragais and Catalonia.  

Men ploughed, harvested cereals and turnips, hunted the forests for
pheasant and squirrels, and fished the rivers for trout.  Children
looked after the local flocks.  Women were in charge of water, fire,
gardening, cooking, and gathering kindling.  They cut the cabbages,
weeded the wheat, tied the sheaves, mended the winnowing fan, washed
the pots at the well and harvested with the migrant workers.  The
forests hid parfaits and provided kindling, shingles and forage.  The
mountains to the south were the high pastures, a world of money, men
and traveling parfaits.  The village economy had little money, it lived
on barter and borrowing.  Crafts were underdeveloped, there was a
shoemaker and only one weaver, plus home spinning for local use. 
Tailoring was done by  Cathar parfaits passing through.  There was one
(female) wine-seller, wine and salt came by mule from the lowlands of
Tarascon and Pamiers, olive oil from Roussillon, tools from the
Vicdessos valley. The nearest fairs, markets (and prostitutes) were at
Ax-les-Thermes, Tarascon-sur-Ariège, Pamiers and Laroque d'Olmes. 
There was no village blacksmith or mill. Wheat was taken to
Ax-les-Therms to be made into flour at the Comté de Foix's mill.  Also
eggs and poultry to sell, and yarn to be woven. In bad years grain was
imported from Pamiers, traded for firewood.  But food shortages were
rare until the 14th century, when droughts, plague and English wars cut
the population by more than half. Montaillou had about 100 souls in 23
hearths at the end of the 14th century.

Bread was the staple vegetable food, wheat or sometimes millet.  Flour
was made in Ax-les-Thermes but sifted at home and baked in home
hearths, not communal or manorial ovens.  Only wealthy homes had ovens,
poorer women took their kneaded dough to a more fortunate friend and
neighbor.  When the fire was not alight, the oven was used to store
fish and snails.  Fish was mountain trout or salt sea fish, brought up
by mule.  Meat was mutton, or more often salt and especially smoked
pork.  Pigs were killed in the winter, neighbors helped smoke the
bacon, ample hearths taking in salted pork quarters for poorer
families.  Records don't say how often meat was eaten.  Artisans of
southern Occitania living in exile in small towns in Catalonia bought
meat twice a week, in Montaillou it seems to have been eaten more
frequently.  Other proteins came from milk, and mostly from cheese made
by shepherds in the mountain pastures.  Soup included bacon and bread,
the potherbs were cabbage and leeks.  The altitude and isolation of
Montaillou kept them from the artichokes, melons and peaches grown in
lower climes by the 14th century.  Broad beans and field turnips were
grown for the pot; nuts, mushrooms and snails were gathered.  Wine was
imported and scarce, drunk on great occasions, around the fire at
night.  Sugar was extremely rare,    Pierre Clergue gave his long-time
mistress a last present of an engraved glass and some sugar (zacara)
from the land of the Saracens.

The Cathar ethic allowed fish, but forbade bacon and butcher's meat
because of metempsychosis.  Christian fasting was widely observed, Lent
was generally followed, enabling the parfaits to move about more freely
and openly consume their favorite food, which was mostly fish.  One
account mentions bread and cabbage flavored with oil for the parfait
because there was no fish.  The ordinary believers ate flesh of 2 or
4-legged beasts, sheep or grouse.  

The kitchen (foganha) was the center of the home (domus), its rafters
covered with hams hung out of reach of the cat.  There meals were
eaten, neighbors visited, and discussed their world.  They gathered
around the central fire, covered at night for safety, watched over by
the housewife (focaria) or 'woman at the hearth'.  It was the man's job
to break kindling (frangere teza).  The hearth was surrounded by
cooking utensils - earthenware pots, pans, caudrons, jugs and basins,
the latter sometimes decorated.  There were never enough utensils,
particularly of metal, so neighbors shared.  Near the hearth were a
table and benches, men and guests ate at table, women and children
sitting around the fire.  

Sometimes people slept in the kitchen, but more often in several
bedrooms surrounding the kitchen, with beds and benches.   Or they
slept on the first floor (solier), above the kitchen, reached by a
ladder.   There were also cellars (sotulum) beside the kitchen.  Large
houses might have an antechamber on the first floor as well.  A solier
was a sign of wealth - there were only 3 in Montaillou.  The foganha
was built of stone, the solier or ground floor of wood and daub. In
smaller homes, people, pigs and sheep lived in the same building. 
There would also be a yard, typically with chickens and a dung-heap. 
Beyond the yard was the threshing-floor.  Large farms had a garden,
stable for oxen (boal), dovecote, pigsty, and barns (bordes) for straw,
possibly a sheep-pen (cortal).  Roofs / balconies were nearly flat, and
could be used for keeping sheaves of wheat - the Catalan Pyrenees did
not use sloping roofs until the 16th century.  

The ruling ostal of Montaillou was the Clergue family.  They were the
largest, with 32 members, the wealthiest, and the most influential. 
Their house had a cellar, anteroom, first floor, portico, and
individual bedrooms.  They had plenty of land, and herds of pigs and
sheep. Bernard Clergue was bayle, and had connections in the court of
the Comte de Foix.  His brother Pierre Clergue was the priest and
Cathar leader who first protected his flock, then turned them in to the
inquisition.  Together they were the political and spiritual power in
the village.   

Pierre Clergue told his mistress he had a special herbal contraceptive.
 Beatrice asked "What sort of herb?  Is it the one the cowherds hand
over a cauldron of milk in which they have put some rennet, to stop the
milk from curdling so long as the herb is over the cauldron?"  The
reference to rennet is relevant - since the days of Dioscorides and
Magnino of Milan, his 13th-century successor, the rennet of a hare was
thought to be a contraceptive.  Beatrice did not see it as a
contraceptive, but as something which made cow's milk or a man's semen
curdle, thus producing either cheese or a foetus.  Pierre Clergue's
magic herb prevented this solidification, and thus acted as a
contraceptive.  


There was no mention of what the herb was (guess the inquisitors didn't
ask Pierre) - any ideas?  One last non-food bit just for fun:

"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:

'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.  If
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 next it came into its
nest.  And this the pelican did.  And the little pelican were
delivered.  In the same way Christ hid his radiance when he was
incarnated with the Virgin Mary.'"

Better than the piercing the heart to feed the young story...

Tara
Finally caught up with the list - for now.

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