Beatrice de Planisoles
In an obscure hill village nestling in the wooded north-facing foothills of the Pyrenees, at about 1,370 metres (4,500 ft) above sea level, a woman named Beatrice de Planisoles (c.1274–after 1322) lived as the chatelaine of the village of Montaillou in the decades around 1300.
As it happens, we know more about Montaillou’s inhabitants than we do of many other larger and more important medieval settlements because of its notoriety as one of the last bastions of the Cathar heretics of Languedoc. The Cathars had been largely – but not entirely – extirpated from the south of France during the Albigensian Crusade of 1209–29, initiated by the papacy.* And we know more about Beatrice than we do about most other medieval women because she was tried by the Inquisition of the energetic bishop of Pamiers, Jacques Fournier (1285–1342).† From her confessions and from witnesses who testified against her, we know the names and habits of her friends and enemies, her servants, husbands and lovers. The incriminating contents of her baggage at the time of her arrest in 1320 are revealed to us. We know what she thought, said and did in considerable detail and in her own words – almost her own words: she gave evidence in her native language, Romance Occitan (the Languedoc region is named from its tongue, Lengadoc) and the bishop’s clerks transcribed them into Latin. Even so, and despite the intimidating and formal setting of a religious court, her testimony rings loud and clear across the ages, with an astonishing honesty and clarity.Montaillou was a typical hill village of terraces straggling up a gentle ridge. Its houses, many of them single-storey with shingle roofs, were shared by family and livestock alike. Wheat, flax, oats, turnips and leeks grew in small plots, while pigs, chickens and flocks of sheep mingled with their owners in small yards.
There was just one weaver in the village and the nearest mill was several miles away. Shepherds passed through on their way to and from the high summer pastures of the mountains beyond. Domestic life was intimately centred on the foghana, a kitchen and living space from which other rooms led off, including cellars where dry goods were stored and which family members often made their private bedrooms. Curing meat hung from ceilings. Privacy was almost non-existent. Neighbours, servants – for those who had them – cousins, visitors, parents, grandparents and children knew each other’s business, a fact that frequently told against Montaillou’s heretics, lovers and cheats, exposed as they were to the forensic scrutiny of the Inquisition.In the 1290s Beatrice was married to a minor noble, Berenger de Roquefort, who held the manor of Montaillou from the Comte de Foix. Physically and socially she looked down on the rest of the village from the walls of the modest château that capped the ridge. Even then, the handsome Beatrice attracted unwanted attention: first, from her husband’s steward, Raimond Roussel of the nearby village of Prades. He was a Cathar or ‘pure one’, believing in the equal opposites of God and the Devil, denying the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and committed to a life of purity – rather ironic, given his apparent sexual availability and that of Beatrice’s fellow defendants. Even while she was pregnant, she told the court, Raimond ‘often asked me to leave with him and go to Lombardy to the Good Christians [Cathars] who were there’, leaving behind her family and following Him – that is to say, Jesus – into the kingdom of heaven. Roussel’s arguments were attractive: Catharism offered women the chance to become ‘perfectae’, the elite of the faith, who could minister to believers and the baptised.
Beatrice was unconvinced – on grounds, it seems, of practicality rather than any aversion to the idea of eloping with Raimond. He seems to have taken her demurral lightly:
After having spread his heretical discourse to me quite liberally at several times and places and asked me to part with him, there came one night when we had dined together and he entered secretly into my bedroom and hid himself under my bed.
I put the house in order and lay down to sleep and when all was quiet and everyone asleep and I myself was sleeping, Raimond came out from under my bed, placed himself next to me and began to act as if he wished to know me carnally.1Beatrice reacted to Roussel’s advances by throwing him out of her room. Then, in about 1297, she says, she was raped by Raimond Clergue, an illegitimate cousin of Montaillou’s curate. The Clergues were a powerful local family,‡ Cathar sympathisers, collectors of tithes for the comte and sometime agents of the Inquisition. The following year Beatrice’s husband died and, since the office and residence of a chatelain was held for a life interest only, Beatrice was forced to leave her home. Her husband’s family seem to have provided her with no dower to support her through just such an eventuality.
Widows with property might maintain themselves and their household independently; Beatrice was forced to accept the protection of others and she told the court that, in her immediate widowhood, Raimond Clergue ‘publicly maintained’ her as his mistress. A year or so afterwards, she recalled two decades later, she attended confession at the village church§ at Lent:
When I was there, I went to Pierre Clergue, the rector [cousin of Raimond], who listened to confessions behind the altar of St Mary. As soon as I had kneeled down before him, he embraced me, saying to me that there was no other woman in the world that he loved so much as me. In my stupefaction I left without being confessed.2
Pierre Clergue was persistent, visiting Beatrice several times, preaching a sort of theology of free love to persuade her to become his mistress. Despite her reservations – the thought of sinning with a priest was evidently quite shocking – she eventually gave in. Beatrice and Pierre maintained a semi-clandestine affair during more than a year and a half, in the face of considerable enmity from the spurned Raimond.
One night, when she was living in Prades in a small house abutting that of another Clergue, the village priest, she was summoned to the church by a servant. Here she found that Pierre had made up a bed ‘and that night he knew me carnally in church’. There was no shaming the man: the Inquisition recorded the names of many of his mistresses, including young girls and pairs of sisters. In response to Beatrice’s fears that she might become pregnant by him, he made her wear a sort of herbal charm around her neck when they had sex.In 1301 Beatrice left the high country of the Pays d’Aillon and moved to Dalou, where she married a second member of the minor nobility, a man named Otho Lagleize. Was she trying to escape the Clergues, their sexual predations and their dangerous Cathar beliefs? If that was her plan, she was nevertheless unable to resist her former lover Pierre’s attentions. He pursued her.
…at the following harvest… entering my house, he said to me that my sister Gentille, who dwelt at Limoux, greeted me, and I let him enter. We went together into the cellar, and he knew me carnally while Sibille, the daughter of the late Arnaud Teisseyre, guarded the door of the cellar. She had brought me the preceding day a present from the rector, a blouse made in the style of Barcelona, which had one red and one yellow ruffle at the collar, and told me that he would come the following day. In order that no one would find us, and if someone did appear he would not believe that anything bad had happened between the rector and me, this servant placed herself near the open door to the cellar, in which we were uniting ourselves, the priest and I. This sin committed, I led him out of the house.3
Beatrice’s testimony was intelligent, unselfconscious, prosaic: as a defence against accusations that might see her burned at the stake, it was either hopelessly disingenuous or brilliantly insouciant. Witnesses brought to bear testimony against her told the court of her poor attendance at church.
They recalled how she would ask apparently rhetorical questions in company: how, if God was present in the sacrament, could he permit himself to be eaten by priests? Theologically, this was a very dangerous position, absolutely heretical. But Beatrice’s defence was always that she was only repeating what she had heard others say; that she herself was not a Cathar believer, even though she admitted giving some of their itinerant perfecti money and support on occasion. One gets the impression that Beatrice was passively orthodox, certainly superstitious, but essentially irreligious. When challenged with the contents of a leather sack found among her travelling baggage – unsurprisingly, she fled from her first summons to Fournier’s court – she had, or had rehearsed, a series of implausible but consistent excuses, delivered with sangfroid:I have the cords of the male children of my daughters, and I preserve them, because a Jewess, since baptised, told me that if I were to carry them with me and I had a lawsuit with anyone, I would not lose…
…These linens stained with blood are the menstrual blood of my daughter Philippa because this baptised Jewess told me that if I were to save her first blood and give it in a drink to her husband or another man, he would never care for any another woman…
I did not put these cloths with grains of incense with a view to casting spells. It is by chance that I have them at all. My daughter had a headache this year and she said that incense cured this malady better than anything else…
The mirror and the wrapped knife, no more than the morsels of linen, are not destined for casting spells or enchantments. As for the seed enveloped in muslin, it is the seed of a plant that is called ive. It was given to me by a pilgrim who told me that it would be efficacious against the falling sickness.4
In another time and place, such objects might mark Beatrice out as a seeress or cunning-woman; in the eyes of Fournier’s inquisitors, they were damning evidence of heresy.
The security of a second marriage and superficial conventionality did not last: Beatrice was widowed for a second time in about 1308. She now had four daughters, all of whom expressed great affection for her. If she was a caring mother, she was also still a passionate lover. In her forties, even as she entered the menopause, she fell for a much younger man, another priest, called Barthelemy Amilhac, who, she believed,
…had cast some sort of spell on me, because I loved him so much and I wished too much to be with him, to the point that when I made his acquaintance, my periods ceased.5
Beatrice was no martyr. With refreshing rationality and a strong desire for self-preservation she willingly abjured all heretical ideas, promised to be a good Catholic and submitted to whatever penance and punishment the court should impose. She stuck it out, held her nerve and learned a key lesson for a defendant: deny the accusations simply, without repetition or caveat. She appeared before the Inquisition on several occasions between June 1320 and March 1321, when she was finally convicted of heresy at the age of about forty-six. Instead of being sentenced to death by burning at the stake, she was imprisoned in Carcassonne. In 1322 she was released on licence, subject to the display of a yellow cross on her clothing, and, because she ceased to be of interest to Jacques Fournier’s inquisitors, she passes out of all knowledge.
The survival of Beatrice’s testimony is fortuitous, the result of an obsessive persecution of heretics by the Inquisition and the equally obsessive preservation, through seven centuries, of ecclesiastical archives. Her story may, in fact, typify the experience of many women who found themselves exposed to the whim of authority and the exploitation of powerful individuals when the protections afforded them by society – marriage, laws on widowhood, family approbation – failed. That she was by no means alone is clear from sketchier accounts of other women who were forced, or who chose, to adapt to challenging circumstances in sometimes surprising ways.