Introduction

Summary

In August 1319, during Bishop Jacques Fournier's first year as Inquisitor in Pamiers, in the County of Foix, four of The Poor of Lyons (also known as Waldensians) were arrested and jailed – two men and two women. Southern France had been since the last decades of the twelfth century one of the central locations of the expansion of The Poor of Lyons, but since their persecution by the Inquisition during the latter half of the thirteenth century their numbers in the region had been dwindling. Those who were not executed or imprisoned had migrated to other parts. In 1319 they were a mere smattering in the County of Foix, and not many in the south of France as a whole. The two men and two women who were arrested that year belonged to a tiny group, consisting of about a dozen men and women who gathered in Pamiers.

Jacques Fournier did not send many condemned people to the stake. In the one extant volume of his register, five individuals are recorded as burnt at the stake. Like other Inquisitors, he sentenced people to prison; some of these were condemned to a ‘narrow cell’, a kind of cubicle in which the prisoner's legs were fettered and sometimes chained to the wall; others were given a ‘wide cell’, in which the prisoner could move about. He ordered some to wear a yellow cross sewn onto their garment (‘ordinary’ – sewn on the back only, or ‘double’ – both front and back), and many others were ordered to atone for their sins with fasts, prayers, pilgrimages to the shrines of saints, or alms to churches, monasteries and the poor. Four of the people he condemned to the stake were the Waldensians arrested in 1319. Two of them, Raymond de la Côte and Agnes Franco, were burnt at the stake on May 1, 1320, after some nine months of imprisonment and interrogation. The other two, Huguette de la Côte and her husband Jean of Vienne, were burnt at the stake after two years of imprisonment and interrogation, on August 2, 1321.