18
In the Village
Pierre Clergue
I WAS SURPRISED AND not altogether pleased that my brother had sent Seigneur Francois de Beaufort – to give him his full title, although he was now only a shepherd – to extract me from the Carcassonne jail. Bernard believed he was the only man we could trust with 20,000 sous. He was probably right.
This was a reflection on how little my work was understood or appreciated in the village. I alone enabled Catharism to survive, I made it possible for the Perfects to visit regularly, I allowed the Consolamentum to be administered to dying souls. All this at considerable expense to my own conscience. It was I who had to preach carefully worded sermons, conduct the Mass which I no longer thought a real sacrament, impose penances and collect tithes.
I did not expect to be loved. Ordering the cutting out of Mengarde Maurs’s tongue guaranteed that. Her incessant gossip about my youth as a believer threatened not only me but the whole of Montaillou, and meant there was only one remedy. Which, by the way, worked. As did the killing of Arnaud Lizier, who hated all Cathars, and was often heard reciting the disgraceful ballad composed by the troubadour Pierre Cardenal:
Clergue pretends to be a priest, a shepherd of his flock,
But really he’s a murderer, though he seems of great holiness,
When you see him in his clerical habit.
Lizier’s body was left for all to see on the green in front of the castle, and the ballad wasn’t heard any more in Montaillou.
I wanted to be feared, and my brother and I achieved that at least. I also thought I would be understood, and I was wrong. The women were to blame. Bernard told me that he had overheard two of them gossiping to each other that Montaillou would be a better place if I never returned from Carcassonne. He gave me their names, Alazais Faurs and Gauzia Maurs, the latter the sister of the tongueless Mengarde. I decided against applying a similar remedy, but the next time they or any member of their families came to me or Bernard for a loan, or for some cloth, or to borrow one of our mules, they received short shrift. We made the reason for our rejection clear.
I hated all the Maurs clan and for good reason. It was Mengarde’s father who, soon after I became the priest, called me ‘little man’ in front of half the village. I smiled and did nothing at the time, but it did not take me long to become richer and more powerful than the rest of them put together. My stature I can do nothing about – I am of medium height, not small – and later I had no objection to being known as the ‘Little Bishop’.
My other offence was to love and to be loved by the women of the village. I need a woman regularly, and my attentions were not unwelcome once I had explained that priests were much like other men. I could offer subsequent absolution for those who wanted it.
Bernard laughed when I told him this.
‘Most of us make do with one woman. You’ve had half the village.’
He was exaggerating; it was no more than six or seven of the wives and daughters in Montaillou, and they were willing enough and even grateful, some of them. I tried to be discreet, but that was difficult in a small village where we all lived on top of each other.
‘On top of each other? You take that too literally,’ said Bernard. ‘One day a jealous husband will stick a knife in your ribs.’
‘They should be delighted. I teach their wives how to please men. Most of the husbands are too tired to perform more than once a week. And Beatrice is a widow.’
Beatrice was different from the rest of my women. For a start she was of noble birth, and when she returned to the village and her castle she kept her distance from the rest of us. I was persistent in my attentions, and the first time had to use force, but only because I could tell her reluctance was feigned. Thereafter she couldn’t get enough of me. There’s no doubt in my mind that part of the attraction was my priesthood, and the fact that I was a peasant.
‘You smell of the farmyard, not the vestry,’ she said to me. On one occasion I even persuaded her to make love in my church behind the altar.
‘How can we do such a thing in the Church of Notre Dame?’ she said. It was easy to convince her that St Peter wouldn’t mind. I had prepared a makeshift bed of old church vestments on which we spent an exciting night. And many other nights, usually in the castle, with her maidservant guarding the door.
Most of the time, however, Beatrice was the dominant partner in our relationship. She wasn’t afraid of me, unlike the other women, and took occasional, cruel pleasure in refusing me when I wanted her most.
So when Francois de Beaufort arrived in Carcassonne on a horse he had borrowed from Beatrice, sending me back on one of our own mules, I at once wondered whether Beatrice had yielded to his charms. For although he was one-armed and one-eyed he was still handsome, confident, well born. And tall.
The moment I got back I asked Beatrice whether she had taken him as her lover.
‘That’s none of your business. But the answer is yes. I like him. And we all believed you would never return from Carcassonne. But since you are back…’ and she took me there and then, standing up in her antechamber, not caring whether we were interrupted. I felt much better after that. I had been three months without a woman, something I had never known before.
Francois had arrived in Montaillou three or four years earlier, with no money. Bernard and I, out of kindness to a fellow Cathar, made use of him as one of our collectors. Perhaps that was a mistake; anyhow, he didn’t stay working for us very long. He became a shepherd, taking over Arnaud’s house and flock when Arnaud was killed – by a falling tree, Francois said – and soon prospered.
He was never a rival to Bernard or to me even when rich. He came to church regularly and confessed, at least until he had slept with Beatrice. And he sheltered the Perfects in his own house and on the mountain. Authie told me Francois was genuinely interested in discussing the finer points of our religion, and was, in Authie’s view, close to becoming a Perfect himself.
My time in the Carcassonne prison, even though I was eventually released, had disturbed more than my relationship with Beatrice. My influence was diminished. Tithes became harder to collect. Pons, the most reliable of our men-at-arms, left to visit a cousin in Pamiers and never returned.
Worst of all, a new and more zealous Inquisitor came to Carcassonne. Montaillou was the last redoubt of Catharism, and I was no longer sure that I could preserve the illusion that we were all good Catholics. Or preserve my family’s wealth and power.
*
Francois
BACK IN MONTAILLOU I soon found, as I had expected, that Pierre Clergue had re-established himself as Beatrice’s lover. She was happy to love me too, and when I grumbled about the arrangement she was absolutely clear.
‘It’s my body we’re talking about, not yours, mine to dispose of as I see fit.’ We had just made love, we were eating my cheese and drinking Etienne’s wine, and I was tired by my journey, by our lovemaking, and by that sadness that one of our poets says always comes after physical ecstasy.
‘I know it’s your body, but it’s mine too. I feel I belong to you when we’re together, when I’m inside you.’
‘I’m happy when you say that’, and she took a long sip of her wine, ‘but when you’re in the mountains I still need a man.’
‘Need a man? Is that all I am to you?’ I was about to say that I loved her, but that was so obviously self-serving, and only a little true, that I stopped myself, saying instead, ‘You know he has other women?’
‘Of course I know. He’s a man who has a hunger for sex, that’s part of the attraction.’
I was silent for several minutes, afraid to ask why I wasn’t hungry enough for Beatrice, and angry at the way the conversation had gone.
Gone nowhere; it was clear I had to share Beatrice with Clergue if I wanted her at all. I left her chamber depressed, and for a few days tried to live without seeing her, days which passed without her reaching out for me. Days which ended with a visit to her chamber bringin
g two of my best fleeces, some cheese and a clear, if unspoken, acceptance that I had no exclusive right to Beatrice’s affections or her body.
I wasn’t afraid of Clergue, but I understood very clearly what he was trying to do in Montaillou. Maintaining his and Bernard’s wealth came first, but he was genuine in his protection of Catharism and the Perfects that visited us, although that in turn gave him the ability to denounce almost the whole village to the Inquisition if he chose. This was a two-edged sword; anyone he sent to Carcassonne could try to incriminate the whole Clergue family, and they might well have been believed.
It was fortunate that his imprisonment had been for skimming too much of the tithes, a common enough offence, and not seen in the same light as heresy. By the standards of the Languedoc the Clergues were not brutal. The mutilation of Mengarde Maurs and the killing of Arnaud Lizier, both of which happened several years before I arrived in Montaillou, had been enough to enable the Clergues to rule thereafter with only the petty sanctions of penances or fines. And at one level all in Montaillou understood the rules, and abided by them.
19
The English Band
Francois
SOON AFTER HIS return from Carcassonne, Pierre Clergue asked me about Montaillou’s defences. The Crusade was over, but not all the soldiers went home, some because they had nowhere to go, most because they were used to living off the land and liked fighting, often among themselves. So the remnants of those armies continued to threaten the Languedoc, forming and re-forming into little bands of mercenaries, anything from ten to a hundred strong.
‘I’ve heard several villages not too far away have been attacked in the last six months,’ said Pierre. ‘Could we defend Montaillou?’
‘The village walls are useless. You would need two hundred men to defend them, and there are no more than fifty in the village.’
‘What about the castle? How many men would that need?’
‘The castle is strong enough. Twenty men would be adequate, if you had provisions, and the well stayed full, and you had a dozen crossbows, two hundred bolts, a mangonel and a good supply of stones,’ I told him. ‘We’d be safe until they’d filled in the moat, built a siege engine and rolled it up against the walls. If they took Béziers, and Cabaret, and Montségur, an army would deal with Montaillou easily enough. But we could withstand anything less than a long-drawn-out siege if we were properly organised and equipped.’
Clergue looked thoughtful; I had undermined his faith in his village walls and the castle. The next morning at dawn I saw him, his brother and a cousin leaving the village on horseback towards the northwest, leading four of the mules we used to take supplies up to the mountains in the summer. Clergue was a man who made up his mind quickly.
Four days later they were back, the mules almost buried beneath the clutter of beams and iron, one poor beast struggling under two great sacks of stones and crossbow bolts. After they unloaded the cargo in the middle of the village it looked as though a small ship had just been wrecked there. Everybody surrounded the debris and waited for Clergue to speak. He was pleased with himself.
‘The spoils of war,’ he said. ‘From Cabaret and Montségur.’ Then he pointed at me. ‘You’re the one who can get this done. The blacksmith can handle the ironwork, and we’re all carpenters after a fashion.’ Nobody grumbled, which is rare in Montaillou, and I thus became the armourer.
It took us three weeks to build the mangonel from all the bits and pieces, but the frame was almost intact and we managed to find a piece of oak straight and strong enough for our throwing arm. We didn’t use counterweights. Clergue extracted half a dozen cowhides from our herdsmen; these we cut into long strips, twisted them together, pushed the bottom of the throwing arm through the middle, secured it with an iron band and finally pissed on the strips to tighten them and give some torsion. The blacksmith put together a crude pawl and ratchet to crank the arm down, and remembered after it sprang back on him to put in a locking fid. On our first dry test the arm smacked into the stopping beam with a satisfying clunk.
I’d never made anything like this before, although I had been on the receiving end of siege engines. In our first test the stone failed to clear the outer wall and took a great piece out of it. We persevered, lengthened the bucket at the end of the arm, and at our third attempt threw a big stone two hundred feet down the main street of the village. I paced out the distance, and we brought the stone back to use again.
Crossbows I knew about. Clergue had found a dozen stocks in various states of repair, enough horn to fashion the bows and leather for the strings. After a couple of botched attempts the blacksmith made good copies of my goat’s foot lever to cock the weapons.
‘The crossbow is effective only at short range, forty or fifty yards,’ I told them. ‘It’s not like a longbow which will kill at three times that distance. Watch’, and we stood at the seventy-yard mark in the tilt-yard, ‘and you’ll see how quickly the bolt drops down. But at forty yards it will penetrate chain mail, and even some armour. So until the attackers get close, hold your fire. You will be on the ramparts either side of the gatehouse tower; we’ll mark the distance.’
We went outside the castle walls, paced out forty yards, and marked the spot with a large whitewashed stone.
‘Wait until they have passed this point, and then fire. That means you’ll only get one or two shots at the most before they are at the gates. So make sure those shots count. There are twelve of you, so I want twelve men dead after the first assault. Accuracy is more important than speed.’
The men, particularly the younger ones, were keen to practise and were soon able to get off at least two bolts in less than five minutes. After all this we felt prepared, felt better.
‘Talk about it through the valley,’ said Clergue. ‘We want marauders to go for easier targets than Montaillou.’
For several months that worked, but in the end we were tested. Clergue always had a herdsman doubling as a sentinel at each approach to our valley, which gave us two hours’ warning before strangers arrived in our village. On the morning we were attacked it had been a crisp dawn after a frost, and our valley was covered in a narrow blanket of mist that burned off later in the day. As I walked back from the washing pool the village was beginning to wake up and the cattle were moving out of their byres below the prosperous houses to graze in the fields to the south. The dung heaps were steaming, their strong smell staining the air, brown rivulets flowing down the gutters either side of the street.
I was almost back in my small house when a young shepherd, one of the Belots, came running up the street, shouting as he ran, ‘They’ve killed my brother, they’re coming.’
He ran on to Clergue’s house; I followed him and listened as he told us what had happened.
‘Alain had been at the far end of the big field, the one we call A la Cot. He saw the strangers but only when they were very close. He shouted to me, and then they killed him,’ he said, sobbing. ‘And then I ran away, ran to the village.’
‘How many?’ asked Clergue.
‘Forty or fifty. They weren’t speaking our language.’
‘We should get everyone and all the cattle and sheep we can round up inside the castle walls. It sounds like the English.’
The English band is what they called themselves. They were well known in the Languedoc. Some of them had been de Montfort’s men, there were a dozen pikemen from Genoa, several French from the north. They had nurtured their reputation for butchery, and for two or three years had managed to get what they wanted – cattle, sheep, money, women – without too much fighting.
We watched the little band move towards us down the valley in the early morning. We were all of us, villagers and beasts, inside the walls of the castle when they entered the far end of the village. There were forty of them, walking quite slowly, only one on horseback. There they stopped, drinking from the cattle trough, their voices indistinct and foreign; we could just hear the occasional French word. They seemed in no hurry
. They dug a fire pit, butchered and roasted a sheep and shared it out.
We were standing at the top of the keep, Beatrice a pace in front of Clergue and me. She was wearing a long dark red dress with a gold belt, her fair hair kept in place by a silver band. She looked every inch the chatelaine, and only Clergue and I could see her fists clenching and unclenching.
We were unsure what would happen next, and Clergue, usually decisive, was quiet.
‘Perhaps the castle will put them off. Perhaps they know we have a mangonel,’ said Clergue.
‘They’ve got half a dozen pack mules, all unladen. I doubt they plan to keep them idle for long.’
Then they formed into three columns and marched towards us like a little army. Their blue flag had a gold fleur-de-lis and a couple of drummers were beating time. They halted two hundred feet away from our moat, well out of crossbow range. Their captain, the only one in chain mail, sitting easily on a strong charger, swept his right hand from his face down to his hip, as though holding a hat. Perhaps it was mockery, but it was no less than Beatrice deserved.
‘Lady, we’re not here to stay,’ he shouted, first in English, then in French. ‘Let out the animals and we’ll be off. No need for bloodshed.’ He came a little closer to hear the reply.
We had a dozen crossbowmen on the walls, weapons cocked; I had told them to fire when the mangonel was released. I tried to talk to Beatrice, but she was past listening. Clergue asked her a question, got no answer, went down to the gate, and I followed to the courtyard, crowded with animals and people. We had fenced off the mangonel from the sheep, and the cattle were penned in the far corner
When the captain shouted again Beatrice answered in Occitan and then in French. Her voice, normally deep and clear, was unsteady. Then she called down to Clergue to open the gates and let out the animals. As the drawbridge chains began to clatter down, the English cheered and ran forward. And I fired the mangonel.
Cathar Page 21