Where Have All the Grownups Gone?

Home Alone in Montaillou

Harvest hand, Ohio. Ben Shahn/FSA, 1938.

In 1308, a hundred years after the pope declared war on southern France, there was a rafle, or roundup, in a little village on the north edge of the Pyrenees. The Inquisition came and hauled off almost all the adult and adolescent residents.

It was a little town, Montaillou - maybe 200 or 250 people. We don't know exactly how many. It's likely that they didn't know either.

At an elevation of 1,300 meters, it was definitely up in the hills. The people grew crops, and they herded sheep. The sheep went higher up in the summer, and sometimes, in the winter, they went down into Spain instead of coming home. There were some amorous connections.

The people taken away were suspected of the Cathar heresy, which had been endemic in southern France, Lombardy, and the Balkans for many years. The Cathars lived good lives, or tried to. But they believed that evil existed independently from God. The church disapproved.

I've been wondering what it was like for the children - probably none more than twelve years old - left home alone. With all those sheep. And chickens. I'm suspecting there were some cows that needed milking.

Children went to work early in those days, on the farm. I'm guessing they did okay until their parents started dribbling home. The grownups and the nearly grownups had been hauled off to an infamous jail in Carcassonne. Most of them were heretics, but the Inquisition hadn't been able to get the goods on them. I'm thinking that the mass arrest was an expression of official frustration.

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie wrote a book on Montaillou years ago (Montaillou, 1978). I recently re-read it with older eyes.

The book is based on the Inquisition's records of its interviews with suspects and witnesses. It's a pretty amazing story - lots of sex. The local priest, Pierre Clergue, had sex with at least a dozen women, including a young cousin, aged fourteen or fifteen (people didn't always know exactly how old they were).

But I keep coming back to the kids. The church had been persecuting these people, who thought of themselves as good Christians with a few unusual opinions, for a hundred years. I imagine the little ones standing around, watching their parents being hauled away, wondering what the hell was going on.

The answer? History. A hundred years of oppression, and for what?

It's a good question to ask. The church lost a lot of its moral authority over those years. It did develop the Inquisition during that time - one of the most important institutional innovations in the high middle ages, although perhaps not the most popular. And the big winner was the French crown, which had originally thought the crusade a bad idea.

I think there are some lessons for us today. I'm not going to tell you what I think they are. Try figuring it out on your own. That's what the children in Montaillou had to do - with the help of the sheep, of course.

See also Submerged Narratives.