No fewer
than seven or eight near contemporary accounts have survived, incontestable
proof of the story’s impact. What is more, these records are sufficiently independent
that one need only hold to what they have in common, or to what they disagree
about least, to reconstruct the likely course of events.
On about Saint Andrew’s day ( 30 November) 1182 a humble carpenter named Durand went before Bishop Peire of Le Puy and urged that he do something ‘to reform the peace.” Rebuffed by the bishop, Durand found many supporters, of whom more than four hundred swore to a first pact of peace soon after Christmas. By Easter their swelling numbers, having surpassed five thousand, could no longer be counted. All this according to the Limousin prior Geoffroi de Vigeois, who wrote within a year of these events. He goes on to say that Durand ‘instituted institutes of peace.’ These consisted of a uniform code of dress, a solemn oath preceded by a confession of sins, an annual payment of six pennies at Pentecost ‘in’ (or ‘to”] the brotherhood’, a once-for-life payment of one poyes in a leaden receptacle, and the commitment of the sworn men to fight when summoned. Canons and monks who swore were dispensed from fighting on condition of praying.
Conspicuous in white capes, with cloth pendants front and back resembling the woolen pallium worn by archbishops, the sworn brothers were visible moral force if not quite a rival clergy. Over their breasts hung an image of the Virgin and Son bearing the circular inscription Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem. Durand’s institutes were confirmed by his bishop in a festival assembly on Assumption Day (15 August) 1183. At( the time knights were joined in the cause by ‘princes, bishops, abbots, monks, clerics, and women without husbands’; and the sault on Castle-dun a few days later resulted in the killing of a ‘prince of robbers’ together with many hundreds of coterels (la compagnie sauvage).
What happened next is harder to reconstruct, for none of the other sources were so close (in time or space)n to the experience as Geoffrioi, who wrote no more. But Robert of Torigni and Rigord, writing in the 1180s, largely confirm his account of the first year, while setting the Capuchins in a wider context of explanation. Both represented Durand as motivated by a miraculous apparition of the Virgin Mary, while Rigord, having noted the atrocities that had provoked the poor carpenter, saw him and his movement as God’s choice to relieve suffering caused by the war between the King of Aragon and the count of Toulouse. Robert of Auxerre, whose annals for 1183 and 1184 may have been first written in those years, is the first to describe the Capuchin campaigns; he was also the first to record a massive reaction against this motley force of (mostly) lesser men pretending to do without lords. Their arrival in ‘France’ (regions north of Velay) and their ‘insolent’ refusal to submit to their betters ended in their ‘destruction’ by the French princes. Conceding that they had begun well, Robert thought that the Capuchins had been overtaken by the ‘angel of Satan.’
Other texts carry this disapproval much further. Their authors knew that the Capuchins had a cause, knew that many regions of (greater) France had been infested by desperate and violent men – rouergats, Aragonese, Gascons, Brabancons-; men who looked and spoke differently (from us); mercenaries all. But these writers could no longer say anything to justify an association so manifestly subversive of lordship. For Guiot de Provins Durand was a venal imposter; for the ‘Anonymous of Laon’ a simple man deceived by a malicious canon disguised as the Virgin. Brilliantly opinionated ,the ‘Anonymous’ touches on all points known from other texts and distorts them mercilessly, save for one alone that takes us to the very heart of the matter. The Capuchins, he wrote, were madmen from the start. For him the enabling assembly of the Assumption far from being a ratification of a grand impulse, was a self-indulgent orgy of worldly and (worse) mercantile opulence, its corruptly overheated materialism nurturing the foul trick played on Durand. Next comes the account of the conjuration, of which the commitments and pieties are made to look suspiciously unorthodox. The oath of the brethren fares no better: it was said to associate the ‘princes’ withy brigand-knights as enemies of the peace. And the peace-tax, plausibly amounting to 6d. in Geoffroi’s account, is doubled to 12d. in this version, resulting (it was claimed) in an ugly swollen treasury of abuse soon amounting to L400,000.
Over blow rhetoric? At its close this narrative sounds a different note, in to sentences. Here they are: “Everywhere the princes trembled, not daring to impose anything unjust on their people, nor presuming to require any exactions or impositions from them except their customary renders . . .[with these successes to boast of] their insane folly drove these foolish and undisciplined people to command counts and viscounts, and other princes as well, to treat their subjects more gently than was customary if they wished not to incur their indignation.’
Here was exposed the raw nerve of a clumsy aggregate of fortified societies that was hardly yet France. Nothing less than lordship itself seemed threatened by the hooded men of ‘peace.’ Outrageous that princes should be limited to just or customary impositions! In their pernicious solidarity, wrote the chronicler of the bishop of Auxerre, the hoods ‘had no fear, no reverence for higher powers,’ forgetting that servitude had been the just consequence of the sin by which people had lost their primal liberty. When Bishop Hugues and his knihts captured some Capuchins in his patrimonial village of Gy, he deliberately reduced them to elemental poverty so that ‘they learn that serfs may not rise up against their lords. The norm of power, even in kingless lands of castles and princes, was lordship: a precedence of affective superiority – indeed, of nobility – as well as armed might. And by this plausible account, when the Capuchins saw, with the pity of the archbishop of Sens, that they could not prevail against instituted lordships, however violent, their movement collapsed.
Were the frightened magnates right about the hoods? Had people lost faith in local lords? No more fundamental question can be raised in this book. And because we may be sure of the fright, it is possible to answer that some Capuchins, at least, had relished the idea of ‘getting even.’ For it is all but certain that from the moment when Durand’ as institutes were agreed upon, some distinction must have been made between the violence of the coterels, and Brabancons and that of the lords. The early enlistment of magnates could only have rested on that consideration. Once the distinction was lost, the cause was lost.
Whatever the fears, the critics of the Capuchins were surely mistaken about one thing: the initial purpose. Geoffroi de Vigoeis got it right when, with honest plausibility, he described an original pact of associative action. Such event are not unheard of in previous generations, but they typically proved ephemeral or else, as in the organizing of urban utilities, went unrecorded. Durand’s ‘institutes of peace’ do not survive in writing, and may never have been written, but they are, as we know them, rational and socially purposive: the solemn oath ,surely bound to fight when summoned, the pecuniary assessment, and the uniform. . . all this was new in Durand’s day.
On about Saint Andrew’s day ( 30 November) 1182 a humble carpenter named Durand went before Bishop Peire of Le Puy and urged that he do something ‘to reform the peace.” Rebuffed by the bishop, Durand found many supporters, of whom more than four hundred swore to a first pact of peace soon after Christmas. By Easter their swelling numbers, having surpassed five thousand, could no longer be counted. All this according to the Limousin prior Geoffroi de Vigeois, who wrote within a year of these events. He goes on to say that Durand ‘instituted institutes of peace.’ These consisted of a uniform code of dress, a solemn oath preceded by a confession of sins, an annual payment of six pennies at Pentecost ‘in’ (or ‘to”] the brotherhood’, a once-for-life payment of one poyes in a leaden receptacle, and the commitment of the sworn men to fight when summoned. Canons and monks who swore were dispensed from fighting on condition of praying.
Conspicuous in white capes, with cloth pendants front and back resembling the woolen pallium worn by archbishops, the sworn brothers were visible moral force if not quite a rival clergy. Over their breasts hung an image of the Virgin and Son bearing the circular inscription Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem. Durand’s institutes were confirmed by his bishop in a festival assembly on Assumption Day (15 August) 1183. At( the time knights were joined in the cause by ‘princes, bishops, abbots, monks, clerics, and women without husbands’; and the sault on Castle-dun a few days later resulted in the killing of a ‘prince of robbers’ together with many hundreds of coterels (la compagnie sauvage).
What happened next is harder to reconstruct, for none of the other sources were so close (in time or space)n to the experience as Geoffrioi, who wrote no more. But Robert of Torigni and Rigord, writing in the 1180s, largely confirm his account of the first year, while setting the Capuchins in a wider context of explanation. Both represented Durand as motivated by a miraculous apparition of the Virgin Mary, while Rigord, having noted the atrocities that had provoked the poor carpenter, saw him and his movement as God’s choice to relieve suffering caused by the war between the King of Aragon and the count of Toulouse. Robert of Auxerre, whose annals for 1183 and 1184 may have been first written in those years, is the first to describe the Capuchin campaigns; he was also the first to record a massive reaction against this motley force of (mostly) lesser men pretending to do without lords. Their arrival in ‘France’ (regions north of Velay) and their ‘insolent’ refusal to submit to their betters ended in their ‘destruction’ by the French princes. Conceding that they had begun well, Robert thought that the Capuchins had been overtaken by the ‘angel of Satan.’
Other texts carry this disapproval much further. Their authors knew that the Capuchins had a cause, knew that many regions of (greater) France had been infested by desperate and violent men – rouergats, Aragonese, Gascons, Brabancons-; men who looked and spoke differently (from us); mercenaries all. But these writers could no longer say anything to justify an association so manifestly subversive of lordship. For Guiot de Provins Durand was a venal imposter; for the ‘Anonymous of Laon’ a simple man deceived by a malicious canon disguised as the Virgin. Brilliantly opinionated ,the ‘Anonymous’ touches on all points known from other texts and distorts them mercilessly, save for one alone that takes us to the very heart of the matter. The Capuchins, he wrote, were madmen from the start. For him the enabling assembly of the Assumption far from being a ratification of a grand impulse, was a self-indulgent orgy of worldly and (worse) mercantile opulence, its corruptly overheated materialism nurturing the foul trick played on Durand. Next comes the account of the conjuration, of which the commitments and pieties are made to look suspiciously unorthodox. The oath of the brethren fares no better: it was said to associate the ‘princes’ withy brigand-knights as enemies of the peace. And the peace-tax, plausibly amounting to 6d. in Geoffroi’s account, is doubled to 12d. in this version, resulting (it was claimed) in an ugly swollen treasury of abuse soon amounting to L400,000.
Over blow rhetoric? At its close this narrative sounds a different note, in to sentences. Here they are: “Everywhere the princes trembled, not daring to impose anything unjust on their people, nor presuming to require any exactions or impositions from them except their customary renders . . .[with these successes to boast of] their insane folly drove these foolish and undisciplined people to command counts and viscounts, and other princes as well, to treat their subjects more gently than was customary if they wished not to incur their indignation.’
Here was exposed the raw nerve of a clumsy aggregate of fortified societies that was hardly yet France. Nothing less than lordship itself seemed threatened by the hooded men of ‘peace.’ Outrageous that princes should be limited to just or customary impositions! In their pernicious solidarity, wrote the chronicler of the bishop of Auxerre, the hoods ‘had no fear, no reverence for higher powers,’ forgetting that servitude had been the just consequence of the sin by which people had lost their primal liberty. When Bishop Hugues and his knihts captured some Capuchins in his patrimonial village of Gy, he deliberately reduced them to elemental poverty so that ‘they learn that serfs may not rise up against their lords. The norm of power, even in kingless lands of castles and princes, was lordship: a precedence of affective superiority – indeed, of nobility – as well as armed might. And by this plausible account, when the Capuchins saw, with the pity of the archbishop of Sens, that they could not prevail against instituted lordships, however violent, their movement collapsed.
Were the frightened magnates right about the hoods? Had people lost faith in local lords? No more fundamental question can be raised in this book. And because we may be sure of the fright, it is possible to answer that some Capuchins, at least, had relished the idea of ‘getting even.’ For it is all but certain that from the moment when Durand’ as institutes were agreed upon, some distinction must have been made between the violence of the coterels, and Brabancons and that of the lords. The early enlistment of magnates could only have rested on that consideration. Once the distinction was lost, the cause was lost.
Whatever the fears, the critics of the Capuchins were surely mistaken about one thing: the initial purpose. Geoffroi de Vigoeis got it right when, with honest plausibility, he described an original pact of associative action. Such event are not unheard of in previous generations, but they typically proved ephemeral or else, as in the organizing of urban utilities, went unrecorded. Durand’s ‘institutes of peace’ do not survive in writing, and may never have been written, but they are, as we know them, rational and socially purposive: the solemn oath ,surely bound to fight when summoned, the pecuniary assessment, and the uniform. . . all this was new in Durand’s day.
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