Heresy and The Free Spirit Beghards and

Heresy and the Free Spirit: Beghards and Bguines
Christian Heresy
Heresy and the Free Spirit: Beghards
and Bguines
Abstract
In northern Europe, the Free Spirit of Beghards and Bguines led the war against the established Church.
From around 1250, they cited Cathars, Waldenses, and Joachites. Their common beliefs included hatred
of the Church, that sacraments are worthless, the spiritual value of poverty, and most important of all, that
each of us can become God. Organized in small groups, they faded away when trouble threatened,
migrating from mountain to mountain like strange sparrows, a good description of the lifestyle the fleeing
Cathars were obliged to follow. If they differed, they were merely variations on the Cathar original.
Primitivists lurked in mute and ragged rebellion in a hundred little hamlets. Only the
more literate were actually more heretical, and their heresy lay in trying to whip the
Church back towards a simplicity and a purity which it had early lost.
W Woods, A History of the Devil
Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002
The Heresy of the Free Spirit
Adamites And Luciferans
Beghards and Bguines
Heretics in England and the Lollards
Did the Cathars Fight Back?
The Heresy of the Free Spirit

Almost everything we know about Catharism comes from hostile sources, whether
polemics written against heretical doctrine, chronicles narrating the successes of
orthodoxy, or the complex and problematic records of inquisitors. Knowing the truth
requires a completeness that history lacks. Once absolute truth is accepted as
impossible in history, then the study of history must be seen as at least implying a
code of practice that demands honesty, reliability and trust. This is where Christian
historians fall short. They are not historically reliable or truthworthy because they
insist first on being theologically correct. How then can there be a community of
belief, a popular idea among historians? It requires mutual respect in addition to
honesty, but dishonesty must be exposed, and there can be no respect where
dishonesty arises.
Academic historians generally do respect each other, but unwarranted respect can
only lead to falling standards, making any approach towards historical truth more
difficult. Here a community of false belief, set by Christian interpretations, made
historians inclined to invent any theory rather than accept that Catharism was a
major influence on Europe at the start of the second millennium. They prefer to
pretend that a variety of different heresies arose over a period of about 500 years all
with little or nothing in common. It is rubbish.

The motivation of the Free Spiriters was the search for religious perfection. Free
Spirits hoped to achieve this through imitating the apostolic life and reaching union
with God, two goals that dominated the spirituality of the High and later Middle
Ages.
The Cathar rejection of corporeality provided one foundation for their faith, leading
to the ritual of consolamentum that transformed a believer into one of the Perfect,
the Perfects abstention from meat and sex, and their belief that marriage was
innately sinful because it pretended to sanctify bodily relations. The example set by
the lifestyle of the Perfecti was more important than their dualistic belief as such.
Another foundation was the Cathar belief that they were the true inheritors of the
early, apostolic church. From this sprang the need for the Perfects to minister to
their flock, to preach and to practice poverty, their mendicancy providing the
example whence Guzman was inspired to form the Dominicans. The Languedocian
Cathars had a church structure, including bishops, deacons and other officials for
different areas, and enjoyed the support of much of the southern French nobility.
Initially, the description Free Spirit was not insulting. Abbot Joachim of Fiore
(1145-1202), who had inspired Francis and his followers, is credited with a tripartite
theory of history based on the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Joachim,
according to Ronald A Knox, of Trinity College, Oxford:
Seems to have been the patentee of these speculations about world-history which
are for dividing it not into two periods, pre-Christian and Christian, but into three
separate Dispensations, that of the Father, that of the Son, and that of the Holy
Ghost.
Each was responsible for an era of history. The father was the old period of the
Jewish scriptures. The son stood for the period of the New Testament and history
until then. Joachim characterized his third age as one of liberty of the spirit. A
commentator glossed this as liberty of the spirit is the apostolic life which has been
renewed through Saint Francis. So, the dawning age was the age of the Holy Spirit,
which would be like the summer compared with the winter and spring that went
before.
Joachim did not originate the idea, but was the first monk to express it in writing.
The contemporary fourteen Amaurians of the Sorbonne had the same tripartite
theory of history, even though they could not have known the work of the Italian
monk. The idea was therefore not Joachim's but already had been formulated, even if
Joachim had refined it in his own way. What could have been most likely to have
been the source of this belief in an age of the spirit other than Catharism in which
everyones soul could and eventually would unite with Godand no magical
sacraments or Catholic Church needed. Joachim preceded the Cathar crusade, and so
had no certain knowledge that the Church was ready to use totalitarian violence
against the heresy, and perhaps saw his dispensations as a way of allowing the two
streams of Christianity to merge. It was a way of synthesising Catharism and
Catholicism. He was nave enough to think the Cardinals would want to. He seemed
anything but intentionally heretical, and three popes allegedly inquired about his
ideas, but they dropped him when they realised it contradicted Augustines dogma
2
that the kingdom of God was already present with us as the Catholic Church. Even so,
the idea of a coming age of the spirit was to inspire heretics and eventually the
Reformation and secularism.
In 1230, Wilhelm Cornelis of Antwerp, who renounced a benefice to follow the
apostolic life, declared that clerics who were not poor were damned, but poverty
abolished sin. The choniclers say he therefore gave himself up to lust. This was the
time when robbing the rich to feed the poor, in the Robin Hood mould, was
fashionable. The Church founded the mendicant orders at this time to try to
neutralise the anticlerical movement. It worked for a while confusing the poor and
winning many that the Church might have lost to heresy, but clerical corruption was
too easy to enjoy and too hard to resist, and the Franciscans and Dominicans soon
fell for it.
The Franciscans, of course, believed in the poverty of Christ and the apostles. No one
other than the artists who depicted the risen Christ as a Byzantine potentate
bedecked with jewels, seems to have dissented for a millennium from the notion of
apostolic poverty. It was John XXII who realised that such teaching was supporting
the heretics and the millions of Christian paupers who contrasted it with the
conspicuous consumption of the bishops and abbots. The Franciscan order had, of
course, quickly got property, adopting the characteristic clerical habits of luxury,
sloth and idleness, but some were shocked and outraged that this debasement of
S Francis had happened so quickly.
In 1323, John XXII condemned the doctrine of Christs poverty as heretical! Many
Franciscans were astonished, and concluded that John was the real heretic to make
such a declaration. The Joachites among them had thought the formation of the new
orders of mendicant monks was one of the signs of the coming new age, and would
supply leaders and prepare the way to the spiritual age. Some, in the very place where
Catharism had been strong, the south of France and Italy, took it very seriously.
Coming out openly against the pope, they split off to form the Spiritual Franciscans,
the Poor Brethren of Saint Francis, or the Fraticelli. These monks had realised they
were fighting the wrong enemy.
The Fraticelli in Sicily would have it that the Gospel of Christ had been wholly
extinguished, to be revived in their own order. The Church of Rome, they added,
instinctively falling back on a Montanist habit of speech, was the carnal Church, theirs
the spiritual.
Ronald Knox
Montanist, perhaps, but they did not have to go back so far. Their contemporary
Cathars thought the same thing. The Spirituals insisted on remaining poor, as they
had vowed. They also forged further works by Joachim prophesying them as the
moving order of the spiritual age. Needless to say, they were hunted and hounded,
arrested and burnt at the stake.
Brother Michael of Florence was among them. He preached that people should attend
more to Gods word in the gospels than anything the divines of the Church said. He
was reported to the bishop. Arrested along with his companions, he was told to sign a
document ackowledging John XXII as a Catholic and holy man, but refused, calling
the pope a heretic. He had his hair and fingertips cut off and was taken to be burnt. A
contemporary account in the National Library of Florence records moment by
3
moment the events en route to his death. The attendant friars chanted continuously
for him to confess, the calls and questions of the crowd, and the Franciscans replies.
I die for Christ. I die for truth. The peoples voice crucified Christ. Christ died
for us. While Brother Michael was being bound to the stake, an onlooker asked,
What is this for which thou wilt die? He replied, It is truth which is lodged in my
soul, so I cannot testify to it except in death.
After saying his Credo, he got to verse eight of his Te Deum before he made a snort as
if sneezing and cried out, Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit, whereupon, his
bonds having burnt through, he fell on to his knees with his body backwards, face to
heaven and mouth silently open, dead. The whole spectacle was about an hour, and
the crowd went off saying he died like a martyr and a saint. The account has it that
his fellow Fraticelli took away the corpse, so that the crowd arriving to gawp on the
following day found it missing. The Fraticelli were nominally Catholics and accepted
the Catholic sacraments but had the faith of the first Christians, that of the primitive
heretics. Like the Cathar Perfecti, they wanted to emulate Jesus but thought it should
be possible as a Catholic Christian too. The Church thought otherwise. This story
paints Brother Michael as a new Christ. The people wanted the redeemer promised
by the Church. It was the heretics that offered them.
Another Joachite element was that of the leader of the new age (Novum Dux), and
this quickly became identified with a Perfect Holy Roman Emperor, soon taken to be
Frederick II, the grandson of Frederick Barbarossa. Frederick II was charismatic,
ruthless and a great critic of the Church and its wealth which he blamed for its
corruption. A forged Joachite work made him prophesy that Frederick II would
overthrow the corrupt Church in 1260. When the Germans started pronouncing
Frederick the Novum Dux, the Church put the whole of Germany under interdict.
Unfortunately, along with the Joachite beliefs were the heretical idea that the
sacraments were worthless, and interdicts by the corrupt Church were no better. The
confidence of the Church in its main deterrent was dented by the preference for the
beliefs it was aimed at.
Revolution simmered but soon Frederick died without fulfilling his prophesy.
Expectations deflated, but in the fashion typical of religious beliefs, Frederick was
soon resurrected and considered to be sleeping like Arthur and Charlemagne until his
proper time comes for a return! A few years later, sure enough, madmen and
opportunists started appearing claiming to be Frederick. One such pretender got
some support from powerful princes hoping to restrict the accepted monarch Rudolf,
the first Habsburg. Rudolf eventually captured the pretender and had him burnt at
the stake. He seemed to have died with the conviction of the heretic, certain he would
rise again in three days. His followers continued to believe he would return too!
The heresy of the Free Spirit spread widely in Champagne, Thringen, Brussels,
Cologne, Bavaria and other areas, disseminated by wandering weavers, dyers and
mendicant religious travellers known as Beghards and Bguines. The Free Spirit is
said not to have been a united organization, though Beghards and Bguines
communicated widely across Europe in the first half of the fourteenth century.
Unlike the Cathars and the Waldensians, the adepts of the Free Spirit did not form a
single church but rather a number of like-minded groups, each with its own messiah
and each with its own particular practices, rites and articles of belief.
Norman Cohn
Their beliefs were not exactly the same, though they had in common a substantial
gamut of beliefs beyond which there were differences. Commentators cannot
understand that all could be called Beghards and Bguines even when, like Martin of
Mainz and William of Hildernissen, some were in orders. The distinct boundaries
that Christians like to see are confounded, and so are blamed upon the confusing
language of the heretics or their accusers. Certainly, the heretics were
disproportionally women. Women seemed particularly attracted to the idea of
spiritual perfection.
The attachment of women to the vita apostolica was both sociological and
psychological. They had a much inferior status. The high male death rate and the
removal of many men from availability as husbands because they were clerics meant
a surplus of women. Few vocations were available for spinsters and not many could
get into nunneries. The life of a Bguine was a way for unmarried women to work and
feel secure in society. Nor could women preach, but Free Spirit doctrine let them, and
better still unite with God in Perfection. A tract like Schwester Katrei encouraged
women in their religious devotion.
The Free Spirits were supposed entirely ignorant of letters, as early as 1310 classed
as untutored people. Many were poor landless artisansit was an urban heresybut
were far from being entirely unlettered. Some were middle class, though the majority
were working men and women. The Bguines in the nunnery-like beguinages seem to
have been often from prosperous families, and commentators assume that someone
of the time who could read was middle class. Robert Lerner (The Heresy of the Free
Spirit in the Later Middle Ages 1972) writes:
The very literateness of the Free Spirit movement was a token of comfortable social
status in an age when literary composition was a near monopoly of the well-off.
But heretics taught the poor how to read and write in the vernacular so that they
could read their gospels. Heretics were authors, and many who were not could still
read, and had a good theological vocabulary. They were called unlearned mainly
because they did not read or write in Latin. They were not an ignorant rabble.
Albertus Magnus, one of the earliest opponents of Free Spirit heresy, preaching in
Augsburg in 1257 or 1263, defined liberty of the spirit as the ability to turn ones spirit
toward all that one wishes without being impeded by the flesh. In this way, the free
spirit could be next to the saints, next to the angels, and even next to God. Albert did
not characterize such liberty as the ability to become one with God, but while he was
preaching at Augsburg there were men and women in the nearby Ries who were
saying just such things and Albert would later have to deal with them. By the
fourteenth century, liberty of the spirit was the designation of a heresy.
Adamites And Luciferans

Adamites originally were early Gnostic Christians, possibly a type of Carpocratian, to
judge by their similarities in beliefs. They practised in Spain from the fourth century
to the fifth. S Augustine and S Epiphanius comment on their heresy. Medieval

Adamites said they had returned to a stage of purity where sin is impossible by doing
what Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. Adamites called their church
Paradise, and their worship was in the nude, like Adam and Eve. They were not
subject to rules. Adamites refused to comply with the law. In particular, they rejected
marriage. The common inference of Christians, and those observers influenced by
Christian mores, is that the Adamites practised free love, and this is doubtless true in
so far as they practised sexual activity at all. The point is that many did not, and
especially those who were advancing towards the spiritual world. They knew there
could be no sexual activity in heaven for immortal beings, and so the closer to heaven
they were, the less need they had for sex.
William of Egmont described the ceremonies of Beghards observed by a man who
dressed himself as a Lollard to escape attention! At a meeting in an underground
place which the heretics called Paradise were two people who called themselves
Jesus and his mother Mary. The leader gave a sermon in the nude in which he
exhorted his listeners to discard their clothing. Then the lights were doused for the
orgy. But in the Low Countries, where William lived, the words Beghard and
Lollard were often used without relation to the heresy of the Free Spirit as terms of
abuse for scoundrels or presumed hypocrites.
In the early fourteenth century, John of Viktring described heretical rites in which
men and women, the Beghards and Bguines of Cologne, enacted naked masses at
midnight in an underground hideaway which they named a temple in which
participants rejoiced that they had returned to the state of Adam and Eve before the
fall.
There Walter, a priest of the devil, said mass and delivered a sermon. Then the
assembly put out the lights, chose partners, and feasted, danced, and fornicated.
This, they said, was the state of paradise in which Adam and Eve lived before the fall.
Their leader Walter called himself Christ and claimed that though condemned to be
executed he would rise on the third day. He presented a beautiful young virgin as
Mary, but taught that Christ was not born of a virgin, that God was neither born nor
suffered, and that fasting was unnecessary.
Lerner
The chroniclers called the promiscuous nudists Adamites and the devil-worshipers
Luciferans. Were they Free Spirits? Denounced by the husband of one of the women,
the leader, Walter of Cologne, though most cruelly tortured, refused to betray his
associates. Eventually he and fifty of his followers were executed by burning and
drowning. The Caputiati, set up in France in the 1180s wore white hoods, whence the
name. They were to clear the land of brigands and were approved by the authorities.
But, having done the task they were set up for, they demanded the Freedom of Adam
and Eve, and became a revolutionary band of poor which had to be suppressed by
force.
Guichard, Bishop of Troyes, was an unpopular man who had made powerful enemies
at the French court. In 1308, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Louvre charged
with falsely indicting people for heresy to extort money from them. Some accusations
he made were that his victims had said normal baked bread was as good as
consecrated bread, a tree trunk was a better confessor than a priest because it would
not reveal the confession, to couple with a dog was as good as with a woman except
that the dog might bite, and people going to Church were told they would be less
foolish to go to a tavern. Only a huge money payment to the Bishop saved the victim.
It shows the clergy had no scruples about making up cases of heresy, though perhaps
few were so blatant about it. It means much of the denigration of Free Spiriters and
other heretics by the Church has to be taken with a pinch of salt.
A German chronicler, Caesarius of Heisterbach, described how, in 1209, some
theologians of the Sorbonne in Paris developed a perverse understanding instilled
by the Devil. They were fourteen in all, two being experienced men in their sixties, all
were clergymen and learned. The leader was called William Auriflex. They were
described as followers of Amaury of Bene, whom Innocent III declared so heretical he
was insane. Despite all this, it is doubtful that the Amalricians had anything directly
to do with Amaury, other than having been in the same place. In 1215, Amalrics
bones were exhumed and reburied in an unconsecrated field.
These Amalricians were betrayed by an agent of the Bishop of Paris, Master Ralph,
who joined them for some months to spy on them. In 1210, the Amalricians were
arrested and tried.
The disciples of Amalric, in l2l0, claimed to be the church of the Holy Spirit, destined
to succeed an outworn dispensation. Dolcino similarly held that the power of Christ
had been made over to himself and his fellow sectaries, as the true heirs of the
Ronald A Knox
apostles.
Considering this was a belief supposed to have been derived by scholastic style
musings, and not, we are assured, by conversion or previous convictions, only three
recanted before the investigating synod (it being before the Inquisition had got
underway) and the other eleven went unrepentent to the stake. In the Condemnation
of the Amauricians, their Cathar beliefs are clear:
They denied the resurrection of bodies and said that there was no paradise or hell,
one who possessed the knowledge of God had paradise within himself, but one
who was in mortal sin had hell within himself.
Amalric of Bena (Amaury de Bene) held that God was the formal principle of all
things, and that everyone was as much God as was Christa Catharistic notion.
Gnostics, which the Cathars were, distinguish matter and spirit. Matter is evil and
spirit is good. A good God cannot make or do anything evil, so the universe and our
Earth were made, not by God but by the Demiurge, a corrupt angel or lesser god. This
explains evil in the world, something Christians who believe only in a perfectly good
God cannot do convincingly. The perfect goodness of God also forbids him from
incarnating on earth as a material being, which, being made of evil matter is
intrinsically evil. If Jesus appeared on earth, he was purely spirit.
The humanity of people is the presence in them of an intrinsically good spirit, misled
and tricked by Satan, but eager to return to God whence it came. Because matter is
evil, the material world must be renounced, including the human body, but not its
spiritual soul. The corporeal body entombs a good spirit. It has been misled by the
Demiurge and has to learn this of its own experience. Once it has this Gnosis, it is
ready to reunite with God. Sex is rejected as a temptation into worldliness by the
Devil, as are all earthly pleasures, and because it leads to the creation of another
physical body to be a prison for another of Gods spirits. Some concluded that
because the material world is evil, it merited no respect at all, and all laws relating to
it were invalid. So, Do what thou wilt! Amaurians allegedly indulged in sexual
pleasures and crimes of all kinds:
They committed rapes and adulteries and other acts which gave pleasure to the
body. And to the women with whom they sinned, and to the simple people whom they
deceived, they promised that sins would not be punished.
Possibly such a phase was accepted as a stage of the souls Gnostic journey, but the
pleasures and cruelties of the world palled and the soul realised it was meaningless,
and moved on. It was essentially a personal journey in which others could only be
guides. Unlike the belief of the established Church, the entombed soul could not be
forced to do what it right. It had to learn it. Gnosis! Nor were earthly rituals any help.
They were Satanic. But all accusations like these have to be treated with caution. The
Church has never been any more honest in describing its opponents than modern
warmongering politicians are. The Byzantine statesman and philosopher,
Constantine Michael Psellos, writing around 1050 against the heretical sect of the
Bogomils, said they performed wicked acts: orgies, infanticide, ritual blood-letting
and cannibalism. These same perversions were used against Christians by Romans,
and by established Christians against Jews, witches, and a variety of heretics. Psellos
thought the cause of them as the coming EndAntichrist was at hand.
After Amalrics death in 1207, his followers held that all things are One, because
whatever is, is God. This sounds pantheistic, meaning they were not Cathars, who
had a clear distinction between the world of the Devil and the world of Godthe
material and spiritual worlds. Yet the Cathars did believe that the souls of all living
things were part of God. It was only God, not Satan who conferred life, so with the
amendment that living things are meant, and even then not their material selves but
their life-giving souls, then the Cathar and Amaurian ideas can be reconciled. If this
is so, then the statement of one of the three leaders that he could neither be
consumed by fire nor tormented by torture, for, in so far as he was, he was God,
makes sense, and matches the convictions of the Cathar Perfects.
The Spirit of Freedom or the Free Spirit is attained when one is wholly transformed
into God. This union is so complete that neither the Virgin Mary nor the Angels are
able to distinguish between man and God. In it one is restored to ones original state,
before one flowed out of the Deity. One is illumined by that essential light, beside
which all created light is darkness and obfuscation.
Amaurians, like Cathars, believed each of them was a Christ. They taught that sinners
would not be punished, just as the Cathars taught. Life itself was punishment for not
discovering or accepting the gnosis required to proceed to unity with God. Cathars
were simply returned to life to continue the learning process. Cohn quotes the
contemporary Abbot of S Victor against the Amaurians, in which he says they
believed that God punishes no one for sin, and that they say they are God.
This expressed a Cathar view of those who were still trapped on earth, but they did
expect to unite forever with God after death, once they had been consoled. Amaurians
perhaps differed from Cathars and abutted with millennialism in thinking that, in the
Age of Spirit, they would lead all mankind into Perfectionall, that is who survived
the usual plagues, famines and earthquakes that God would use to kill off incorrigible
sinners. As with other heresies, the Church of Rome was the instrument of Satan, the
pope being Anti-Christ. Moreover, the French king took the role of warrior
messiahlike Arthur, Charlemagne and Frederick. He would receive twelve loaves
and would preside over his convent of twelve councillors.
The chief stronghold of the Amaurians became Troyes in Champagne where an
Amaurian knight was burnt in 1220. Troyes was a prosperous town on the trade route
from Lyons and the south to Flanders, and had a thriving trade and industry in cloth.
Beghards and Bguines

Bguines were lay sisters in the Netherlands and Germany, the enclosed district
within which they live being known as a beguinage. The equivalent brothers were also
called Bguines, but more usually Beghards. The Bguines were earlier in origin than
the Beghards. The Bguines and Beghards spread a network of ascetic communities
all over Europe, more like the ancient Essenes and Therapeutae than the Christian
monks. Some were severely persecuted, though their only heresy was that they did as
the gospel Christ bade them do.
As early as the commencement of the twelfth century there were women in the
Netherlands who lived alone, and without taking vows devoted themselves to prayer
and good works. It was the age of the Crusades, and the land teemed with desolate
women. These solitaries made their homes not in the forest, where the true hermit
loves to dwell, but on the fringe of the town, where their work lay, for they served
Christ in His poor. About the beginning of the thirteenth century some of them
grouped their cabins together, and the community thus formed was the first
Beguinage.
The first records are of communities at Louvain in 1220 and at Antwerp in 1228. Both
the institution and the name of the Bguines might be derived from the name of a
Belgian priest of Lige, Lambert le Bgue (d 1187). Le Bgue, as the chronicler
Aegidius, a monk of Orval (Aureae Vallis), tells us, simply means the stammerer, so
it means the same as Lollard (from Flemish lllen, to stammer). But, Bguine might
be a corruption of Albigan, implying a link with the Cathars. The idea is
strengthened by the alternative nicknames they haveGood Boys, Bons Garons,
Boni Pueri, Boni Valetiall reminiscent of Bonhomme and Boni Homines, the names
of the Cathar Perfects, whose lesser ranks were sons and therefore interpretable as
boys. Both could be correct if Lamberts surname had been Albiga, as the Latin name
of the place of origin of his family, the surname being rationalized in the vernacular
as Le Bgue.
About the year 1170, Lambert, like Peter Waldo and Francis of Assisi, renounced his
wealth, to found the hospital of S Christopher at Lige, for the widows and children of
crusaders. He set up an association for women, who, without taking the monastic
vows, could devote themselves to a life of religion. He preached repentance, and
attacked the vices of the clergy, sounding anti-sacerdotal, like the Cathars. Large
numbers of women, many abandoned by the loss of their husbands on crusade,
responded in a spirit of revival, and gathered into a convent-like community

around his church of S Christopher.
The Bguines lived in separate small houses, subject to no vows or rule, in contrast to
women who entered convents, save the obligation of good works, and of chastity so
long as they remained members of the community. By 1210, contemporaries testify to
the existence there of whole troops of holy maidens. The ascetic spirit took hold
also of the married women, who frequently made vows of continence. Women could
enter Beguinages having already been married and they could leave the Beguinages to
marry. The first inmates were mostly women of position, who renounced their
property and supported themselves by their own labors.
After Lamberts death, the movement rapidly spread, first in the Netherlands and
afterwards in Franceencouraged by the saintly Louis IX, who erected a large
Beguinage in Paris, in 1264Germany, Switzerland and the countries beyond.
Everywhere the community was modelled on the type established at Ligea little
city within the city, with separate houses, and usually a church, hospital and guesthouse. The Bguines did not beg, and, when the endowments of the community were
not sufficient, the poorer members had to support themselves by manual work,
sick-nursing and by teaching the children of burghers.
As time went on, they came together in larger houses put at their disposal by pious
gifts, and formed communities of a monastic type. The growth of these convents
continued from the first third of the thirteenth century to the beginning of the
fifteenth, by which time the majority of German towns had their convents of
Bguines. The statutes varied much in the different houses. The number of occupants
was between ten and twenty on an average. There was no uniform dress, but most of
the members wore hoods and scapulars resembling a religious habit. Those who had
property retained full control of it, or left it to the convent when they died or left.
Celibacy was required as long as they stayed, but they were always free to leave and
marry.
Flanders was the weaving centre of the continent since Roman times, and, from the
eleventh century to the thirteenth, the whole of north eastern France and Belgium
became industrialised as the textile centre of Europe. The whole of the region from
the north of France through the Low Countries and into the Rhine valley became a
place of religious and economic revolution with weavers and cloth workers at the
centre of it all.
On the face of it the unrest was economic, with uprisings protesting against excessive
taxes, poor wages and lack of freedom, but since the comparisons were made with the
rich, it was natural for the theology of poverty to be used to sustain it. Christ himself
had condemned the rich and exalted the poor, and should have returned by then and
put his redistribution into effect. Economic rebels at Ypres in 1377 were actually
condemned by the Inquistition but hanged for rebellion.
This early phase of industrialisation based on cloth manufacture had provided the
best chance for wandering preachers or revolutionaries to get occasional work and
keep from starving. Many of the voluntary poor were connected with cloth making as
weavers, combers and dyers. Cohn writes:
10
The voluntary poor found a mobile, restless intelligentsia, members of which were
constantly travelling along the trade routes from town to town, operating mainly
underground, and finding an audience and a following among all the disoriented and
anxious elements in urban society.
In northern Europe, the Free Spirit of Beghards and Bguines led the war against the
established Church. Cohn confidently asserts, from around 1250, they assimilated
any and every heretical doctrine there was, citing Cathars, Waldenses, and Joachites,
and had no common beliefs. He gives no authority for it, and his own evidence of the
beliefs held by the heretics contradicts what he says here. They had some constant
beliefs among them allhatred of the Church, a belief that sacraments are worthless,
a belief in the spiritual value of poverty, and most important of all, the belief that
each of us can become God. Cohn mentions their ability to split into small groups and
to fade away when trouble threatened, migrating from mountain to mountain like
strange sparows. This is a good description of the lifestyle the fleeing Cathars were
obliged to follow. If they differed, they were merely variations on the Cathar original.
Cohn highlights that they were all alike articulate and literate. How could this be?
Because the Cathars and Waldenses taught literacy as part of their mission. They
wanted everyone to be able to read in the vernacular, and to be able to preach. The
Church had no such duties, except to teach the clerics some Latin to be able to read
the mass and the Lord's prayer, but learning them by heart would suffice. At the
Ecumenical Council of Lyons in 1274, an outraged Franciscan complained that
Bguines had translated the bible into French, and even discussed it!
Again Cohn, giving no authority says Bguines had no positive heretical intentions.
It cannot be true. The Franciscans made strong efforts to take control of many
beguinages, succeeding with many, but why, if they were no heretical danger? By
1320, the Church had driven the Beghards underground again. These men were the
descendents of the Cathar Perfects in hiding, and depended on the Bguines, who still
operated openly, for support. Bguine communities took in these men, giving them
food and shelter, and sending on messengers to nearby beguinages that an angel of
the divine word had descended on them. Bguines poured in to hear his address.
Cohn concludes that the Free Spirit became an invisible empire, while continuing to
propagate the Church calumny that these men were super studs servicing whole
nunneries of randy nymphomaniacs. He knows and even mentions that such fiction
was the stock in trade of the Church's propaganda.
The earliest Flemish Beghard communities were associations mainly of artisans who
earned their living by weaving and craft skills. They were all of them laymen of
humble originweavers, dyers, fullersintimately connected with the craft gilds.
Indeed, no man could be admitted to the Beghards convent at Brussels unless he
were a member of the Weavers Company, and this was in all probability not a unique
case. Like the Bguines, they were not bound by vows.
The rule of life which they observed was not uniform, and the members of each
community were subject only to their own local superiors, but, unlike the Bguines,
they had no private property. Just like Essenes, the brethren of each cloister had a
common purse, dwelt together under one roof, and ate at the same board. Under the
influence of the mendicant orders of the thirteenth century, these tended to be
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incorporated as secular associates of the orders of friars. The name of Beghard then
became what it is today, beggar, as the name of wandering mendicants who made
religion a cloak for living on charity.
Amazingly like the Essenes as described by Pliny, the Beghards were often men to
whom fortune had not been kind, and felt unable to stand alone, through personal
misfortune and disaster. Thanks to their connexion with the craft gilds, they were
able to influence the religious life and opinions of the cities and towns of the
Netherlands. As time went on, they acquired endowments, but they were never rich.
They waned with the waning of the cloth trade, and, when that industry died,
gradually dwindled away. The male communities apparently did not survive the
fourteenth century, even in the Netherlands, where they had maintained their
original character least impaired.
More serious still, from the point of view of the Church, was the association of these
wandering mendicants with the mystic heresies of the Fraticelli, the Apostolici and
the Brethren of the Free Spirit. The Bguine, Marguerite Porete, was called before the
inquisitors on suspicion of promoting the heresy of the Free Spirit. Inquisitors
identified the Free Spirit heresy with all Bguines and the less numerous but perhaps
more active Beghards. She was burned to death in 1310. But Bguines in Belgium
were regarded as a bulwark against heresy, and Mary of Oignies, an early solitary,
supported the crusade against the Albigensians.
The heretical tendencies of the Beghards and Bguines necessitated severe
disciplinary measures by the Church, and they were repeatedly condemned by the
Holy See, the bishops notably in Germany, and the Inquisition. Catholics accuse them
of Quietism, a denial of the desire for salvation. Yet, one of the common threads
running through the new religious groups, like the Waldensians, Lollards, Brothers
and Sisters of the Free Spirit, Spiritual Franciscans, Apostolici, Joachimites, and
Flagellants, as well as the mendicant orders, was the appeal of the vita apostolica, a
life of freedom, travelling about preaching, and living frugally.
The Cathar Perfects valued total poverty. For what few needs they had, their regime
being so severe, they depended on the Credentes. This example led, from the
beginning of the millennium, to the fashion for voluntary poverty, something quite
unknown to the bishops. The opulent wealth of the Catholic Church was the image of
Christ it offered. Perhaps a few Catholic priests turned to voluntary poverty in protest
against the Church and to try to impress God before he ended the world, but even
they were shamed into it by the Cathar example rather than any twinges of guilt from
reading about Ananias and Sapphira.
Max Weber stressed the importance of Protestant ethics for the development of
capitalism and its social role. The rapid growth of trade and capitalism also motivated
some merchants who had rapidly become wealthy to renounce it all and become
peripatetic teachers. Waldo was the famous one. Voluntary poverty meant that
starvation and destitution could be certainly avoided only if the poor person had
some skill to offer on a casual basis. The vita apostolica was a return to primitive
Christianity, a simple life and simple spirituality. The Bguines were called the
voluntary poor. Their strict poverty designated them as the true followers of Christ.
They were apt to withdraw themselves from the teaching of the clergy and listen
rather to the exciting exhortations of wandering preachers, the Vaudois, the followers
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of Peter Waldo, in sympathy with their beliefs. These Waldensians, also of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, called themselves the Poor in Spirit, and
literally obeyed every word of Christ, and so they were branded as heretics and
burned in batches, sixty at one time being committed to the flames in Germany in
1211, and some being burned in Spain even earlier.
Bguines preached and taught scripture in the vernacular, inviting ecclesiastical
venom for a practice that the Church thought was heretical and faithless. In the
middle ages, holy communion was not taken often. Indeed, there were Catholic
churches where no mass had been said for thirty years! Members of religious orders
might receive communion three times a year, but Bguines wanted communion
weekly or even more often. Such devotion does not suggest they were Cathars.
However, like all mystics, they believed that the individual human soul could be
directly united to God, and that sounds more Catharistic. The work of William of
S Thierry, who was from Lige, was influential for Bguine mysticism. This sounds
Cathar, but William was a trinitarian unlike Cathars:
It is well said that we shall see him fully as he is when we are like him, that is when
we are what he is. For those who have been enabled to become sons of God have
been enabled to become not indeed God, but what God is: holy, and in the future,
fully happy as God is.
Williams friend, S Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), echoing the Old Testament

book Song of Songs, allegorized the relationship between the individual and God as a
spiritual marriage between a human bride (the soul) and a heavenly bridegroom
(Christ), and that sounds Cathar. S Bernard was trying to convert them, so might
have used imagery they liked. Most often Bguines accused of heresy were said to
share in the errors of the Brothers of the Free Spirit, who were said to be pantheistic
and to reject the Church and its sacraments. Every human soul could realize its divine
nature, and for the soul that had come to this awareness that it was God, there could
be no sin. That sounds Cathar, not Bguine. Although scandalized by greed and
corruption, Bguines did not reject the Church nor its teaching authority.
The disapproval of the Bguines by the papal authorities eventually made many join
the mendicant orders for protection. Some retained their original character, but
others were ultimately converted into Dominican, Franciscan or Augustinian
tertiaries. In the fifteenth century, many Beguinages were transferred to the
Augustinian order, but even by the end of the thirteenth century, the Bguines of
France and Germany had been taken over by Franciscans and Dominicans to such an
extent that, in the Latin-speaking countries, male and female secular associates of
these orders were commonly called respectively beguini and beguinae. The aim of the
friars was doubtless to ensure they did not lapse into the Cathar heresy.
In the thirteenth century, others evidently did fall into heresy, if they were not
devised as heretical movements in the first place. They turned in increasing numbers
from work to mendicancy in imitation of Christ. They practised extreme corporal
austerity, and lost themselves in mystic speculations which increased their tendency
to see visions and to condemn the sacraments and ritual of the Church. In short, they
sounded close to Catharism.
Restrictions were placed upon them by the synods of Fritzlar (1269), Mainz and
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Eichstatt (1281), and Bziers (1299), when they were absolutely forbidden, Cologne in
1306, and Trier in 1310, when a decree was passed against those who under a pretext
of feigned religion call themselves Beghards, and, hating manual labour, go about
begging, holding conventicles and posing among simple people as interpreters of the
Scriptures. This says that the Beghards were the same as the Vaudois.
Early in the fourteenth Century, the inquisitor Bernardo Gui investigated the lay
followers of S Francis of Assisi. Gui reported, in his Inquisitors Manual, that many of
both sexes were heretical. He began burning them from 1317. As they died, they cried
out that they defended the gospel truth, the life of Christ and apostolic poverty. Gui
thought their duty was to the Church, and thus to God, rather than directly to God!
They listened to the Holy Spirit not the pope, and deserved to die for it. Gui said a
Bguine or Waldensian had the habit of greeting each other in the street with the
words, Blessed be Jesus Christ. Anyone using that greeting had to be arrested.
In 1311, under Pope Clement V, decrees were passed at the council of Vienne
suppressing the Bguines and Beghards and demanding their severe punishment.
The persecution died down, but was resumed from 1366 to 1378 by Popes Urban V
and Gregory XI, and the Bguines were not formally reinstated until the pontificate of
Eugenius IV (1431-1447). In 1421, Pope Martin V ordered the archbishop of Cologne
to search out and destroy any small convents of persons living under the cloak of
religion without a definite Rule. Many Bguines had a strong devotion to the
Eucharist and the Corpus Christi, which feast some of them campaigned for and had
granted by pope Urban IV.
Throughout the fourteenth century, Beghards and Bguines were persecuted for
heresy when they were simply pious and disciplined in their beliefs. They sought the
apostolic ideal by taking such names as brothers of the highest poverty, the
association of the poor, good daughters, little brothers, followers of Christ and
the Apostles, poor good youths, and simply brothers and sisters, but the friars,
who also called themselves brothers, often resented them as rivals and the secular
clergy resented their imitation of the friars and their frequent unwillingness to obey
parish priests. Their pursuit of the vita apostolica embarrassed wealthy members of
the clergy, who thought they could punish the heretics by confiscating the property
that they ought not to need as apostles. Popes ordered procedures against them to
earn reputations as reformers and hammers of heresy, and Bguines were
undefended targets.
At the Reformation the communities were suppressed in Protestant countries, but a
few still survive as almshouses for poor spinsters. The beguinage of S Elizabeth at
Ghent has some thousand sisters, and occupies quite a distinct quarter of the city,
being surrounded by a wall and moat. The Bguines wear the old Flemish head-dress
and a dark costume, and are conspicuous for their kindness among the poor and their
sick nursing.
Heretics in England and the Lollards

In 1167, heretics, called Poplicani or Deonarii, were charged in Vezelay that they
denied the cross, holy water, churches, donations, marriage and the holy orders. A
little earlier, in 1162 AD, some heretics, led by a man called Gerbert and called
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publicani by William of Newburg, came from Germany to England on the crest of

the heretical wave, mentioned by Eckbert, later Benedictine abbot of Schonau. There
were about 30 of them and they were described as uneducated, perhaps because they
denied the sacraments of baptism, marriage, the mass, and the Catholic church
generally. Most had a tragic fate, being put on trial at Oxford, branded, chased away,
or starved to death. It seems the English were much opposed to heresy, and it never
even got a foothold. Later evidence, though, from the 1300s, seems to tell a different
tale. Of the Publicans tried, branded and chased out of Oxford, some seem to have
adapted, kept their heads down and avoided any direct conflict with the ecclesiastic
power until they emerged as Lollards.
Georgi Vasilev found it curious that the heretics never got to Britain, at least as far as
British scholars were concerned. Despite their apparent absence in British history,
medieval English literature and language has tantalizing hints of a dualist BogomilCathar heretical presence persisting in England until the seventeenth century.
Apocryphal writings and dualistic themes appeared first in manuscripts of the Old
English period in the ninth and even the eighth century, including works like
Beowulf. The Lament of the Fallen Angels in MS Junius retells a fragment of The
Secret Book of the Bogomils. The poet William Langland, Anglo-Norman variants of
The Legend of the Tree of the Cross (De arbore crucis) composed in the tenth century
by the priest, Jeremiah, and The Infancy of Jesus Christ, the reformers John Wycliffe
and William Tyndale, the iconography of the Lollards, and the apocryphal volume
Cursor Mundi as well as Miltons poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained all
suggest that dualist ideas pervaded England, persisting through the Lollards. William
Empson, in Miltons God, confirms William Blake when he says, Milton was of the
Devils party without knowing itunless, of course, he did know it!
The Vision of Piers Plowman is full of Bogomil-Cathar imagery and theologythe
Fall of Lucifer, the Descent of Christ into Hell to liberate all sinful souls. Christ
teaches Piers Plowman how to plough the spiritual field, a version of a scene in De
arbore crucis where Christ taught the ploughman to plough. In Langlands poem the
land is given to Piers Plowman, as it is given to Adam in the heretical works, and it
uses Bogomil vocabulary like good people, the Perfect and Spiritus Paraclitus.
Linking with the free spirit of the travelling artisans was the image of the Christ of the
Trades in poor Lollard churches like S Marys Church in Ampney, Gloucestershire, in
the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, and others listed by Georgi Vasilev from
T Borenius and E W Tristram (1927).
John Wycliffe agreed with the Bogomil belief that the Devil is master of the world,
insisted on sermons in the vernacular, was fond of the dualistic myth of the pride and
fall of Lucifer, attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation on the grounds that Gods
word is our supersubstantial bread, the Bogomil-Cathar view.
The OED tells us Bugger, in English, a form of the old French bougre, from the
Latin Bulgarus, Bulgar or Bulgarian, is a name used in the eleventh century of the
Cathars, a sect of heretics in Southern France whose origins were Bulgaria. In the
Middle Ages, it was used particularly of the Albigenses, to whom the Church ascribed
the abominable practice of sodomy. Bougres was also a name used of usurers.
Usurers in Provence and Lombardy were called bougres, and Lombardy became
famous for it, but both also had many heretics in their populations. Moses Gaster, in
1887, associated the word boggard, the name of a lurking ghost or ghoul (becoming
15
the modern bogey and bogeyman), with bugger, suggesting it was a dialectal form
of Bulgard, Bulgar or Bulgarian, applied to the heretics who were allegedly
worshippers of the Devil. Matthew Paris is said to have used the word.
Eric Partridge showed that the bougres, the heretics, in fact had been vilified. The
troubadours of the thirteenth century, Vassilev notes, used bougre with an
honorable meaning in the Song of the Crusade against the Albigensians. After the
Albigensian crusades against the Cathars in the beginning of the thirteenth century,
the Catholic clergy launched the inquisition and simultaneously blackened the
character of the heretics in any ways they could. The same ploy is still constantly
used, against enemies of the west like the Russians, the Moslem Arabs and the
Vietnamese communists.
Charles Schmidt, the scholar of heresy, says the Church often resorted to calumny in
dealing with the heresies, beginning with S Bernard of Clairvaux. The lie is given by
the fact that some Catholic writers characterised them much more generously, as
respected, with honest conduct and dignified bearing, and a Catholic chronicler
wrote, they say that the heretics are virtuous and accomplish miracles. And
curiously bugger also has a connotation in France, Britain and the USA of a good
chap, un brave homme. Perhaps it signified the dual truth about the heretics, they
were good people but blackened by propaganda. The Perfects, unlike most of the
clergy, genuinely eschewed sexual relations, and so the clergy claimed they were able
to do it because they preferred sex with animals. It is a slur that has never been
upheld by any evidence, and the clergy had a reason for that too. Cathars fornicated
secretly by night! The Perfects were famously pale and thin because of their constant
fasting, but the clergy had their own explanationthey were worn out by fornication.
Bogomil Perfects looked pale because they really did fast incessantly. Vasilev cites
Euthymius Zigabenus as declaring that they fasted on the second and the fourth day
and the Friday of every week fast right up to the ninth hour, besides fasting
throughout Lent. Bernard Gui (A Manual for Inquisitors) confirms that they fasted
on bread and water three days a week for the whole year, and nor did they touch a
woman. As children of the Good God, Cathars were all members of one spiritual
family. Taken to the limit by the Perfects, it meant that sexuality with any woman was
like incest with a sister or mother. This principle, needless to say, was reversed by
catholic Inquisitors, like R Sacconi, into Cathar men and women both enjoying
intercourse with sisters and brothers. Yes indeed, but only the Hearers, not the
Perfects, and the sisters were spiritual sisters and the brothers the samejust as the
sisterhood and brotherhood of the first disciples of Christ was, and the Essenes
before them.
Schmidt, in 1849, also identified the poblicans in Northern France and England as
Cathars, observing that a good many chroniclers mentioned them. Stephen
Runciman derived publicani or poplicani through Latin from the Greek word
Paulicians. The Greek Paulicani gets written with the Latinized letter u looking
like a v (Pavlicani) and that easily gets pronounced as a b (Poblicani)! The
Paulicians were the original and stricly dualistic heretics which spawned the
somewhat less rigid Bogomil church.
Vasiliev explains that the Chronicle of Rodulphus Coggeshalensis from the time of
Louis VII (1137-1180) says publican was the popular name of the heretics who had
16
spread to many parts of France. Many historians have pointed out that it was
merchants and travelling tradesmen who were among the main propagators of the
Cathar heresy in Europe. As early as 1017 AD, popelicani appear in Du Canges
Glossarium, that being how our Manichaeans are called. Du Cange goes on to say
that, at the Third Lateran Council of 1179, the Cathars, Patrenes (Patarenes) and
Publicani were bracketed together because they had spread in Albi, Toulouse and
elsewhere, and citing Magna Chronica Belgica (1208), he says the Popelicani
professed both principlesthey were dualists.
The bougres and the poblicani might have been distinct dualistic sects from
Bulgaria, but they were sufficiently alike to be seen as the same heresy in the west. It
is inconceivable that the publicans or buggers did not have a strong influence on the
emergence of the Lollards, but the indistinctness of their traces suggest they kept
their heads very low, after the fate of Gerbert and his party in Britain and the
shocking events of Languedoc. One way they seem to have done it is to use the
parable of the Pharisee and the publican (Luke 18:9-14) to give themselves the cach
of the reformed sinner. The conclusion of the story is the Christian truism, forgotten
by many if not most of them, that the exalted are humbled and the humble exalted.
There is little doubt that the Cathar Christs took this seriously, unlike traditional
Christians who prefer to act the part of the Pharisee. The catholic inquisitor, Bernard
Gui, noted that Cathars called their catholic Christian persecutors Pharisees whereas
they were persecuted as Christ and the apostles were.
Guillaume de Saint-Amour (1202-1272), to whom a chapter of The Roman de la Rose
is dedicated, was rector of the liberal University of Paris. Facing up to the papel
orders of the Church, in one of his sermons, he called the catholic clergy falsely
pious and vain, whereas publicans were men of the world who, even if they are
sinners admitted their sins. Thus the publicani were associated in the writings of
English authors of the seventeenth century with an anti-Catholic, Protestant spirit,
arising, in actuality, from their heretical beginnings with the Paulicians.
Even in the eyes of the strictest moral judgement the Cathars would be worthy of the
name they have chosen for themselves (Cathari, Puritans).
N Osokin, cited by G Vasilev
And the affection of the peasantry has come down in a variety of fourteenth century
observations noted by Jean Duvernoy in the medieval registers. A farmer aroused the
suspicions of Cathars when he attended one of their secret meetings around 1303,
and was gently led away protesting:
But, sir, I too want to receive a part of the Good!
And after the Cathars had fled the crusade and the Inquisition:
The land does not produce anything good.
Since the heretics were chased from Sabartes there is no longer good weather in the
area.
When the heretics lived in these lands we did not have so many storms or lightning.
Now that we are with Franciscans and Dominicans the lightning strikes more
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frequently.
Others recorded that people thought the Cathars brought happiness and plenty and
no one could do evil in the day they had seen a Perfect. It was the purity of the
Bogomils that attracted disaffected catholics to the heresy.
The Bogomil-Cathar heresy, in many respects, is influenced by pre-Christian pagan
beliefs, notably Orphism. Vasilev relates Orphism with Bogomilism in the myth of
Christs descent into hell and his freeing of the imprisoned souls there, and shown in
a fresco of Boyana Church. Christ descending into hell is a Christian version of
Orpheus in the underworld. The story of the Harrowing of Hell was known
everywhere in the Middle Ages. Yet, it came from a heretical work, The Gospel of
Nicodemus, a non-canonical book, but the favourite reading of the dualists, according
to Vasilev (Bogomils And Lollards. Dualistic Motives in England during the Middle
Ages, online). In it, the captives in hell are in darkness, then see a light, the arriving
King of Glory. He had come to cause confusion and stop the tyranny of hell that kept
the souls entrapped, and the medival reader too! The reader was considered as
caught in the darkness as the poor captives. They were the captives! In the
Carcassonne version of the Secret Book, Christ meets and subdues Satan in hell, but
none of this happens in the Vienna version, thus leaving Satan as coequal with his
brother and rival, Christ. This is not Catholic Christianity. People in the Christian hell
are there because of Gods judgement on them, yet here they are subject to a tyranny,
and are to be freed from it. This is Catharism. This world is hellish, and the Church is
its tyrant.
The miracle plays of the British towns, popular in the Middle Ages, covered the
passion of Christ, including the Harrowing of Hell, and in the order of the gospel of
Nicodemus, suggesting it was their source, and Langlands Piers Plowman also has it.
Dualistic apocrypha like these were brought over to England via France in the
thirteenth century, but Vasilev thinks the presence of the Harrowing of Hell in the
tenth century Exeter Book shows heretical influence that early.
If weaving was one of the crafts that the heretics practiced, England was important to
it from the tenth century as the centre of the supply of wool, and the Rhine valley was
the route taken by the cloth merchants to the east where some could meet familiar
beliefs from the Bogomils. The Fall of Lucifer and his Angels found in the Caedmon
Ms is another dualistic theme. Did the heresy create its own cultural infrastructure in
England, apart and often opposed to the official Church?
The Lollards of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are well documented as
connected with the reformist efforts of John Wycliffe, and taking part in John Balls
Peasants Revolt of June 1381, certainly according to the Catholics, some say to
discredit Wycliffe. Like the earlier heretical sects, Lollardy criticised clerical abuse of
power and position, denied Church authority particularly as the only route to
salvation, and its holding temporal power and possessions. Like the Waldenses,
Lollards believed faith was founded directly on the bible as the source of all truth.
God needed no clergy as intermediaries between Himself and the laity, and they
denied the sacraments, deplored church rigamarole and ritual, and rejected the need
for confession before priests. The Lollards also said the catholic priesthood used
Latin to make the laity as ignorant as themselves.
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The catholic Church reacted by defaming the holders of these beliefs, claiming
Lollards threatened law and order. Suppression was considered more effective than
argument. The aim was to get the secular arm to do its dirty work for it. The Church
always acted under cover of the secular authorities, or the secular arm,
recommending to the secular arm what it should do, usually execute. Technically, the
state burned people at the stake, not the Church, and so the Church could not be
accused of killing anyone. Notionally, the secular authorities need not have followed
the Churchs recommendation, but the lords and princes were superstitiously
Catholic and feared for their mortal souls if they defied the bishops or inquisitors, so
only the Cathar lords in thirteenth century France declined to follow clerical
recommendations in this respect. The ruling nobility wanted to remain united with
the Church against the growing artisan and merchanting classes. Heresy was linked
with the new tradesmen, and it was seen by the nobles as well as the clergy as
threatening.
Pope Gregory XI, in 1377, having read Wycliffes Propositions, wrote to king
Richard II, the University of Oxford, and Archbishops Sudbury and Courtenay in
protest. Historian, Doris Haddock, explains that the demands of Wycliffe were
unquestionably close to John Balls, including the abolition of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy, monks, and the distribution of clerical property among the laity. Wycliffe
had written, in early 1381, that there would be a rising of the people under prophetic
leadership. Moreover, in Balls confession, he said he had been a disciple of
Wycliffe for two years and learned from him the heresies which he had been taught
and the heresy concerning the sacrament of the altar. Ball was said to have
admitted openly preaching this and other matters taught to him by Wycliffe. He also
confessed the sect travelled around England preaching the doctrines of Wycliffe and
conspired like a secret fraternity. They meant to destroy the kingdom within two
years. A Catholic chronicler, or propagandist, wrote that Lollards spread dissension
and incited the people to insurrection.
Their name, though, is not English. Before they appeared in England, the Lollards
were well known in Germany and Flanders, and an explanation of their name is that
it is from the low German verb lollen meaning mumble. The Flemish Beghards
were called lollards because of their habit of muttering their prayers to themselves
constantly. Du Cange adds that they called the Lollard also a Waldensian. Sir John
Oldcastle, later Lord Cobham when he took his wifes entitlement, was called
Lollardus.
In 1401, after Henry IV had usurped the throne (1399) and the fallout had settled,
Parliament enacted De heretico comburendo, reinforced in further enactments of
1405 and 1414, decreeing that heretics and anyone in possession of heretical writings,
who refused to abjure or relapsed after doing so, were to be burnt by the lay
authorities. Undoubtedly, the king knew he could use the new law against his political
opponents, heretics or not.
To the sin of heresy was now added the crime of subversion.
Lollardy offered a religious justification for the uprisings of the desperately poor in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Oldcastle case was used to inspire a fear of
heresy and a conviction that Lollardy was conspiratorial. Oldcastle was a friend of
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Henry, the prince of Wales, who became Henry V, and this saved him from
prosecution when he was first accused of heresy. Shortly afterwards, when even the
new king could not prevent a prosecution, he was found guilty, but Henry ordered a
forty day stay of execution in the hope of finding a way out. Lollardus escaped from
the Tower in this time and set up a Lollard conspiracy in which, most interestingly,
the king and his brothers were to be seized during a Twelfth Night mumming at
Eltham. The plot failed but Lollardus remained free and conspiring in rebellion for
four years until he was captured and hanged in 1417, the gallows and all being
burnt. The Pattishall riot in 1387, the South Yorkshire disturbances in 1392, and the
1400-1405 Welsh uprising of Owen Glyn Dwr were all linked to the Lollards, and,
according to Doris Haddock, they were later said to have been involved in the
Southampton plot of 1415, and attacks by the Scottish on Berwick and Roxborough in
1417.
Lollardy was forced underground but remained of significance in preserving an
anti-authoritarian, anti-sacerdotal and anti-sacramental spirit which assisted in
preparing popular beliefs for the English Reformation.
D Haddock
Wycliffs heresyhe was at first supported by his university and the nobleswas
really a return to primitive ChristianityEssenism. It took such root in England that,
in the middle of the fourteenth century, one-tenth of the nation, some historians
estimate, were Lollards. Du Cange said, from a chronicle of 1318, heretics hid
themselves in many parts of the English kingdom, contradicting the view that heresy
was alien to England. This heresy paid the typical penalty of being true to Christ.
Vasilev concludes:
The spiritual kinship between the Lollards and Waldensians directs our attention to
the roots of the Waldensian doctrine which lie in Catharism. In fact, Waldo adopts
from the Cathars their social vision and organisational model but abandons their
complicated dualist mythology.
Vasilev sees a similarity of doctrines in the writings of the Lollards and in the
evidence of the Norwich heresy trials (1428-31), and those of the Cathars or
Bogomils. The nineteenth century scholar, J v Grres, says Cathars were also known
by such names as Patarini and Piphlers, Beghards and Lollards. It might seem
unlikely that doctrines separated by four centuries and a thousand miles could be
linked. M D Lambert in his Medieval Heresy. Popular Movements from Bogomil to
Hus (1977) thought Cathars used stereotypical aphorisms to initiate a novice that
were, even so, adapted, changed and interpreted for different situations. Their use
shows a common thread or influence rather than identical meanings, and though
Christians will not accept any such influences on their revealed religion, the historian
and common sensical people know they are there. The anger of the Bogomils, Cathars
and Lollards generated a vivid language which travelled almost unchanged across
countries and centuries and was later used by the Protestants in their discourse with
Rome.
Louis Moreri (Dictionnaire Historique, 1600s) cites old sources which reveal the
beliefs of the Lollards:
These sectarians said that Lucifer and the angels that followed him were condemned
20
wrongly, that rather Archangel Michael and the good angels deserved this
punishment. They added inadmissible blasphemies against S Mary, they said that
God does not punish us for the faults we commit here They taught also that the
Mass, baptism and the extreme unction are useless. They also denied penance and
refused to obey the Church and the secular authorities.
Moreri was not entirely reliable. These allegations probably came from the official
Church aiming to discredit the Lollards as Luciferians, or Satanists. It is not typical of
the English Lollards, and the role reversal of Lucifer and Michael must be a slander
by the reporter, his confusion, or a confusion of some Lollards, through the
difficulties Cathars had in preaching their views. Vasilev shows the myths and beliefs
of the Lollards were in the Bogomil-Cathar tradition:
1. Beliefs and mythsthe fall of Lucifer, Satan as creator and ruler of the visible
world, denial of hell and purgatory,
2. ritual practicesbaptism in the Holy Spirit, preference for the Pater Noster, direct
confession to God, denial of Transubstantiation,
3. anti-clericalismthe official Church is a community of Herod or the Anti-Christ,
Church buildings are synagogues, cross-roads or wastelands,
4. denial of the cross and crucifix, of icons (images) and relics of saints,
5. refusal to worship the Virgin and the saints,
6. denial of social normslegal authority and oath taking, condemnation of
bloodshed, effective rejection of the feudal system.
Professor Thomas Butler of Harvard has noted that the cross reappeared as a
religious symbol in Bogomilism, being carved on monuments like a crucifix but not
with a body, with clusters of grapes topped with a rosette where the head would be.
Some monuments featured a numinous tree of paradise, which one could also take as
a cryptic reference to the The Tree of the Cross.
Vasilev points out the Bulgarian contribution to the popular myth of Christs return
to earth as a plowman in a gesture of love to all mankind. Christ is Peter the Plowman
and shown with an aureol of farm tools. Vasilev, in his paper (Etudes Balkaniques 1,
1993), compares the Tract against the Bogomils by Prezviter Kozma (Presbyter
Cosmas), the Secret Book of the Bogomils and the Panoplia Dogmatica by
Euthymius Zygabenus with Lollard and tracts from Lambert, finding ample parallels.
The Bulgarian presbyter (bishop) Cosmas gave a sermon against the Bogomils in
about 970 AD. Cosmas explained about the new heresy of a man named Bogumil,
beloved of God, who is rather Bogu-ne-mil, not beloved of God. The Bogomils
were like sheep, pretending to be meek, humble and quiet, while attacking the human
frailties of other Christians, including the clergy. They appeared pale from their
hypocritical fasting. They did not utter excessive words, nor laugh loudly, and were
not inquisitive. When they saw someone simple and ignorant, there they sowed the
weeds of their teaching, reviling the rules passed down to the holy churches. They
opposed the veneration of the cross, of icons, and of relics of the saints. They scoffed
at miracles as the works of Satan. They thought Christ and Satan were brothers, but
that Satan created the material world, including the earth and mankind. That is why
the world was evil.
The Bogomils denied that Mary was the Mother of God, and thought Christs birth
21
was only an illusion. They opposed the sacraments, except for baptism but which was
spiritualthe laying on of handsnot by immersion in water for water as a material
substance was the Devils work. John the Baptist was Satans emissary. Confession
was necessary but it enough to confess ones sins to another Christian (their name
for each other). Cosmas was particularly outraged that confession could be to a
women. Bogomils opposed the priesthood and hierarchy in the Church, the liturgy
and Holy Communion, both of which were invented by John Chrysostom.
This sect relied almost exclusively on the New Testament and the Epistles and Acts of
the Apostles as their authorities, but rejected most of the Old Testament, particularly
the Prophets. They sought the return to a more primitive form of Christianityto a
renewal of Christs message as they interpreted itminus the accretions of the
Church. They recognized only two groups of worshippersthe perfect, who had had
spiritual baptism (the consolamentum) at a mature age, and the believers, who had
yet to receive baptism. Cosmas mentions no writings, rather implying their message
was by word of mouth. The medieval Church considered Bogomil errors as leading
to the perdition of the soul, and as a threat to the Church. Notably, however, they also
were seen so early as a threat to the secular powers, to the tsar and to the boyars.
The coincidences can be enriched even further. The appellation good men (boni
homini), good Christians (boni christiani), the title of the Perfecti, the spiritual
leaders of the Bogomils and Cathars, is unique in the whole spectrum of medieval
heresies and is typical only of the dualists (Vasilev). Yet, in the records of the
Norwich heresy trials every good man or good woman is a priest. Also that every
good Christian man is a priest also appears, and certain variants, and they also speak
of some people being the most holy and most perfect. Wycliffe confirms this in
Conclusiones Lollardorum. Sometimes what was likely to have been good man is
expanded upon by the recorders either because they did not realise it was the
heretics name for themselves, and they sought a little literary variation, or because
the heretic had sought to explain what he meant by it:
Some held that every good Christian, or a man who was living in charity, was a priest
of God, and this was carried to its logical conclusion by those who held that the true
vicar of Christ was the best man.
John Thomson, Norwich Trials
The word charity (caritas) was interpreted by Cathars as equalling love.

Lollards were like the Cathars in encouraging reading by setting up reading circles.
The inquisitors used possesion of the testaments in the vernacular, or even evidence
of it as proof of heresy, because the Church forbade it.
Norman Tanner notes that the heretics tried at Norwich
were accusing the Church of using magic, thus reversing the roles played in the
trials of witches.
In giving the right of women to become Perfecta (spiritual leader), the Bogomils,
Cathars and Lollards are unique in the Middle Ages for allowing women the same
spiritual function as men. Vasilev concludes:
22
These almost perfect coincidences and astonishing similarities point to the common
roots of Bogomilism and Lollardy. Yet, it is surprising that given the well-studied
problem concerning the views and beliefs of Lollards, there has been no attempt to
trace down their Bogomil-Cathar roots.
Profesor Butler summarises Vasilevs work as distinguishing an official, Churchcontrolled, stagnant, antihuman culture, and an unofficial, folk, and ever-evolving
vernacular streama counter-culture that is both wise and loving, nourished by old
myths and more recent, apocryphal tales, gradually absorbed into the prerenaissance
literature which gave us Dantes Divine Comedy and Langlands Piers Plowman.
In 1960, M A Aston found resemblances between Lollards and Cathars in their social
conditions and dispersal:
Lollards, like Catharists and earlier continental heretics, and like friars themselves,
flourished along the main roads, and found supporters among the trades people of
large towns.
Certainly, the movement across countries and ages produced visible distinctions
between the views of Lollards and Bogomils. Even then there is doubt, as there must
always be when much of the evidence is missing. Vasilev finds some apparent
differences, but does not seem to think deeply about them. Thus Lollards do not
regard the Old Testament as wicked, being the work of Satan, but they do often say
that the New Testament forbids bloodshed. So the Old Testament stands condemned
by the New, as it is full of God, His holy angels or His Chosen People killing people all
over the place often in large numbers.
Bogomil and Cathar Perfecti denied marriage as providing for an entrapment of souls
in the human being thus born in Satans material world, but Lollards did not insist on
sexual abstinence. But nor too did the Perfecti for people who were not perfect! And
the Lollards had the same view in that they denied that the ritual of matrimony in
church was necessary for marriage. Lollards do seem to have rejected the Cathar
taboo on meat, although again, it was for the Perfecti only.
Both Bogomilism and Lollardy involved their followers in cultural activity which was
surprising for the Middle Ages. Catharism on its part was a major creative stream in
the Provenal culture of the twelfth century. Bogomils contributed to the
advancement and propagation of literacy, with schools in most of their communities.
The literacy and creativity that they taught contributed to the spallation of their
culture under the inquisition. People sought compromise, they sought a synthesis out
of the thesis and antithesis of Church and Heresy. Eventually it was realised in
Protestantism.
Among the books mentioned as owned by Lollards, besides non-religious books, and
some of the books of the New Testament, are a book of S John the Evangelist and the
Gospel of Nicodemos, both alluding to books that the Cathars used, but are
non-canonical for the received Churches. Wycliffe translated the latter into English.
Many other marginal books were translated which would have been neglected
otherwise. The influence of the Evangelion Nicodemi on The Vision of Piers
Plowman and the miracle plays confirms this.
23
Vasilev draws attention to the prayer, Pater Noster (Mt 6), which in its Cathar
version ends with the words, For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,
for ever. Amen. This is missing in the Vulgate. C Schmidt, who wrote about the
Cathars in the mid-nineteenth century, thinks the Cathars translated the bible from
the Greek independently of the Vulgate. The Perfecti, as is accepted by many experts,
were often educated in Greek and Hebrew. There is no information that Waldo or his
disciples knew Greek.
When the king of Bohemia married an English princess, the Lollard ideas passed to
that country, then one of the most enlightened in Europe, and, by the preaching of
John Hus, a large part of the nation embraced and developed them. The Hussites
scorned the corrupt priests, monks, and nuns, attacked clerical celibacy, confession,
the eucharist, and the ritual. Two hundred years of war and savage persecution were
needed to suppress them. At one time, most of the nobles of Bohemia were Hussites.
Did the Cathars Fight Back?

The so-called Master of Hungary was a sixty year old ascetic called Jacob, said to
have been a monk. He spoke eloquently in Latin as well as German and French, and
told crowds of shepherds he had been commisioned by the Virgin Mary to summon
them to help S Louis (Louis IX of France) to free the holy sepulchre after the latters
set backs in the Holy Land. The gang he assembled were called the Pastouraux. There
were said to have been sixty thousand of them. This was the Shepherds Crusade.
The Pastouraux worshipped Jacob, and many more followers worshipped the
Pastouraux. Supposedly, anyone who did not venerate them were robbed because
Jacob really led an armed gang of bandits, made up mainly of criminals and
prostitutes, according to the monks who wrote about them. Jacob, in his speeches,
according to the same sources, attacked the clergy, the mendicant orders and the
papacy. He taught his followers the familiar heretical teachings of disregarding the
sacraments as worthless, and regarding the assembly of heretics as being the true
Church. He claimed certain powers, and supposedly married eleven men and a
women, standing for the faithful disciples and either Mary Magdalene or the Virgin
Mary. Together, then, they formed the usual coven. Evidently he took himself to be a
type of living Christ, and people knelt before him, at Amiens, giving up their
belongings to him in apostolic fashion.
Jacob took a group to Paris where he received gifts from the Queen Mother, Blanche,
who was regent while her son was away. There, he dressed as a bishop, taught in
churches and sprinkled holy water. If these are not just monkish inventions, this man
was not a Cathar Perfect, but the Church chroniclers tried always to depict the
heretics as insane megalomaniacs. Perhaps Jacob was. Meanwhile, his followers were
allegedly killing any priests they found in Paris by drowning them in the Seine.
At Tours, the population supported the band in desecrating the host, and humiliating
the Franciscans and Dominicans. At Orleans, the clerics were drowned in the Loire,
and some, who had barricaded themselves into houses, were burnt out, or burnt to
death. It was the hatred of the Pastouraux for priests and the sacrements that made
them popular. At Bourges, Jacob supposedly preached against Jews, killed a public
critic, and had the burghers turn against him. The Queen Mother also abandoned the
24
Pastouraux, and many began to desert.

Finally, Jacob was killed by the burghers, and the rest of the group scattered, though
many were caught and hanged, including some at Bordeaux by Simon de Montforts
English soldiers. The movement looked a lot like a deliberate counter attack by
heretics against the Church, and its main occupation seemed to have been to kill
priests. Another rising of Pastouraux in 1320 was excommunicated by John XXII
then scattered by the Senechal of Beaucaire.
The famous Flagellants of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries fairly come under
the same heading. The world and Church were so corrupt that they expected a speedy
end of them, and they did penance for their sins and those of others. The Fratricelli, a
detachment from the Franciscan Order whom the clerical corruption drove into
heresy, belong to the same period, and were fiercely persecuted.
Self-flagellation seems to have started as a response to the impending millennium
(c 1030) early in the eleventh century by some monastic hermits in Italy. Their idea
was to punish themselves in the hope that God would not. Because Christ had been
scourged, the Flagellant felt like him, and it became a method of inducing this
Christ-like feeling. The Joachite forgery had numbered the year 1260 as the date of
the Parousia, and, in that year thousands of Flagellants turned out in Italy, ravaged as
it had been by civil war, famine and plague, begging the Virgin Mary to intercede with
her son on their behalf. Salimbene, who was a Joachite, reported that the processions
themselves were seen as signs of the dawning spiritual age.
At the year end, the enthusiasm evaporated in Italy but transferred to Germany
where, a year later, the same phenomenon appeared, and evidently organized. The
leaders boasted one of those heavenly messages which listed human sin and
demanded atonementa procession of flagellance for 33 days, matching the
number of years in Christs life, as theologians believed. In Germany, the poor
artisansthe smiths, cobblers, combers, weavers and dyersjoined the processions
and lent them their anti-clerical views, believing that the Christ-like feeling brought
on by the flagellation showed they were being absolved of sin, and were becoming
Christs like the Cathar Perfects. Soon, princes and bishops had to unite in opposition
to the processions.
For over two centuries, Flagellants were common in central and southern Europe, but
whereas in Italy, they were orthodox Catholics, the ultra montanes were heretical.
The German heretics certainly continued underground when necessary, as it often
was, emerging from time to time in response to famine and oppression with the same
uniform, songs and ritual as beforeand the same heavenly letter in justification.
The greatest Flagellant processions were almost 100 years later in 1348-49, triggered
by the Europe wide plague called the Black Death, when a third of all people died.
The Flagellants went in procession before the plague struck, in the hope of being
spared from it. Their uniform was a white smock with a cross before and behind, and
a similarly marked hat or hood. Each group was led by a layman called a Father or
Master who heard confessions and granted absolution.
Flagellation was twice daily in public, and once at night in private for the 33 days,
following a set ritual. If a woman or priest interfered, the ritual had to begin again.
25
The Flagellants saw themselves as martyrs atoning for all human sin, and so the
people saw them, and treated them with every favour. They dipped cloths in their
blood and preserved them as miraculous holy relics.
When the pope finally decided to issue a bull against the Flagellants, he made it plain
that he regarded the majority as simple folk who had been led astray by the heretics.
N Cohn
Yet, Chroniclers (Gerta Abbatum Trudonensium) say explicitly that the German
Flagellants aimed to destroy the Church and its clergy. These various heresies were
part of the counter attack by primitive Christianity against the Churchs earlier
crusadethe Cathar crusade about 150 years beforeagainst it. The Flagellants
repudiated the supernatural authority of the Church. They denied the sacraments.
They claimed the superior direct revelation of the Holy Spirit. Like the Fraticelli, they
thought the Roman Church had ended, but when did it happen? The Flagellant
heretics at Sangerhusen, who called themselves Brethren of the Cross, asserted that
the true revelation had been handed down only through them, having been lost in
Christendom since 343
when the Donation of Western Europe by Constantine to S Sylvester made the
Church a property-owning body.
These Flagellants, therefore, saw themselves as part of a centuries old tradition

opposed to the establishment of the Church. Peter Lucensis, a Spaniard who
belonged to Dolcinos Apostolic Brethren added:
That when poverty was changed from the Church by S Sylvester, then sanctity of life
was taken from the Church, and the Devil entered into the companions of S Sylvester
in this world That there is a double Church, the Spiritual and the Carnal. That the
Spiritual Church is in those men who live in perfect poverty that the Carnal Church
is of those who live in riches and honours such as are the bishops and prelates
of the Church of Rome This Church he says is that carnal Church of which John
speaks in the Revelation, which he calls Babylon.
It sure sounds to be the same heretical root, but these Flagellants were far in distance
and time from Languedoc where the Cathars had tolerated Jews. Cohn says they
sought to please God by killing Jews. God, it seems, had sent the Black Death to kill
Christians for allowing Jews to live with them.
It is curious how followers of the patriarchal God always end up killing other
followers of the same God. A God of love could not have been bent so easily into His
opposite, but the Church never taught the God of Love. Constantine had adopted a
God of War, and the biblical God of war was the tribal totem of the Jewish scriptures
who made no pretence of being loving to anyone, even His own. The Christian God is
never satiated by the blood He is fed, and Christians have never had a defendable
reputation for love or justice.
The Jews who survived fled to the east. The plague was now endemic in Europe,
breaking out at regular intervals, each being accompanied by Flagellant processions.
In 1396, the Flagellants of Spain, the Languedoc and Italy were led by a Dominican,
S Vincent Ferrer.
26
Like the apostolic era of Christianity, they held all their material possessions in
common. John of Leyden (Jan Bockelson) wrote that, come the New Jerusalem, all
things were to be in common, there was to be no private property and nobody was to
do any more work, but simply trust in God. The dream of never working, Cohn
highlights as part of the Roman Stoics legend of the Golden Age, in which, in the
words of Seneca:
No labourers ploughed up the soil, nobody was allowed to mark out or divide the
ground; when men put everything into a common store, and the earth bore all things
more freely because none demanded it.
Heretical sects did refuse to work. The Flagellants of Thuringia in the 1360s, the
Beghards of Cologne in the fourteenth century, the radical Taborites in 1419-1420, all
refused to work, becoming destitute and having to beg for bread for Gods sake.
These were short-lived and unable to bear the weight of hope and expectation that
people tended to place on them. They seemed to be trying to copy the mainstream
heresy from within the Church by reforming it. The generation of the millennium in
southern France initially, then in most of France and the francophone Lowlands, saw
two waves of millennial enthusiasm which carried with them the whole culture, even
the warlords attended the councils and took the oaths. The most radical turned
against the church, rejecting its institutions, substituting as a medium of salvation a
community in which the egalitarianism and mutual love of those committed, replaced
the need for a eucharist at mass. In short, they turned to the alternativeto
Catharism.
Europes misfortune in the Middle Ages was that the leaders of the established
Church saw their opponents as enemies to be annihilated, whether they were
apocalyptic leaders or apostolic evangelists. It is plain enough who were not
Christian among them!
Reference
Georgi Vasilev, Dualist Ideas in the English Pre-Reformation and Reformation
(Bogomil-Cathar Influence on Wycliffe, Tyndale, Langland and Milton), Sofia.
2005
-oOo-
Dr Michael David Magee

Michael D Magee was born in Hunslet, an industrial suburb of Leeds, Yorkshire, in
1941. He attended Cockburn High School in South Leeds. He won a studentship to
the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham, where he graduated with an
honours degree in natural science in 1963. He went on to obtain a PhD degree from
the University of Aston in Birmingham in 1967 and a teaching qualification, a PGCE,
from Huddersfield before it was a university.
He carried out research at the Universities of Aston and Bradford, and at the Wool
27
Industries Research Association, taught in a Further Education College in Devon for

seven years and for ten years was an advisor to the UK government at the National
Economic Development Office in London.
He has written three books, and, mainly in collaboration with Professor S Walker, a
dozen scientific papers on the structure and interactions of small molecules
investigated using microwave radiation. Working for the government he has written
or edited some forty publications on microeconomic issues.
He was brought up by Christian parents but was never indoctrinated into one dogma
and was able from an early age to make his own judgements about the Christian
religion.
http://askwhy.co.uk/index.php
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