false.[1] The judgement, we may be sure, was the more
exemplary on account of their previous favour in high
places. The persons whose intimacy with the arraigned
canons might seem to commit them too deeply to their
errors, attested their own innocence by the savage joy
with which they heard the sentence, the queen, according to one account, plucked out the eye of her old confessor as he passed from the hall ; and thirteen of
the number, two others recanting, perished at the stake.
The Acts of the synod of Orleans suggest no clue as to
the origin of this sect. Among contemporaries
of Chabannais alone describes it as Manichean. He
traces it to the teaching of a certain Rusticus or was he
only a rustic ? of Pengord. Rodulph Glaber, on the
contrary, says it was imported by a woman from Italy
Both these writers, however, betray too plainly their
ignorance of the characteristics and motives of the heretics
for us to be at liberty to accept their testimony without
corroboration. If we examine the indictment against
them, we find a variety of articles shewing kinship with
the Paulician beliefs. They denied, it was alleged, all
the facts of the human life of Christ, the miracles of his
birth, his passion, and his resurrection; r all miracles,
they said, were madness, delir amenta. They assailed
doctrines not less closely bound up with the life of
the church, s the regenerating virtue of baptism, and the
presence of the body and blood of the Saviour in the
eucharistic species ; they denounced the vanity of in
voking saints, the superfluity of the Christian works of
piety. Rodulph adds that they held the universe to be
eternal and without author, and if the specification be
true it would place the canons of Orleans in a position
by themselves ; but the tenet is little in keeping with
- ↑ Milman s remark that they were, if their accusers speak true, profligates rather than sectarians (he enters into no detail in the matter) may be contrasted with the judicial impartiality of the Benedictine editors of the acts of the synod, p. 538 n., from whom I have borrowed the parallel in the text. Gibbon has given a lively picture of the correspond - ing passages in the history of the ancient church, ch. xvi, vol. 2. 155 sq.
