Some anti-Jewish movements linked the Jews with lepers. Occupying a
profoundly ambivalent place in medieval society, lepers were both revered and
despised. Saint Louis used to feed the lepers who came to him, and he supported
leprosaria, houses to care for them. Saint Francis was praised for ministering to
lepers and was admired for kissing them on their hands and mouths. Yet at the same
time, lepers were thought to be tainted by horrible sin; they were made to carry a bell
as they moved about to alert everyone to their ominous presence; their rights to
private property were restricted; and, through rituals of expulsion, they were
condemned to live apart from normal people, never “to eat or drink in any company
except that of lepers.”^5 In the south of France in the 1320s, lepers were accused of
horrific crimes: of poisoning the wells and streams, like Jews, to whom they gave
consecrated hosts for their wicked rites. Hauled in by local officials, the lepers were
tortured, made to confess, and then burned.
Only by comparison with lepers does the revulsion against beggars seem mild.
Like leprosy, poverty too was thought to have its social uses. Certainly the
mendicants like the Franciscans and Dominicans, who went about begging, were
understood to be exercising the highest vocation. And even involuntary beggars were
thought (and expected) to pray for the souls of those who gave them alms.
Nevertheless the sheer and unprecedented number of idle beggars led to calls for their
expulsion.
No group, however, suffered social purging more than heretics. Beginning in the
thirteenth century, church inquisitors, aided by secular authorities, worked to find and
extirpate heretics from Christendom. The inquisition was a continuation (and
expansion) of the Albigensian Crusade by other means. Working in the south of
France, the mid-Rhineland, and Italy, the inquisitors began their scrutiny in each
district by giving a sermon and calling upon heretics to confess. Then the inquisitors
granted a grace period for heretics to come forward. Finally, they called suspected
heretics and witnesses to inquests, where they were interrogated:
Asked if she had seen Guillaume [who was accused of being a heretic]
take communion [at Mass] or doing the other things which good and
faithful Christians are accustomed to do, [one of Guillaume’s neighbors]
responded that for the past twelve years she had lived in the village of
Ornolac and she had never seen Guillaume take communion.^6
