This book examines the beliefs and lived religion of men and women attached to the dualist Christian sect known as Catharism in the Languedoc region of southern France between the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Its main sources are the interview records of mendicant inquisitors charged with the identification and elimination of heterodoxy. The ordained ministers of the Cathar sect – called ‘good men’ and ‘good women’ by sympathisers, ‘heretics’ by the inquisitors – are not its principal concern, however. Instead its primary focus is on the large number of non-ordained men and women who made up the majority of its membership.

A great deal of material has been written about the Languedocian Cathars. Many of these studies focus on the theology of the sect, on its rituals, or on the careers of its leaders. Others have mapped the history of the movement in Languedoc from its emergence there in the mid-eleventh century to its gradual dwindling at the hands of orthodox persecutors. Catharism also plays a large part in the tourist industry in the modern région of Languedoc-Roussillon, whose Pays Cathare road signs will be familiar to any modern tourist. There are at least two series of bandes dessinées – comic books – devoted to the Cathars, and they have recently appeared in UK households in Kate Mosse's Labyrinth series of novels, and its television adaptation.

William, Peter and Raymond waited in the cemetery of Ax. It was a pitch-dark night in late summer 1311, and it was raining. They had been there for some time. The men had just begun to talk amongst themselves when the guide they had been waiting for arrived, leading a man. ‘Well, here he is’, she said, ‘– go! … but don't take the Bath road; go by the Old Town so that no-one will see you.’

Taking her advice, the trio left with their charge. They journeyed on into the night, sleeping when they could go no further beneath the trees of a mountainside wood. The following day they travelled on once more, arriving at Coustassa late in the evening. They were tired from the journey, but their new companion stayed up in the room he had been given by their host and was visited by around six of the locals. The travellers did not have much time to rest that night. After midnight, they rose once more and begun the final leg of their journey to Arques, where they arrived as dawn was breaking. Their two-day journey had covered around sixty miles.

The three men each had different reasons for participating in this strange quest. William Escaunier – who had begun his journey alone – had come to seek out their charge, the good man Prades Tavernier. Prades had been summoned to administer the consolamentum to William's mother, Gaillarde, who was nearing death.

In 1234, the six-year-old Isarn of Villeneuve had his first encounter with the good men. He had gone with his mother to visit the house of his grandfather William, who was dying. Amongst the crowd of friends, family and neighbours who had gathered around the sickbed had been two men unfamiliar to the young boy. The strangers – whom Isarn would later identify as heretics – were performing a ritual blessing to purify William's spirit and guarantee it a place in paradise. Quite a crowd had gathered, though whether they had come to witness the rite or to pay their respects is not clear. In any case, all those present had ‘adored’ the two men, bending their knees before them and petitioning them to pray to God. In the account he later gave of that day, Isarn himself did not have much contact with the two – he could not in fact remember whether he had adored or not. Later that same year his contact with heretical preachers was briefly renewed: he was sent to them by his mother, bearing gifts of bread and wine. These two encounters, it seems, were the limit of his contact.

Twelve years later, in March in 1246, Isarn was called to appear at Toulouse before the inquisitors Bernard of Caux and Jean of Saint-Pierre, and to recount his contact with the good men. It was then that he described for his interrogators what they would probably have seen as tentative childhood steps into heresy.

On the feast day of St Denis 1273, Durand of Rouffiac testified at Toulouse before the inquisitor Ranulph of Plassac and a panel of three witnesses. A scribe recorded his testimony. The inquisitor had a pre-prepared list of questions for Durand, based upon a catalogue of jovial anti-clericalisms that had been sent to him and his colleagues earlier. It did not take Plassac long to get Durand to confess – he admitted scorning the Eucharist, questioning the existence of the soul and advocating usury. Here, it seems, was someone who enjoyed saying the unsayable. There was little substance to his utterances, though. Durand was no evangelist, and when we read his claim that he had not really meant what he said, there seems little reason for scepticism.

The inquisitor was not quite so trusting. The following day, Plassac asked Durand again about a report that he had questioned divine power – something he had previously denied. This time, a different story came out:

Picture the scene. It is some time in the late twelfth century, and we are in the French Pyrenees. In the spa town of Ax-les-Thermes, Arnold Weaver, a doctor and sometime notary from nearby Lordat, is in the square. He is approached by an older man, who looks to be in his fifties. It is his father-in-law Peter, another notary. There is tension in the air. ‘Arnold,’ Peter says, ‘you are not on good terms with me, or with your wife Guillemette, my daughter. You are harsh and cruel [to her], and you're doing this against Scripture, which teaches that a man should be peaceful, gentle and agreeable.’ Arnold will have none of this: ‘It's usually your daughter's fault,’ he tells Peter. ‘She is bad-tempered and a gossip.’ Peter seems to have no answer, and the conversation takes a surprising lurch. ‘Arnold,’ Peter interjects, ‘it says this in the Gospel of St John, “In the beginning was the word” …’. The subsequent exchange on the interpretation of scripture and the quality of each other's Latin is entertaining, but Guillemette does not come up again, and so we shall leave them as they walk on out of the town.

This brief story, which began Arnold's testimony before bishop-inquisitor Jacques Fournier in December 1321, offers a glimpse into the workings of a fourteenth-century marriage. The exchange reveals that, in Peter's mind at least, a married couple should be on good terms, live peaceably and that a husband should be gentle and kind.

Dinner was not going well in the household of Peter Marty, blacksmith of Junac, and his two sons. ‘Unless you shut up’, Arnold Marty told his father, ‘one of these days you're going to get your block knocked off.’ Enraged by this insolence, Peter picked up the salt cellar from the table and hurled it at his son. Restrained by his friend and dining companion, Arnold could only reply with more thinly veiled threats. ‘You're no son of mine,’ retorted the senior Marty, picking up the bench upon which he was sitting and throwing that too. Arnold beat a hasty retreat from the table and the house.

‘Afterwards’, recorded the scribe in 1323, as Peter's other son Bernard gave evidence before the tribunal of Pamiers, ‘there was for a long time hatred between the witness's father and his brother.’ The row had begun when Peter had challenged his adolescent sons about their late nights and early morning returns. In fact, the younger men had been behaving conscientiously (if not safely or legally) as chaperones, guides and watchmen for Cathar ministers. Fiery tempers and generational religious conflict – would that all deposition records were as arresting.

In many ways, youth is a more problematic category than childhood, not least because it is harder to define and to identify. Our concern is primarily with the sociological phenomenon ‘youth’, rather than with the biological and legal period of adolescence, which is often defined more narrowly.