Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/127

 RESULTS OF THE INQUISITION. JH of property illegally held, this was but a smaU fraction of the whole. To assist his Parlement in settling the innumerable cases which arose, he ordered, in 1260, the charters and letters of great- est importance to be sent to Paris. Those of each of the six sene- chaussees filled a coffer, and the six coffers were deposited in the treasury of the Sainte-Chapelle. In this process of absorption the case of the extensive Viscounty of Fenouilledes may be taken as an illustration of the zeal with which the Inquisition co-operated m securing the political results desired by the crown. Fenouil- ledes had been seized during the crusades and given to Nunez San- cho of EoussiUon, from whom it passed, through the King of Aragon, into the hands of St. Louis. In 1264 Beatrix, widow of Hugues, son of the former Viscount Pierre, appUed to the Parle- ment for her rights and dower and those of her children Imme diately the inquisitor. Pons de Poyet, commenced a prosecution against the memory of Pierre, who had died more than twenty years previously in the bosom of the Church, and had been buried with the Templars of Mas Deu, after assuming the religious habit and receiving the last sacraments. He was condemned for havin.. held relations with heretics, his bones were dug up and burned" and the Parlement rejected the claim of the daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Pierre, the eldest of these, in 1300, made a claim for the ancestral estates, and Boniface VIII. espoused his quarrel with the object of giving trouble to Philippe le Bel; but, thou<.h the affair was pursued for some years, the inquisitorial sentence Held good. It was not only the actual heretics and their descend- ants who were dispossessed. The land had been so deeply tinct- ured with heresy that there were few indeed whose ancestors could not be shown, by the records of the Inquisition, to have in- curred the fatal taint of associating with them.* (Do*a7xXXI^'.'^'■ « '^' '"' ^"-Archives de Vt.,oU de Beziers Doat'x™!.? ■" ^"^° ' ^'™ ^- ^'^^'•-^O— Le^ Olim I. 580.- Coll. The e.xtent of the change of the proprietorship is well illustrated by a list of the lands and rents confiscated for heresy to the profit of Philippe de Montfort Senegats, Rabastam, and Lavaur. The knights and gentlen.cn ^nd peasants thus stripped are all named, with their offences-one died a heretic, another w herefcated on h.s death-bed, a third was condcnaned for heresy, 'and a fourth