Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/160

 ^^ FRANCE. of his intervention in the case of Jean Langlois, priest of St. Cris- pin, who, when celebrating mass, June 3, 1491, horrified his flock by casting on the floor and trampling the consecrated wme and host. On his arrest he gave as his reason that the body and blood of Christ were not in the elements, and as he stubbornly refused to recant, he expiated his error at the stake. Similar was the fate of Aymon Picard, who, at the feast of St. Louis in the Samte-Cha- pelle, August 25, 1503, snatched the host from the celebrant and cast it in pieces on the floor, and obstinately declined to abjure. AU this was significant of the time coming when the Inquisition would be more necessary than ever.* The present degradation which it shared with the rest of the Church in the constantly growing supremacy of the State is mani- fested by a commission issued in 1485, by Frere Antoine de Clede, appointing a vicar to act for him in Eodez and Yabres. In this document he styles himself Inquisitor of France, Aquitame, Gas- cony, and Languedoc, deputed by the Holy See and the Parlement. The two bodies are thus equal sources of authority, and the ap- pointment by the pope would have been insuflicient without the confirmation bv the royal court. How contemptible, indeed, the Inquisition had become, even in the eyes of ecclesiastics, is brought instructively before us in a petty quarrel between the Inquisitor Eaymond Gozin and his Dominican brethren. When he succeeded Frere Gaillard de la Eoche, somewhere about 1516, he found that the house of the Inquisition at Toulouse had been stripped of its furniture and utensils by the friars of the Dominican convent. He made a reclamation, and some of the articles were restored; but the friars subsequently demanded them back, and on his re- fusal procured from the General Master instructions to the vicar, under which the latter proceeded to extremities with him, whoUy disregarding his appeal to the pope, though he finaUy, in 1520, succeeded in obtaining the interventibn of Leo X. Imagmation could scarcely furnish a more convincing proof of decadence than this exhibition of the successor of Bernard de Caux and Bernard Gui vainly endeavoring to defend his kitchen gear from the rapa- cious hands of his brethren.f 808-18, 319-20, 323, 347. t Bremond, ap. Ripoll IV. 373.-Ripoll IV. 390.
 * Mfemoires de Jacques du Clercq, Liv. iii. ch. 43.-D'Argentr&, op. cit. L ii.