Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/102

84 took root among the obscurest and rudest orders of society, in the ignorant villages of Lombardy or in the low suburbs of the French or Flemish trading towns. An enthusiast, generally an Italian, might stir up the common people and expose them to the vengeance of the church: such were the victims of catholic zeal at Toulouse, at Arras, Cambray, and Liège, in the course of the eleventh century. But the influence rarely as yet extended deeper into society, as when, in the case just alluded to, the heretics (here they were clergy as well as laymen) enjoyed the alliance of the countess of Montforte. In one single instance, if its source be not wrongly traced, we find a whole religious foundation in an important town, a widely frequented clerical school, pervaded by the dangerous current.

Perhaps the most singular fact in the history of these canons of Saint Cross at Orleans is the silent and unsuspected way in which their sect grew. A member of it had been dead three years before his character was discovered. One of the two leaders, Stephen, had been confessor to the queen of France; he and his colleague Lisoius, or Lisieux, were familiars of the court and of the king. The very council which condemned them admits that they were distinguished among all for wisdom, surpassing in acts of holiness, bountiful in almsgiving. At length their opinions were detected, and a synod convened to examine them. They were charged with nameless atrocities in their secret meetings, calumnies of the same class as those with which the early Christians were wont to insult the heretics of their day, and possibly as