These particulars are to be found already in the earliest scholarly history devoted to the witch-trials, that by Wilhelm Gottlieb Soldan, published in German in 1843;(1) they are given very fully in Joseph Hansen’s great history, published in German in 1900;(2) and they are still to be found in the most recent histories by the most reputable scholars. They are nevertheless false from start to finish: none of these things really happened. The entire story can be shown to rest on three fabrications, dating respectively from the fifteenth, sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. As what is involved amounts to a major revision of the history of the witch-hunt, the matter calls for detailed exposition — and if detailed expositions can sometimes be tedious, this one has at least the attraction of the bizarre.
Hansen’s influence on twentieth-century historians has been so great that it is reasonable to start with him. He mentions the earliest case in three separate passages, the most striking of which can be translated as follows:
(In the year 1275) the Dominican Hugues de Beniols (or de Bajol), who was at that time inquisitor at Toulouse, carried out in the town a persecution of heretics and sorcerers, in the course of which a widely respected woman, Angela de la Barthe, was denounced by her neighbours as suspect of having dealings with the Devil. The 56-year-old woman confessed to the judge that for many years a demon had visited her and had intercourse with her every night. From this intercourse was born a monster, wolf above, serpent below, and human in between. She fed the monster on small children, making nocturnal excursions to catch these. After two years the monster vanished. The woman, who was obviously mentally deranged, was handed over by the inquisitor to the secular arm. On the orders of the seneschal she was burned in the square of St Stephen at Toulouse, along with several other individuals who had confessed to being magicians, necromancers and diviners....(3)
As his sole source for this story Hansen gives the Histoire de l’Inquisition en France, by the Baron de Lamothe-Langon, published in Paris in 1829. The relevant passage in Lamothe-Langon, however, turns out to contain no primary source but merely another summary of the story, accompanied by references to two earlier works: the Histoire ecclésiastique et civile de la ville et diocèse de Carcassonne, by the Augustinian monk T. Bouges, Paris, 1741; and the Chronicle of Bardin.(4) On examination these two sources melt into one: Bouges has simply translated the story of Angela de la Barthe from a chronicle written around 1455 by a councillor of the parlement of Toulouse called Guillaume Bardin.(5)And that chronicle is the earliest known source of the story.
But the chronicle of Guillaume Bardin is highly unreliable. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it was trusted and used by many historians; but in 1742, the very year after the publications of Bouges’s history, the great scholar Dom Joseph Vaissete printed it in the fourth volume of his Histoire générale de Languedoc, and at the same time entered a caveat. In his view a chronicle so manifestly inaccurate might well be a fabrication, concocted by some unknown impostor in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. And although Vaissete went too far — Bardin’s authorship is not seriously in doubt — his instinct was sound. When Auguste Molinier came to re-edit Bardin at the beginning of the present century, as part of a new edition of the Histoire générale, he too insisted that the chronicler was careless, even somewhat unscrupulous, and not above falsifying his documentary sources.(6)
These strictures certainly apply to the passage concerning Angela de la Barthe, for this contains a ruinous blunder. Bardin says nothing of the inquisitor Hugues de Beniols: that detail was added by Lamothe-Langon, who took the name from a standard list of the inquisitors for Toulouse.(7) Instead, Bardin attributes the whole persecution not to the Inquisition but to a seneschal of Toulouse called Pierre de Voisins; and he goes on: “I have had in my hands, and have read, the sentence pronounced by the seneschal, in which all these things are laid out.”(8) But it is known that Pierre de Voisins had ceased to be seneschal of Toulouse by late 1254, and was dead long before 1275;(9) so Bardin cannot possibly have read such a sentence.
The spuriousness of the story is confirmed by the silence of the contemporary sources. The sole contemporary mention of a witch-trial around 1275 says simply that the royal judge of Carcassonne, Barthelemi Dupuy, in 1274 tried a woman accused of simple sorcery.(10) Perhaps this brief comment prompted Bardin to his flight of fancy; but however that may be, it is certain that Angela de la Barthe never existed. And indeed one might have guessed as much from the details of the story itself: the case has no real parallel in any recorded witch-trial, early or late, but represents, rather, an amalgam of various ideas about witches and about monstrous births, such as would have been familiar to a fifteenth-century lawyer like Bardin.
Yet the story as given by Hansen is not entirely the work of Bardin. It was the Baron de Lamothe-Langon who turned Angela into a lady of rank and gave her the age of fifty-six; who transformed her judge from a seneschal into an inquisitor; who located the place of her execution as the square of St Stephen at Toulouse. And one may reasonably ask on what authority this nineteenth-century writer made these additions to the traditional story — had he some source at his disposal other than Bardin and Bouges? The answer is that his source and authority lay simply in his own fertile brain. In 1823, six years before he published his Histoire de l’Inquisition, Lamothe-Langon had helped edit a Biographie toulousaine. The entry on the fictitious Angela is clearly from his pen — and it contains, in addition to all these new “facts”, the curious sentence: “The chronicler Bardin adds that the sentence pronounced on this insane woman was still extant in his time. And truly it is to be found in the archives of the Parlement (of Toulouse); all these facts are given there at great length....”(11) So, like Bardin before him, Lamothe-Langon claims first-hand knowledge of a document which, as we have seen, never existed at all. As for other sources, not a word.
That is only the beginning of the story. The notion of the witches’ sabbat, in particular, is supposed to have been generated by the persecution of the Cathars and to have reached its full development as that persecution drew to its close: by 1330-5 the inquisitors at Toulouse and Carcassonne are said to have been trying women on charges of attending the sabbat and of practising Devil-worship as an expression of the Dualist religion. Briefly mentioned by Soldan, these trials are given fifteen pages of Hansen’s history.(12) More importantly, in the massive collection of original sources which he published to accompany his history he printed what purport to be records of the trial proceedings, translated into French.(13) In this case the whole of the material is taken from Lamothe-Langon’s Histoire de l’Inquisition.