protector in the throne. With the advice of his council an inves- tigation was ordered, and confided to the Bishops of Beziers and Maguelonne, but the inquisitors arrogantly and persistently re- fused to allow the secrets of their oiRce to be invaded. This was not calculated to remove popular disquiet, and in 1301 PhiUppe sent to Languedoc two officials armed with supreme powers, un- der the name of Reformers. As the royal authority extended and established itself, special deputies for the investigation and correction of abuses were frequently despatched to the provinces. In the present case those who came to Languedoc perhaps had for their chief business the arrest of the Bishop of Pamiers, ac- cused of treasonable practices, but the colorable pretext for their mission was the correction of inquisitorial abuses. One of them, Jean de Pequigny, Yidame of Amiens, was a man of high char- acter for probity and sagacity; the other was Richard :N'epveu, Archdeacon of Lisieux, of whom we hear little in the following years, except that he quietly slipped into the vacant episcopate of Beziers. He must have done his duty to some extent, how- ever, for Bernard Gui tells us that he died in 1309 of leprosy, as a judgment of God for his hostility to the Inquisition.[1]
The Reformers established themselves at Toulouse, where Foulques de Saint-Georges had been inquisitor since Michaelmas, 1300, and speedily gathered much damaging testimony against hmi, for he was accused not only of unduly torturing persons for purposes of extortion, but of gratifying his lusts by arresting women whose virtue he failed otherwise to overcome. Thither flocked representatives of Albi, with the wives and children of the prisoners, beseeching and imploring the representatives of the
- ↑ MSS. Bib. Xat, fonds latin, No. 4270, fol. 163.-Gmllel. Nangiac. Contin ann. 1303.—Grandes Chroniques, T. V. pp. 156-7. —Girard de Fracheto Chron. contin. ann. 1203 (D. Bouq. XXL 23).—Vaissette, IV. I12.-Bern. Guidon. Hist. Fund. Conv. (Martene Ampl. Coll. V. 514). When, long years afterwards, in 1319, Bernard Délicieux was carried from Avignon to Toulouse for the trial which led to his death, one of the convoy a notary named Arnaud de Nogaret, chanced to allude to a report that Pequiny had been bribed with one thousand livres to oppose the Inquisition. Then the old mans temper flashed forth in defence of his departed friend—"Thou liest in the throat: Vidame was an honest man!"-MSS. Bib. Nat., fonds latin, No. 4270, fol. 263.
