Popularly they were held to have certain distinguishing characteristics--ears furred like those of bears and destitute of the lower lobe. That they had stinking breath, and white granular spots under the skin in parts of the body, indicating undeveloped leprosy. In parish registers they were always designated in entries of baptisms and marriages and burials as Cagots or Capots. F. Michel, in 1847, published a work upon them. He went through the Pyrenees, and recorded how many families of Cagots remained, and where they resided. The theory of their origin as propounded by him was that they were descended from the Spanish Christians who were driven over the Pyrenees by the Moors, and whom the natives received with scant hospitality, and continued to look upon as intruders. One reason for the adoption of this wild theory was that in ancient documents they are frequently called Crestiaas. Undoubtedly refugees from Spain did settle in parts of the Pyrenees, but there exists no evidence to show that they were looked down upon. Moreover, Cagots were found also in Brittany, and Michel’s theory does not fit in with this fact. Now the word _cagot_ is comparatively modern. A Cagot in old documents is called _Capot_ or _Crestiaa_. Capot comes from _caput mortuum_, a legal expression used of one who is outside the pale of the law; the word is still employed in Germany for what is broken and of no further use. _Es ist caput._ The original Cagots were probably lepers, gradually recruited from the native population. A religious service was said over a man on whom were discovered the marks of the disease. It was a form of funeral. Earth was cast upon him, and he was declared to be legally and socially dead. Precisely the same regulations were applied to the Cagots that were made for lepers. They were forbidden to spit in the roads, and to walk in them barefooted. If constrained to handle anything that had to be used by those who were sound, they must wear gloves. They might not marry out of their caste or company. They were relegated to live and be buried apart from all others. When we consider this identity of regulation, as also that the Cagots are spoken of by all old writers as quasi-lepers, as that in popular belief they were held to have on them marks of undeveloped leprosy; when, further, we see that their old designation comes from _caput mortuum_, I think it is hard not to arrive at the conclusion that the Cagots were the descendants of sequestrated communities of lepers. But such is the recuperative power of Nature, in the healthy surroundings of the mountains, in its pure air and in wholesome diet, that the descendants of the lepers in course of time shook off the disease and became sound and robust men and women. The Church in the eighteenth century made an effort to break down the wall of separation, the occasion for the existence of which had ceased.