With the twelfth century the scene changed ominously. Throughout considerable districts in Languedoc, Manicheanism began to gain such headway that heretics were no longer lynched but protected there. They had become so numerous in the district around Toulouse, and especially in its neighbouring town of Albi, that they began to be called Albigenses. Just when the change took place is hard to say. “Early in the century,” we are told by Lea, “the people of Albi prevented the bishop and a neighbouring abbot from imprisoning certain ‘obstinate heretics.’” And yet as late as 1126 we find the mob at St. Gilles lynching Peter of Bruys, a notorious anti-sacerdotal heretic who had taken it upon himself to show his contempt for Christian symbolism by burning a pile of crosses on Good Friday and roasting meat at the flame. However, this seems to have been the only instance of heretic-lynching in Languedoc. In 1119, Pope Calixtus II, held a council in Toulouse which declared the Albigensian Manicheans excommunicate. Henceforward we begin to get a whole series of councils. Pope Innocent II, presiding over the second General Council of the Lateran in 1139, again excommunicated the Albigenses, and went further by ordering the civil authorities to prosecute them. Only nine years later, Eugenius III, through the Council of Rheims, forbade anyone to give them aid and comfort. Under Alexander III the Council of Tours, in 1163, solemnly cursed all who might give aid and comfort to heretics; and in 1179, the third General Council of the Lateran repeated the curse once more. The need for five Papal Councils in sixty years to repeat one another shows that their successive decrees had not amounted to much in practice. The heresy had continued to flourish. Its missionaries travelled from fair to fair throughout Gascony, the Albigeois, and the Toulousain. Their doctrine was no longer whispered, it was openly stated and seldom denied, for the clergy of the South were too busy enjoying themselves and quarrelling with the laity about property rights to go in much for preaching and theological debate. The wealthy, refined, pleasure-loving society described earlier in this chapter was beginning to see in Albigensianism a means of escaping the clear-cut scheme of faith and morals which irked it. To most of these volatile easy-going people, with their immemorial tradition of civilization stretching back beyond the beginnings of recorded history, heresy may well have seemed like a grateful mist, a twilight serving to blur and soften the clear unmistakable lines of Catholic Christianity. And if to such a people, the life of an Albigensian believer seemed easier and more natural than that of a Catholic layman, on the other hand their self-mortifying eccentrics found in the life of an Albigensian “Perfect” a stricter and more fiercely inhuman rule of conduct than that of any Catholic order. Councils and anathema notwithstanding, the Church continued to lose ground.