The churches of Languedoc were not fortified for nothing. Speaking of the bandits, Lea remarks that the chroniclers, who were themselves mostly Churchmen, “... insist that their blows ... fell heavier on church and monastery than on the castle of the seigneur or the cottage of the peasant.” Naturally, since they would get little plunder from the cottage and many hard knocks from the castle. “... They ridiculed the priests as singers, and it was one of their savage sports to beat them to death while mockingly begging their intercession, ... ‘Sing for us, you singer, sing for us’; and the culmination of their ... sacrilege was ... their casting out and trampling on the holy wafers whose precious pyxes they eagerly seized.”[28] Exactly how much connection Albigensianism had with disorder we cannot say. On the face of it, such teaching tended rather to non-resistance. But in an age so direct, so extreme in brutality as well as in tenderness (as for brutality in speech a leading Albigensian argument against transubstantiation was that it involved the excretion of the body of Christ into latrines), in such an age, I say, it is improbable that the heretics greatly disapproved of anyone who attacked their enemies, the Churchmen. Even assuming that the godless mercenary-turned-bandit was not, strictly speaking, a heretic at all, he was certainly favoured by the atmosphere of heresy. As the twelfth century neared its close Albigensianism must have seemed “the coming thing” in Languedoc. Although we hear of none of the greatest nobles of the region as having been “hereticated,” yet many individuals among their immediate families had been, especially among the women. In general, the heretics were enthusiastic and the Catholics uncertain and troubled. The Orthodox were still able (as in the affair of Mauran) to win “test cases,” but they must have felt that their hold was slipping. From the point of view of those resolute to suppress heresy, the only real gain of the whole twelfth century was that both the canon and the civil laws on the subject had become more defined. Even as late as the middle of the century, we find St. Bernard calling the burning of heretics “excessive cruelty,” and favouring imprisonment as a maximum punishment. The heresy made its only appearance in England in 1166. Henry II, the very man whom we have seen so angry against Becket as to threaten to turn Mohammedan, seems to have felt free to take a line of his own. He had them stripped to the waist, flogged, branded on the forehead, and turned adrift, strictly forbidding everyone to give them any aid and comfort whatsoever. This was effective enough in its way, as they must have soon died from hunger and exposure, but the point is that there seems to have been no recognized procedure to be followed. This want had been partly met, in the last two decades of the century, by three laws.