The charges of all manner of vices raised against the Albigeois by monkish chroniclers ought naturally to be received with great caution. Sometimes even these bear unwilling testimony to the general purity of their manners. It is said that on one occasion Folquet, the fanatical Bishop of Toulouse, asked a knight recently converted to Catholicism, why he and his friends did not drive the heretics from the country. ‘It is impossible,’ was the answer; ‘we have grown up amongst them, our friends and relations are of them, and we know that they lead honest lives.’ It is, however, by no means improbable that the exaggerated asceticism of their moral code frequently led to secret vice and hypocrisy. The anecdote just related may at the same time give the reader an idea of the power and extension of the Provençal heresy, about the beginning of the thirteenth century, the period which chiefly concerns us here. It proves, and we know from other sources, that the sect was by no means limited to the lower orders. We hear, for instance, of a great teacher of the Albigeois, by name Guillabert de Castres, who had many followers amongst the highest nobility of Southern France. At one of his religious meetings, in 1204, he received amongst his flock five high-born ladies, one of them the sister of Count Raimon Roger of Foix, one of the most powerful lords of the country, of whom we shall hear again. The ladies, the old account runs, surrendered themselves to God and the Gospel. They consented to abstain from flesh, eggs, and cheese; the use of oil and fish, on the other hand, was conceded to them. They also promised never to take an oath nor to speak an untruth. Vows of perfect chastity, and of adherence to their creed at the risk of their lives, were further conditions of their reception amongst the faithful. The Count of Foix, and many knights and citizens, are said to have witnessed this conversion, and there is little doubt that the former himself followed, or perhaps had preceded, his sister’s example. But the same is not by any means certain of Raimon VI., Count of Toulouse, the champion of the national and religious freedom of Southern France. There is little evidence with regard to him of even an inclination towards the doctrinal views of the heretics, and he died a faithful son of the Catholic Church, although she refused him her comfortings in his last hours, and a grave after death. But it is just this orthodoxy of his dogmatical opinions which makes his position in the struggle so interesting. He is an almost unique instance in the middle ages of a strict adherent, nay a martyr, to religious toleration.