Jewels of French History Books, The Lauragais Story

By Hugh Nicklin

A new history book for France that examines the commercially and strategically important region of the Lauragais, sometimes known as the 'Land of Cockaigne' in reference to a time of Pastel and the flourishing woad industry that once existed there.

The Lauragais lies to the south east of Toulouse and this history of the region is aimed primarily at both the expats and the huge number of tourists that live in or visit the region respectively. This is an opportunity for them to truly discover the region and understand the significant role that the Lauragais played in the history of France.

There are any number of cock-ups, catastrophes and conspiracies that mark the 5000 year history of the Lauragais. It has been the heartland of Catharism and the home of Pierre Paul Riquet, the pioneering genius behind what is now a UNESCO World Heritage Centre, the 'Canal du Midi', an icon of European industrialisation. The area suffered at the hands of the Vandals, the Inquisition and the Gestapo, and has profited enormously on the proceeds of wheat, woad and airbuses, to the music of its troubadours. This is a book to make you cry and laugh out loud in turns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hugh Nicklin
• Release date: Jun 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9791090730229

Hugh Nicklin

Hugh Nicklin is a retired former History teacher living in UK. He taught in state and private schools in the UK and India. Recently returned from 11 year residence in France, where he wrote two History books for general readers (both in English and French editions) and two pantomimes for 11 year olds in a French primary school, who he helped to perform them. Married to Averelle, a better drama producer, housewife and parent. Hugh Nicklin est prof d'histoire retraite qui habitait en Languedoc avec sa femme Averelle pendant onze ans. Il enseignait dans les écoles privées et de l'état en Angleterre et en Inde. Pendant son séjour en France il a aussi écrit deux 'pantomimes' (pièces dramatiques et humoristiques) pour les enfants de l'école primaire de Pieusse 11300.

Book preview

Preface

The best I can hope for is that the reader will have as much fun reading this book as I had writing it. Thanks are due to Mr Jonathan Veale, who explained how I should become rich beyond my wildest dreams by writing it, to M. Robert Macé who lent me his complete, indexed set of ‘Couleur Lauragais’, Mr Brian Stephens who marshalled the electrons, to readers of my Limoux book who reported that it had made them laugh out loud, and to my wife Averelle who made the picnics and did the navigating on dozens of trans-Lauragais journeys of discovery.

Hugh Nicklin

Cailhavel

April 2012

A Note on Copyright:

All the pictures without a specific mention were taken by me. The majority of the rest came from Wikimedia Commons, one of those modern resources which make a book like this possible. Wikimedia material is indicated thus:

WPD = ‘Wikimedia Public Domain’ – i.e. Wikimedia Commons say that its copyright has expired; and CCA = Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Details of the authors where known are recorded on the page of Wikimedia Commons which contains the picture. The Cover Picture shows Diane de Poitiers, Lauragais property owner and mistress of King Henry II of France.

CL refers to Couleur Lauragais, whose directors kindly gave permission for me to use their basic map of the Lauragais and to vary it for use in different places in the text. Three special cases are the pictures of the two politicians Sarraut and Bayrou, for which I thank the Archives de Sénat, the picture of Jean Mistler for which I thank the former pupils’ organisation of Sorèze, and the picture of the ‘Confrérie of the Cassoulet’, for which I thank their Grand Chamberlain.

Table of Contents

1 Crocodiles and Sandstorms (to 200 BC)

The broad highway which is the A61 motorway is thick with ghosts. For those who have eyes to see them, there are Neanderthals at Naurouze and Romans at Renneville; Cathars at Castelnaudary and barbarians at Bram; assassins at Avignonet, fanatics at Fanjeaux, virgins at Villefranche and bigamists at Baziège. Let me show you how to see them...

First you must know that even the wide flat plain and the peaceful blue ridges have been through hell to get here. For 50 million years Spain has been crashing into France – the edges of the two are bruised, and the swelling is the Pyrenees. The land that lay to the north was lifted up on that swelling, and in it lay the fossils of dinosaurs which had died in the extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period, and the crocodile bones are still there on the Montagne Noire, the most easterly of the ‘blue ridges’.

The rain washed vast quantities of alluvial soil (called ‘molasse’) off the Pyrenees and north down into the Lauragais. Then the Mediterranean Sea (not for the first time) dried out, a meteorite hit Siberia and the whole thing entered an appalling Ice Age. There was no water and no vegetation, and the ‘molasse’ reverted to sand with a few stones mixed in. It was the Sahara desert with pebbles in, and the winds began to howl.

In a piece of geological slapstick, the underlying rock split along two lines and collapsed to form a rift valley between present-day Avignonet and Villefranche. This created one of the great European routeways, (that’s the A61) but there was more to come. The winds whistled through the valley like a blow-pipe, creating terrible sandstorms and blasting the sandy soil away leaving huge depressions called ‘wind-holes’ to the east and north of Castelnaudary and leaving smooth rippling sand-dunes everywhere else. Near Mas St Puelles you can still pick up ‘dreikanter’, pieces of stone which have been sand-blasted into a triangular shape by the storms.

When at last it rained again, the fertile alluvial soil clothed itself in vegetation. The plant-life stabilised the sand-dunes and coloured them green. There wasn’t much rain, and what there was created little streams trickling among the green dunes and making the bottom of the ‘wind-holes’ into bogs. With its wide valleys, its blue ridges and rolling back country, the Lauragais was born.

Ice Ages came and went, and the ‘men’ from Tautavel crossed and recrossed the Pyrenees more than once before dying out. About 28,000 years ago, bears roamed the Montagne Noire (perhaps polishing off the last Neanderthals just as homo sapiens was inventing the first calendars).

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Around 400,000 years ago, when the Mediterranean had filled up again and the climate had warmed, a group of small mammals walked upright through the Lauragais. They came from Tautavel near Perpignan, looking for ‘a better ‘ole to go to’. They were not quite homo sapiens, but evolutionarily close. Finding good caves in the Dordogne they painted pictures on the walls.

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Most of homo sapiens was not up to calendars yet, and was still hunting and gathering, and 18,000 years ago a group came over from the Alps into the Lauragais. DNA studies show that they were from the snappily named ‘haplogroup’ R1b1c10. They found good caves at Peche Merle to the north of the Lauragais, and at Mas d’Azil to the south of it. The warmth of these caves was crucial, as the Last Ice Age began around 18,000 years ago. In Peche Merle they whiled away time by painting human hands and decorating them with spots.

Around 15,000 years ago the last ice shelf receded. Flourishing homo sapiens began to compete for land, and the Lauragais may have seen combat for the first time about 13,000 years ago when, it is said, warfare was invented.

At some point between 6000 and 4000 BC homo sapiens made a great leap forward in learning to cultivate land. Agriculture liberated the species from nomadic life, and permanent settlements could be established. Instead of getting up every morning not knowing where you would sleep the following night (because it depended where the reindeer herd took you), you could now start making a particular place warm, dry and ‘homely’ permanently, and give proper attention to your calendar. While you were doing this your wife, who had been doing the gathering, noticed what happens to plants over time, and learned how to manage their growth. Herding animals and growing cereals was the result. The ‘Neolithic (‘New Stone’) Age’ had arrived.

Climate change pushed these ‘Neolithic’ farmers north-west from Iraq, and it was not long before they arrived in the Lauragais. Next time you fly in to Toulouse Blagnac from the east, look to your right before landing, and just after crossing the Garonne you will be looking down at the site of the Neolithic village at St Michel de Touch, dated at 3430 BC. Neolithic axes found at Baziège and Ayguesvives confirm that their owners got to Toulouse via the Lauragais. The DNA says they came from Iraq via the Balkans. It was goodbye, haplogroup R1b1c10, and hello, haplogroup J2: I expect they had more interesting names for themselves.

J2 knew about agriculture, and soon picked out the Lauragais as a place where grain would grow well. This was not in the boggy valley bottoms, but on the great rolling hillsides of ‘molasse’, to the north and south of the slapstick valley. The geology created the history. For three thousand years the Lauragais remained in the ‘New Stone Age’.

Back in Iraq, the J2 people’s cousins were enlarging their villages into cities. They discovered writing and metallurgy and, not long after that, the alloy of copper and tin called bronze. This was the first metal hard enough for tools and weapons, and a new aristocracy ruled in the ‘Bronze Age’. Bronze was cool, and everyone wanted some. Everyone had copper, but tin was rare, so there was a ‘Tin Rush’ as the bold and greedy went looking for it.

They found it in Cornwall, which was good news for the Lauragais, standing as it does on the route between Cornwall and the Middle East. Carried by boat to the mouth of the Garonne and thence to Toulouse, the ingots of tin were carried by pack mules to Carcassonne, floated down the River Aude and embarked at Narbonne for the east, where they made their new owners into wealthy playboys, flaunting their collections of (often unused) bronze axe heads.

The tin trade broadened to include many more commodities: copper, glassware, leather, cereals, slaves, and amber came from the north-west, and luxury goods like jewels and wine went the other way. Not a luxury, but an essential, salt from the Mediterranean coast also came west. In the hot climate it was indispensable for preserving meat during the summer.

Between 900 and 250 BC the last Bronze Age people to arrive in the Lauragais were burying their dead in pots in open fields, from which the archaeologists named them ‘Urn-Field’ people. It would fit what is known of later events if these were the people history has called ‘Iberians’. The hill-fort at Berniquaud was busily populated. They were noted for clearing forests (a useful skill in the Lauragais valley) and growing corn: they pushed the hapless Haplogroup J2 off the hills of molasse.

Meanwhile there was iron. Historians are reassessing the transition from the ‘Bronze Age’ to the ‘Iron Age’. A two-hundred year Dark Age in Britain (c. 800 to 600 BC), perhaps associated with an Icelandic volcanic eruption, disrupted the tin-supply from Cornwall. In the Middle East there were droughts and city-destroying earthquakes, and the iron-tipped-spear-carrying infantry of the mysterious ‘Sea Peoples’ made mince-meat of the Bronze Age toffs in their chariots. The tin trade collapsed.

The snooty Bronze Age world was replaced by a more egalitarian society based on iron. This has been described (probably first by toff historians) as ‘culturally more disastrous than the Fall of the Roman Empire’. Goodbye palaces and hello huts. Population levels fell, and literacy, where it had taken root, withered again.

There was recovery, and with it the first historical lights come on. In 753 BC Iron Age people founded Rome. The people with iron in the Lauragais were influenced by both the Hallstadt and La Tene culture, which means, I think it is now safe to say, that they were ‘Celts’, and archaeological evidence dates their arrival in Toulouse to the 700s BC. By 680 Greek traders were on the coast of France and by 600 they had founded Marseilles. In the 500s, the Hebrews and the Greeks knew Narbonne as the capital of the Elisyque tribe and a busy port. From Narbonne, Greek influences reached the Lauragais: Greek coins are common and there is a Greek altar in the church at Labège.

In 400 BC there were Celts living on the hills to the south of present day Toulouse at ‘Old Toulouse’, and other Celts were sacking Rome itself (in 390BC). The Toulouse Celts were the ‘Volcae Tectosages’, an iron age Celtic tribe who were indeed linked back to La Tène Culture on the Danube, related to other ‘Tectosages’ which had defeated a Greek army in 279 BC and settled in Turkey. They enjoy the distinction of being the first group of people living in the Lauragais whose name we know. The Volcae Tectosages wore trousers, and are thereby distinguished from the ‘Hairy Gauls’ to which Asterix belonged. In the 200s BC Hannibal came through Narbonne on his way to the Alps and Rome. He allied with the Volcae Arecomici, and some of them may have gone with him.

By this time the Volcae Tectosages’ oppidum (hill-fort) at Berniquaud, standing on the Montagne Noire over Sorèze, was a frontier post marking the border between the Volcae Tectosages and their northern neighbours the Ruthenes, who lived around Albi.

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2. ‘Trousers notwithstanding’ (200 BC – 69 AD)

The Romans eventually beat Hannibal. His Spanish territories fell into their hands. Romans preferred going by road to going by sea, so they occupied the French Mediterranean coast. Domitius Ahenobarbus was welcomed into Narbonne by the Volcae Arecomici in 121 and, in 118, the multi-millionaire Roman Licinius Crassus financed a group of Roman families to set up a colony there.

Narbonne was the nearest Mediterranean city to inland Toulouse. In possession of Narbonne the Romans were bound to get involved in trade up the main valley past Carcassonne. In this way the Romans soon came into contact with the Volcae Tectosages and their sub-group the Tolosates, famous for their wealth and the key position of their capital for trade with the Atlantic. Soon afterwards they were in the Lauragais, the land of the Volcae Tectosages themselves. It did not take long for the fighting to start.

To some, a Roman occupation might seem just another name and date, but they should ask themselves how it can have been that the Romans could regularly knock hell out of all their contemporaries without being in any material way superior to them. In this case, trousers notwithstanding, the Tectosages proved to be a pushover. Both the Romans and the Tectosages were Iron Age, but the Romans applied more intelligence to their warfare. If an enemy withdrew into his hill forts the Romans soon winkled him out with clever siege tactics such as the famous ‘tortoise’ formation. Locking their shields together over their heads the Romans were more or less impervious to enemy attack as they approached. As the tortoise edged forward, any enemy showing himself ran the risk of being transfixed by a bolt from a ballista, the Romans’ terrible fixed-mounted crossbow. Roman armies carried spears which bent on impact, and so could not be thrown back at them. Their armies built their own fortified camps at the end of each day, and roads for long term supply. They also applied intelligence to the strategic planning which informed their diplomacy. They ‘divided and ruled’: making friends with one lot of Gauls (the Volcae Arecomici) to give them help in, and an excuse for, assaulting another lot, the local Lauragais ‘Volcae Tectosages’. Intelligent, goal-directed conduct like this is a timeless good, and explains why the Romans still have many fans and emulators today.

The Romans soon reached Toulouse. This may have been ‘Old Toulouse’ on a hill south of the present city, but some think its wealth, sophistication and trading role requires that it be already established on the bend in the Garonne where it stands now. A Roman garrison was established there.

The Romans brought with them coinage, markets, language and writing, but unfortunately also officials, soldiers, taxes and conscription. This made Roman rule at first somewhat precarious, because there were bound to be losers. We know the sort of dirty Roman tricks which provoked Boadicea/Boudicca into rebellion in Britain in 60 AD (moving in on the widow queen contrary to agreements made with her late husband, stealing land, raping daughters etc.) and if we imagine unfrocked Druids playing on the anger of displaced farmers and outraged taxpayers in the Lauragais, it is not difficult to imagine why the Volcae might want to rebel against their ‘allies’.

An opportunity presented itself in 109BC when a Germanic tribe, the Cimbri, (it’s the same word as ‘Cymru’ – ‘Wales’ – but they weren’t Welsh) descended the Rhone Valley and invaded the Provincia, the Mediterranean coastal stretch which the Romans had occupied. They defeated the Romans, whose power was shaken all along the recently conquered Mediterranean coast. With the arrival of the Romans the Lauragais emerges into recorded history. For the first time we can know the names and thoughts of individuals who lived here. We know the name of King Copillus of the Volcae Tectosages who took the opportunity provided by the intervention of the Cimbri to liquidate the Roman garrison in Toulouse.

This was a mistake. In 107 BC the Romans sent an army under Proconsul Quintus Servilius Caepio; it marched through the Lauragais and devastated Toulouse as a punishment. Copillus and Caepio thus jointly earn the accolade for the earliest named individuals in Lauragais history. In Copillus’ case it is probably what the Romans thought his name sounded like rather than what it actually was. In Toulouse, Caepio found a huge treasure of gold and silver, allegedly the proceeds of a successful Balkan adventure of the Tectosages in 359, when they were one of a number of Celtic tribes which had invaded Greece and Turkey. This treasure should have been sent to Rome, but much of it disappeared on the way. Colleen McCulloch says it was seized by a large force of bandits somewhere east of Carcassonne and taken over the Pyrenees, but this may only be a novelist’s invention. If not, the gold will have passed close to Rennes le Chateau and Bugarach. Oh dear...

Rome was a strictly hierarchical society, and though Caepio may have fame of a kind in the Lauragais, he is infamous in Roman history because, in 106 BC, he was blamed for a military disaster in which the entire Roman army in Gaul was annihilated near Orange. The social class issue was that Caepio had refused to cooperate with his nominal commander because that commander was of inferior birth. The Romans dealt with the matter in an impeccably establishment fashion. Caepio was found guilty and sentenced to a fierce array of punishments, but most were quietly ignored and he lived out a comfortable exile on a Greek island; I should not be at all surprised if some of the ‘lost’ treasure found its way to the same place. As a result of Caepio’s defeat at Orange the whole Roman army was re-organised on the professional lines proposed by the great Marius, making it even more formidable.

Caepio’s successors returned to the Lauragais. They re-established the military fort at Toulouse, a key position near the border of independent Aquitania. The Lauragais, with the rest of the Aude, passed under Roman control via their alliance with the Volcae who retained their customs and princes. This constitutional arrangement was the classic Roman approach to such things.

Between 79 and 76 BC, under the administration of Manlius Fonteius, ‘a veritable monarch with absolute powers’ trade between Narbonne and Toulouse flourished, carried down to Narbonne via the Lauragais and, eventually, the River Aude. The Romans were not noted for philanthropy, and annoyed the Volcae by creating a monopoly of wine sales. The Volcae had just discovered wine and were major consumers of it. Fonteius created four customs posts, of which the one at Elusiodunum (Montferrand) is definitely identified. They stopped the wagons carrying the amphorae of wine up towards Toulouse, and when all the duties had been paid the wine was eight times what the vineyards in Italy had sold it for. An amphora of good wine cost as much as a slave! The Gauls sued Manlius Fonteius in a Roman court, and he was defended by the great orator Cicero.

The case gives us some lovely insights into the pre-Roman world of the Gauls and the irritations which Roman rule had brought. Cicero says for example that ‘No Gaul does any business without the aid of a Roman citizen.’ He grants that the Gauls have ‘...been compelled once and again, and sorely against their will, to furnish cavalry, money, and corn; ...’ He also mentions the Balkan adventure of the Lauragais Gauls, saying that ‘These are the nations which formerly marched ... as far as Delphi, to attack and pillage the Pythian Apollo’ which gives credence to the story about the Toulouse treasure. Wishing to prejudice the Roman judges against the Gauls Cicero points out that they ‘retain that savage and barbarous custom of sacrificing men’. He speaks of the Gauls who have come to testify against Fonteius with their leader Induciomarus ‘with their military cloaks and their trousers ... strolling in high spirits and with their heads up, all over the forum, uttering threatening expressions, and terrifying men with barbarous and ferocious language.’ They are ‘a savage and intolerable band of barbarians’.

But he still lost the case! In an impressive example of Roman legal even-handedness the monopoly held by Italians over the wine trade was broken. From that moment, vineyards managed by local people spread rapidly. Many vineyards and olive trees were planted, and poplar trees were imported from Italy, where they can still be seen in the east of the Lauragais.

The Lauragais was now incorporated into the Roman Provincia, but things did not revolutionise themselves immediately; by the time of Caesar (around 50BC) the number of Romans living at Narbonne had diminished and the ‘colony’ had ‘gone bush’. To address this, more settlers were shipped out. Few Roman soldiers settled in the Lauragais [Though one source attributes the name ‘Laurac’ to a soldier called Laurus.] but in a sign that Romanization of the people was already well under its way, Tolosa did not take part in the various uprisings against Rome called the Gallic wars. Caesar’s conquest of the rest of Gaul was therefore of little interest in the Lauragais, as the Romans had been established in the Narbonnensis for three-quarters of a century. Caesar recruited in the Lauragais and used the Narbonnensis as a base for his operations. His ‘valiant soldiers’ were rewarded by grants of privileges, many becoming Roman citizens. Caesar established a camp in the ‘plain of Toulouse’ in 52 BC, and from there he conquered the western regions of Aquitania. He described the hills of the Lauragais as ‘covered with cereal crops’. With the conquest of Aquitania and the north of Gaul, the Lauragais ceased to be a frontier area.

In 27 BC, Augustus visited Narbonne and re-organized the province. It passed under the authority of the Roman Senate, which nominated the proconsul. It now included the whole of the Languedoc extending from Toulouse to Provence. At the time of Christ’s crucifixion (c. 30 AD), Narbonne was the largest city of Gaul and the most important port in the western Mediterranean. Until the fall of the Roman Empire, the Lauragais remained in the ‘civitas’ (district) of Tolosa within the Narbonnensis. Thus it came to enjoy the peace and order of the Roman Empire and benefited from its organization and wealth.

During the civil war following Nero's death, an army led by M. Antonius Primus marched from Toulouse entering Rome in AD 69 thus helping in the establishment of the Flavian dynasty. Emperor Domitian, son of Vespasian and personal friend of M. Antonius Primus, granted Tolosa the honorific status of Roman colony. Benefitting from its key position for trade between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, now both under Roman control, the Lauragais developed rapidly.

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3. ‘An Immense Garden’ (69AD – 462AD)

The Romans constructed the road called the ‘Via Aquitania’, plus various minor roads. It ran through Carcasso (Carcassonne), Eburomagus (Bram) [‘magus’ was a Celtic word for ‘market’, hence ‘market of the boar’], l’Estap (St Pierre d’Alzonne a.k.a. Elusiodunum and, nowadays, Montferrand); Badera (Baziège, from the Latin ‘vadaculum’ - ‘little ford’)) and on to Toulouse. Excavations between Villeneuve and Baziège showed that the carriageway was a metre thick and 7m. wide; with its banks and ditches it was 12 metres across. It carried heavy traffic: rugged, big-wheeled wagons, and fast light carriages filled with fashionable Romans. Large houses lined the road, whose whole length was dotted with milestones, often as sturdy columns, and several of them are still around in various places. The one at Montgaillard (‘Solid Mountain’) still stands by the road. Many of the milestones have dedications to various emperors, and the dates suggest two periods of road improvement between 305 and 311, and between 335 and 337. During its time the Via Aquitania has also been called ‘the Iron Road’ and ‘The Royal Road’. Its inns were called ‘tabernae’ and, for those in economy class, ‘cauponae’. A ‘caupona’ which served food was a ‘popina’: popinae often served girls as well...

At Baziège there are wells associated with funerary practices dating from the first century BC, mosaics, a Roman milestone and some amphorae. By the 300s AD a causeway there carried the Via Aquitania across the marshy plain where the Hers meets the Garonne; (the bits of it known as ‘les pountils’ are 17th C repairs on the hidden Roman foundations).

Elusiodunum was mentioned in 69 BC by Cicero in his defence of governor Fonteius (whose heavy tolls had quadrupled the price of wine). Its name suggests ‘rock’, either the outcrop there, or simply the watershed. Watersheds interested the Romans, as all ‘forked-road’ situations did. The junction with the ‘Road of the Ruthenes’ towards St Felix, doubled the ‘forked-road’ interest. Elusiodunum was a day’s journey out from Toulouse and therefore a natural place for inns and stabling. Hence its name ‘L’Estap’ which is old French for ‘étap’, which (by the law that an e acute indicates an ‘s’ in old French, came into English via the Normans as the noun ‘stop’, as in ‘bus stop’) It had a large 5-star hotel called the ‘mansio’, baths with an ice cooled cold room and a horse changing station or ‘Mutatio’. An establishment at Peyre Clouque produced metal objects connected with travel. (Places beginning ‘pey’ suggest stony ground.) Slag was used to repair potholes and ruts on the Via Aquitania, which may explain why it was sometimes called the ‘iron road’.

Bram, at 50 hectares, was much bigger than Elusiodunum (16 ha) and Sostomagus (8 ha). Bram was a centre of pottery production managed by Italians and using slave labour. Bits of pot marked ‘Protus’ tell us the potter’s name. There was a butchery centre, with by-products such as bone being made into small items like dice. Bram had an important metalworking facility linked to the steel producing sites on the Montagne Noire.

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At least fifteen Gallo-Roman sites have been identified at Avignonet. At Ayguesvives there is a Roman altar and milestone. Standing behind Ayguesvives (‘Abundant waters’) south of the Via Aquitania was the hill of Montalbiau, where bits of amphora, plus its extensive views over the valley have given rise to the idea that there might have been a point of surveillance there. It is unlikely: what need had the Romans of such a thing?

Away from the Via Aquitania there were Romans at Nailloux, where fragments of Gallo-Roman pottery, amphorae and tiles have been found. There was a villa at Castanet, and the aqueduct bridge at Fanjeaux can only be Roman in origin. There was a Gallo-Roman settlement at Villasavary, and another near Cumiès. At the crossroads where the roads from Avignonet, Montferrand, and Cumiès met, and water was to be found at the source of the Fresquel, men and horses naturally rested. This was ‘Varianus’, today’s Baraigne.

There was work to do in the vineyards on the large rural estates and villas, and in the towns, where good money could be earned. If you could tell a nominative from an accusative, you could earn good money. If not there were Latin grammar schools in Toulouse or Carcassonne to teach you. By the 300s the low Latin which would become Occitan had replaced Gaulish, apart from a few words for parcels of land, like ‘arpent’ and ‘soc’. So Romanised was the Lauragais that it was called ‘Little Tuscany’.

You could have a fair hearing in a legal dispute, (Manlius Fonteius lost his case) be elected to a town council and have a say in making law. In 212 AD the emperor Caracalla decreed that all the free men in the Lauragais were Roman citizens; the provincial governors were Gauls rather than Italians, and they gained the right to sit in the Senate at Rome. Ælius Aristides summed it all up: ‘the people were pleased with their defeat, and, losing the memory of the old independence, were happy to be part of the Roman world’. Tertullian spoke of ‘Warriors … forsaking their armour for party clothes … The land is like one immense garden. The world is each day better known, better cultivated and more prosperous. Deserts are transformed into fertile fields: men plough where forests rose, men sow where only arid rocks were seen; the marshes are drained, and the herds graze, free from wild beasts’. So it would have been in Roman Lauragais (for the well-off, at least).

Tertullian tells us that ‘Superstitious fears are no more, and everywhere there are houses, people, cities, and life.’ With the Gaulish language went all the old religious traditions: the cult of Rome and the emperor became the main religion. The Romans liked their religion pretty low-key and business-like. A handful of goats’ livers, a squad of Vestal Virgins and a polite nod to a god every now and then kept them going for ages. In the Lauragais they followed their usual policy of transforming tribal gods into Roman gods so smoothly that locals soon stopped noticing the joins, a process called ‘syncretism’. Fanjeaux is a fine example of ‘syncretism’. Its name means ‘Jupiter’s shrine’ and we’ve all forgotten the Celtic deity who had it first. Next door to Elusiodunum, Avignonet had a villa and a ‘fanum’ or sacred site with a statue of Mercury and another of Jupiter.

Some of the Romans’ greatest admirers were eighteenth century English gentlemen like Edward Gibbon, who attributed the Romans’ eventual demise to their adoption of an over-enthusiastic religion called Christianity. Some Romans took this view, suspecting new religions such as Christianity and Mithraism of subverting Roman values; not long after the first Christian missionaries arrived up the Via Aquitania from Narbonne, nasty persecutions took place. In Toulouse in or about the year 250 AD St Sernin the first bishop of Toulouse was martyred by being dragged behind a bull, and in 257 and 311 under the Emperors Valerian and Diocletian persecution was widespread. ‘Mas St Puelles' (‘The farmhouse of the holy girls’) owes its strange name to two young women who gave the martyred St Sernin a Christian burial in 250 AD. They were chased out of Toulouse by the Roman authorities and found refuge in the Mas, where they died. Saint Papoul was a contemporary of St Sernin, and was also martyred just north of the town. Where his head fell it is alleged that a spring arose, causing the stream which ran down to where the monastery now is.

The Lauragais followed the Emperor Constantine’s lead and adopted Christianity readily. The emperor