In the first of two extracts from her new book, Revolution in Carcassonne, Elaine Graham-Leigh explains how and why the city rose in revolt in 1303

In August 1303, the people of the southern French town of Carcassonne rose up in revolt.

At the time of the revolt, Carcassonne had been on the frontlines of particularly harsh religious and secular rule for almost a century. Before this time, Carcassonne, along with the rest of the Languedoc, had been largely outside any real royal control. In 1209, however, the town had been one of the first targets of the Albigensian crusade against heretics in the south of France and as a result, had ended up under the direct rule of the French royal authorities. Carcassonne became not only the base of the senior royal official for the region, the seneschal, but also a centre for the Inquisition, being dominated from the mid-thirteenth century by a huge Inquisition prison, the Wall.

The 1303 revolt was the culmination of some twenty years of a fightback against the Inquisition, which saw appeals to King and Pope, a supposed plot to steal Inquisition records, and armed resistance when the royal authorities decided to try to arrest some of the ringleaders but were driven back by the enraged populace. The revolt was itself not short of dramatic and violent action. The houses of town leaders perceived to be supporting the inquisitors were sacked, the Dominican church – the Order that supplied most of the personnel of the Inquisition – was stoned, the gates of the Wall were opened and the Inquisition’s prisoners led out (albeit not precisely to freedom). The rebels first put their trust in the King, Philip IV, to resolve their grievances, decorating the streets of the town for a royal visit in January 1304. When he refused to listen, they tore the garlands down and embarked on a more idiosyncratic course, a search for a new, people’s king for Carcassonne.

The revolt was supported by a charismatic Franciscan friar, Bernard Délicieux, whose fiery sermons in the streets of Carcassonne and surrounding towns were widely remembered as giving key encouragement to the people to rise up. The records of his trial in 1319 for his involvement in the revolt and other offences comprise an unusually detailed and dramatic account of the revolt and his role in it. They include his iconic sermon in which he likened the people of Carcassonne to rams in a field. In this parable, after watching their fellows taken away for slaughter, the rams came to the realisation that while they did not have any authorities prepared to defend them, what they did have was horns.

Alongside these headline events, the revolt saw the rebels taking control of royal judicial and fiscal functions, depriving the royal authorities of control of the bourg – the lower town – from August 1303 until the revolt was put down in the spring of 1305. Using a range of tactics, from following the Dominican inquisitors around and mocking them by cawing at them like ravens, to blocking the streets with wine barrels, the Carcassonne revolt succeeded in winning for the bourg a temporary independence.

This was achieved not by the previous town elites, those who had been prominent in the earlier salvos against the Inquisition, but under the leadership of a group who appear to have had neither wealth nor connections, and who were as much opposed to some of those local elites as they were to royal and ecclesiastical authorities. In other words, it is an important episode of class struggle; an example of a limited, reformist fight by local elites against higher authorities being taken over by lower-class representatives with more radical, if sometimes inchoate aims.

Revolution in Carcassonne is available now from the Counterfire shop