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111 pages

English

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A journey through the past and present of a little-known area of south-west France. Explores the people, places and events that shaped a land once too important to ignore.A whole library has been written about the Lauragais in French, but virtually nothing in English.The Lauragais lies in south-west France at the heart of Occitania. Today it is largely ignored by the millions who visit its neighbours each year - Toulouse and Carcassonne - but in times gone by it rarely escaped the attentions of the great and the good, or the ambitious and the avaricious. This is a book with big characters - Simon de Montfort, the Black Prince, Thomas Jefferson and the Duke of Wellington among others - but most of all it tells the story of the people who have shaped this land, the living and the dead, families that have lived in the same house or village for hundreds of years. This is the story of their lives, their religion, their forgotten language and their environment. On the autoroute, a journey through the Lauragais will take you three-quarters of an hour, but all you will see are tantalising glimpses of gorgeous countryside and distant signs of human habitation. In this book, the author takes you on a more leisurely trip through time in a land that is endearingly modest about its illustrious past.

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Travel writing

France

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	05 octobre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781789012446
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Extrait

Lauragais
Steeped in History,
Soaked in Blood
Colin Duncan Taylor
Copyright © 2018 Colin Duncan Taylor

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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Email: books@troubador.co.uk
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ISBN 978 1789012 446

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

I dedicate this book to the memory of Lucette Colombié and Claude Combes, both of whom helped me enormously with my research, both of whom sadly passed away while I was in the midst of writing.
Contents
Introducing the Lauragais

Prologue

I. Those Murderous Cathars

1. An Air of Malevolence
2. Soldiers of Christ, Travellers of God
3. A Ghostly Acquisition
4. The Massacre
5. Retribution
6. Unearthing the Dead

II. On the Trail of a Troubadour

7. The Heart of Occitania
8. Troubadours and Trobairitz
9. An Occitan Tutorial
10. At Home with Raimon de Miraval
11. An Occitan Swansong
12. Survival

III. Of Bastides and Adulterers

13. Market Day
14. The Birth of a Bastide
15. Prisoners in the Tower
16. The Lost Ramparts
17. As Easy as Buying a Baguette

IV. A Hundred Years of Misery

18. The Black Prince
19. Burning the Lauragais
20. A Secret Retreat
21. A Plague of Bandits

V. In Search of Pastel

22. Taking Root in the Lauragais
23. Stratospherically Rich
24. A Spectacular Fall
25. Two Queens called Elizabeth
26. Renaissance
27. A Field of Pastel

VI. A Question of Religion

28. A Protestant Stronghold
29. A One-Sided Siege
30. An Uneasy Peace
31. A Chaotic Walk
32. Inside the Temple
33. Too Many Henrys
34. War Diary
35. Disturbing Encounters
36. Swords and Schoolbooks

VII. From the Bottom of a Lake

37. A Walk in the Desert
38. From Sea to Ocean
39. The Eighth Wonder of the World
40. Sand in the Works
41. Legends and Broken Dreams

VIII. The English Cemetery

42. The Mystery of the Dead
43. A City at War
44. Night Manoeuvres
45. A Long and Disastrous Day
46. Retreat into the Lauragais
47. The Last Battle

IX. A Deadly Occupation

48. At Home in the Château
49. Resistance is Not Useless
50. Among the Maquisards
51. Dawn Attack
52. Homecoming

Epilogue

A Note From the Author

Lauragais Timeline

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Notes
Introducing the Lauragais
To find the Lauragais, head for south-west France. Pronounced ‘lo-ra-gay’, it lies in the middle of the Midi, at the heart of Occitania, astride the ancient route from Carcassonne to Toulouse. Perhaps these words make the Lauragais sound important, but they merely describe its geography. Today, the Lauragais has no particular economic or strategic significance. Industrialisation and many other aspects of modern life seem to have passed it by. Most travellers do the same, including the vast majority of the two million who squeeze inside the medieval walls of Carcassonne every year and the five million who stroll through the streets of Toulouse. Lost in the middle between these two giants of tourism, the Lauragais attracts only a few per cent of such overwhelming numbers.
So why write a book about an area which so few take the time to explore? More importantly, why read one? The answer is this: if you scrape below the surface of the Lauragais you will discover a land steeped in history and soaked in blood, a place where century after century the people have suffered and sometimes prospered, been told what faith to follow or what language to speak. For over two thousand years, the Lauragais and its inhabitants were often at the centre of movements and events – commercial, cultural, military, political and religious. In times gone by, the Lauragais rarely escaped the attentions of the great and the good, or the ambitious and the avaricious. Its geographic position and fertile soil made it too important to ignore.
In the Lauragais, the reminders of these vibrant and often violent times have not been consigned to the museums, the history books and the gift shops. This is a land where the past is a part of everyday life. You can stumble across it during a country stroll, hear it spoken during a sortie to an ancient market, pull it over your head in the shape of a pastel -dyed garment, or drink it down with a glass of the world’s oldest sparkling wine. And then there are the people who have shaped this land, the living and the dead, families that have lived in the same house or village for hundreds of years. In a setting like this, the concept of folk memory becomes both credible and comprehensible.
I have been exploring and living in the Lauragais for twenty years, gradually discovering its past and absorbing its present, and most importantly making friends. One day I called in on one of them, and quite by accident what should have been an innocuous social visit transported me back in time by several centuries. My friend showed me the deepest parts of his home, and what I saw prompted me to start writing this book, the story of an extraordinary land and its people.
At the outset I made an important discovery: there is nothing like trying to write about a subject to realise how little you truly know about it. So I resumed my travels in and around the Lauragais, and naturally I asked other friends to help me tell its story, even if at times this made the experience an intoxicating time-trip back and forth across the ages. Where I was at any particular moment was rarely in doubt; it was the when that was sometimes problematic. On other occasions I had the sense I was exploring places no one had visited for centuries, and this solitude reminded me that the Lauragais provides the perfect antidote to its more popular and crowded neighbours.

For long periods during its early history the Lauragais found itself in frontier land as empires and kingdoms struggled for supremacy: the Romans, the Visigoths, the Franks and the Moors; then the counts of Toulouse and the kings of Aragon, England and France; and it was the setting for some of the last military action to take place during Napoleon’s first reign as emperor.
The Lauragais was also plagued by religious conflict. In the thirteenth century it was ravaged by armies from the north during the Albigensian Crusade and its population terrorised by the Inquisition. In the sixteenth century it tore itself apart for forty years during the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants.
More peacefully, the Lauragais lies on a natural axis of communication. From the gates of Toulouse, a wide corridor of flat land arcs its way southwards and eastwards, cutting the Lauragais neatly in two before continuing its journey to Carcassonne and then onwards to the Mediterranean. As well as armies on the march, this route has been used by merchants and other travellers for at least three thousand years. Among the earliest were the Phoenicians, transporting Cornish tin via Bordeaux to the Mediterranean. A century before the birth of Christ, the Romans built a road through here, the Via Aquitania, to connect Narbonne, Toulouse and Bordeaux. A thousand years later, the first pilgrims trudged through the Lauragais on their way to Saint-Jacques de Compostelle. Since then, each successive form of transport has used this same axis. Today, the Roman road, the Canal du Midi, the railway and the autoroute keep one another close company all the way through the Lauragais.
Agriculture has long dominated the landscape. The Lauragais has been a land of cereal production since Roman times, and for centuries the countryside was dotted with windmills grinding the grain into flour. In 1355 the Black Prince’s men set fire to twenty of them in one small town alone. A century later this same rich earth nourished a new crop: pastel , or woad, the source of the blue dye that was exported all over Europe and brought fame and fortune to Toulouse.
The flat central corridor of the Lauragais is flanked by rolling countryside, and both the hills and the plains are today planted with a range of crops that has diversified to include wheat and barley, soya beans and sorghum, oilseed rape and maize, and in summer the countryside is ablaze with sunflowers. Dotted among these fields are patches of woodland, the last remnants of the vast oak forests that once covered much of the Lauragais.
Towards the east, the land rises abruptly to become the Montagne Noire. During times of religious troubles, this mountain was a refuge for the persecuted. At others, it served as a hideout for fearsome brigands who plundered the Lauragais, and a secret base for the Resistance during the second world war.
To the south lie mightier mountains. If you find yourself in the southern part of th