• 1 Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages, Berkeley, University o (...)
• 2 That is, by the territories covered by the dioceses of Thérouanne, Tournai, Arras, Cambrai, Utrec (...)

1How to honor The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages? How does one properly celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of a book that today is as fresh, as lively, and as inspiring as it was fifty years ago? I can think of no better way than by applying Robert Lerner’s principle, that the medieval Free Spirits “cannot possibly be understood unless one places them within the context of the religious movements of their day”1. In the following pages I will return to the world of lay religious people from which the Free Spirit sprang forth – or, more correctly, was suspected of springing forth – to suggest new distinctions between the various groups that were subsumed under the general sobriquet of “beguines and beghards”. Fifty years of research since 1972 have produced far more data on these men and women than were available to Robert Lerner, and we can now know them better. I will limit myself largely to the birthplace of beguines and beghards, the Low Countries and the Lower Rhineland, defined by diocesan borders (for ease of identification)2, and to the late thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth centuries, a time of grave challenges but also renewal among lay religious.

• 3 Willige arme sometimes applied to women.

2The first part of my argument is simple. I am suggesting that in this region and at this time, a new type of beguines and beghards emerged that was inadequately set apart from the “traditional” type by the ecclesiastical establishment of the era and has remained largely under the radar of modern scholarship as well. Women and men of the new type were known by various names in the German and Dutch vernaculars, of which swesteren (literally “sisters”, modern German Schwestern) for the women, and “poor” or “mendicant beghards”, then also “lollards” (not to be confused with the later English dissenters known as Lollards) and willige arme (“willing poor”) for the men3, were the most common. It was this new movement of swesteren and lollards that authorities first deemed responsible for the spread of Free-Spirit ideas, but soon all lay religious, including the old-type beguines and beghards, were in one way or another caught up in the dragnet of measures devised by clerical authorities to counter heretical activity and suppress unauthorized forms of religious life.

• 4 Herman Haupt, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sekte vom freien Geiste und des Beghardentums”, Zeitsc (...)
• 5 Naturally, in compiling this checklist of houses, I have relied on local studies whenever availab (...)

3That part of my argument is not entirely new: naturally all historians of the Free Spirit, starting with Herman Haupt, knew that papal and episcopal decrees against the Free Spirit often referred to swesteren and “begging beghards” as the main culprits, but so little was known about those groups that historians, consciously or not, internalized the image conveyed by the legislation condemning them, as a riff-raff of aimless wanderers, beggars, and lowlifes, possibly indeed guilty of harboring “Free-Spiritism”4. Although Robert Lerner did much to question that impression, it was difficult to dislodge it, short of new and reliable information to replace it. The materials discussed here, including a catalogue of their settlements before c. 1350 (presented in Part Four), are (mostly) new5. They make use of secular and civil-law records generated without obvious bias against the groups to demonstrate that in the decade prior to the first condemnations (1307–1310), swesteren and lollards reached a degree of organization much greater than previously thought. They formed “houses” (or “convents”) and were supported by reputable citizens and even clerics. By the mid-fourteenth century a network of more than forty-four of such lodgings covered the Lower Rhineland and Low Countries, soon reaching into other parts of northwestern and central Europe. While it is true that both swesteren and lollards travelled often between those places and that begging was common, they were not lowly vagrants but were drawn from diverse social backgrounds and some may have come from upper-middle class families.

• 6 Jörg Voigt, Beginen im Spätmittelalter. Frauenfrömmigkeit in Thüringen und im Reich, Cologne, Böh (...)

5This essay consists of four sections: in Part One, I explain that, in order to properly understand the distinctions we should make between the various lay religious (and which Church authorities often failed to make), we first need to return to the “Clementine” decretals of the fourteenth century, examine how and why they were issued, and review their implementation in the following decades, which varied greatly. Until about twenty-five years ago, historians believed that those decrees launched widespread persecution of lay religious in German lands, from which only select beguine communities survived. Since then, several research projects on German beguines have corrected that view but the pendulum now risks swinging too far the other way, especially after the publication of Jörg Voigt’s Beginen im Spätmittelalter (2012)6, which argued that Church authorities never targeted beguines and that they survived this period unscathed. I advance a more nuanced assessment, recognizing a range of measures against non-monastic religious, some of which did strike a serious blow against beguine communities in certain regions, as well as more focused procedures aimed at rooting out heresy; the latter were directed primarily against swesteren and lollards. I also examine the curious history of the beghards or “male beguines”, still poorly known, and explain the split among them around 1290–1300, when the new movement of lollards and swesteren was born.

• 7 HFS, p. 83.
• 8 Jacqueline Tarrant, “The Clementine Decrees on the Beguines: Conciliar and Papal Versions”, Archi (...)
• 9 Aemilius Friedberg, ed., Corpus Iuris Canonici, 2^nd ed., Leipzig, Tauchnitz, 1879-1881, vol. 2, c (...)
• 10 Friedberg, Corpus, vol. 2, col. 607 and 1042-1043; Tanner, Decrees, vol. 1, p. 242 and 326-327.
• 11 HFS, p. 47, translates hospitia as “communal houses”, which I believe is an error. As Müller, Das (...)

9The Council of Vienne (1311–1312) generated two decretals concerning lay religious, Cum de quibusdam (mulieribus) and Ad nostrum, the latter of which, in Robert Lerner’s famous phrase, can be regarded as “the birth certificate of the heresy of the Free Spirit.”7 Since Jacqueline Tarrant’s important article of 19748 we know that they originated from two distinct deliberations at the Council and received their final form only between the end of the Council, on 6 May 1312, and their promulgation as part of the Clementinae (named after Pope Clement V, 1305–1314, who presided over the council) by Pope John XXII on 1 November 1317. Cum de quibusdam (Clementinae 3.11.1, published as canon 16 of the Council) abolished “the way of life” (status, literally their state or mode of being) of beguines, excommunicating all those who led such a life. Although the proximate cause cited in the decree were reports that some of those women “argue and preach on the holy Trinity and the divine essence, and launch opinions contrary to the Catholic faith on articles of faith and sacraments of the Church”, the decree did not accuse beguines of any specific heresy nor did it denounce particular statements; rather, it condemned the status … beguinarum because it cloaked the women in an aura of fake religiosity: “they wear a special habit, which is called that of beguines, and attach themselves to certain religious men to whom they have a special attraction”, but, the argument went, “they are not religious at all since they promise obedience to no one, do not renounce possessions, and do not profess any approved rule”9. As such, the decree harked back to thirteenth-century efforts to limit the proliferation of new religious orders, starting with canon 13 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Ne nimia, followed by canon 23 of the Second Council of Lyons (1274), Religionum diversitatem, which ultimately reduced the ranks of the “new” Mendicant orders to the Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinian Friars10. That background also explains the final sentence of Cum de quibusdam: it notes that, while the status beguinarum was prohibited, individual women could of course lead a life of penance devoted to God in their private dwellings (hospitia)11, with or without a vow of continence. This “escape clause” has puzzled both medieval canonists and modern historians but is relatively straightforward, given the canon-law understanding of religiosus: as long as these women practiced their humble service to God “rightly and at home” (honeste in suis conversantes hospitiis), and did not falsely pretend to lead a religious life (which, to be valid, required disposition of one’s goods, an irreversible profession to a more perfect life according to a recognized rule, and a recognized habit), they would not be disturbed.

• 12 Friedberg, Corpus, vol. 2, col. 1183-1184; Tanner, Decrees, vol. 1, p. 383–384.
• 13 HFS, p. 82.
• 14 Sean L. Field, The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trials of Marguerite Porete and Gu (...)

10A second decree, Ad nostrum (Clementinae 5.3.3, canon 28 of the Council), was more specific: it condemned the “abominable sect of wicked men called beghards and of faithless women, commonly called beguines, that has sprung up in the realm of Germany”12. It identified eight errors of their doctrina, largely centered on the notion that humans may acquire such spiritual perfection on earth that sinning becomes impossible – the “essence of the Free-Spirit heresy” as it was then imagined, in the words of Robert Lerner, who pointed out that six of the listed errors seem inspired by statements condemned during the trial of Marguerite Porete, the beguine author of the Mirror of Simple Souls, in Paris in 1310.13 In his authoritative study of that trial, Sean Field concurred with that opinion but allowed – as did Lerner – that Marguerite’s work might not have been the only basis for Ad nostrum, even though Marguerite was the most prominent beguine on the radar of inquisitors at the time and the trial documents call her one-time supporter, Guiard de Cressonessart, a beguinus or “beghard”.14

• 15 Muller, Das Konzil, p. 581-587 and 698-688; see also above, note 11, and HFS, p. 81.
• 16 Verdeyen, “Le procès”, p. 60.
• 17 Heinz Wolter, ed., Die Synodalstatuten der Kölner Kirche im Spätmittelalter 1261-1513, Vienna and (...)
• 18 Hartzheim, Concilia Germaniae, vol. 4, p. 174-224, at p. 200-201; an extract, with a slightly dif (...)
• 19 HFS, p. 67; Ioannes Iacobus Blattau, ed., Statuta synodalia, ordinationes et mandata archidioeces (...)

11An early draft of the Clementines drawn up at the end of the Council of Vienne and discovered by Ewald Müller almost a century ago, in addition to the decretal itself, provides context to Ad nostrum. The draft stated that “there was a long discussion about the beghards” and then listed the eight incriminating errors; it did not mention beguines.15 And while Marguerite, as beguina … de Hannonia,16 could possibly be associated with “Germany” (the county of Hainaut was indeed part of the Empire), it is extremely unlikely that the Council would have situated this presumptive “sect” of beghards in Alemannia on that basis alone. Rather, the focus on Germany should be explained by several decrees issued by bishops in the Empire in the years preceding both her trial and the Council of Vienne, most importantly by the synodal statutes for Cologne issued by archbishop Henry II of Virneburg on 13 February 1307, which excommunicated “beghards and beghardesses, as well as ‘apostles’” (becgardos et becgardas ac apostolos), all of whom were identified as heretics, and threatened with excommunication all those who aided them.17 Three years later, on 20–22 April 1310, a council in the neighboring Church province of Mainz, codifying synodal law, similarly targeted a “sect” of “beghards … and “pernicious beguines”.18 And less than a week after that, on 28 April 1310, the clergy of the province of Trier (another neighbor of Cologne) met to hash out measures against “those unlearned people who call themselves Apostles” and “certain lay people who call themselves beghards”, using a terminology that may have been borrowed from the Cologne statutes, as Robert Lerner noted.19

• 20 Wolter, ed., Die Synodalstatuten, vol. 1, p. 176-178. For the incoherence of the “errors”, see He (...)

12In short, beghards rather than beguines were the main suspects at the time of the Council, and Germany, specifically the Lower and Middle-Rhine formed the primary area of concern, independently from Marguerite’s trial. The Rhenish statutes accused these beghards and their presumed female followers of illicit public begging, demanding “bread for God” (Brod durch Gott, Mainz, 1310), a slogan henceforth often associated with suspect beghards. Although able-bodied, they rather sought alms than to work (Trier, 1310; the same charge is made differently in Cologne, 1307). Introducing “a new mode of life and a habit cloaked in the trappings of poverty”, they publicly challenged sermons of mendicant friars (Cologne 1307). “Under the pretext of a fake religious life they posed as exegetes of sacred scripture to simple people” (Trier 1310), preaching in caverns (in cavernis/cameris) and in public (Mainz, 1310). Furthermore, the 1307 statutes of Cologne listed several heretical statements that, although phrased poorly and incoherently, suggested either antinomian beliefs (the beghards claimed they do not sin) or insinuated an antinomian basis for them20.

• 21 Edited in Joseph de Guibert, Documenta ecclesiastica christianae perfectionis studium spectantia. (...)
• 22 David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans. From Protest to Persecution in the Century After Saint Fra (...)
• 23 Wehrli-Johns, “Mystik und Inquisition”, p. 227 and 240, where she argues that “Apostles” may have (...)
• 24 Raniero Orioli, Venit perfidus heresiarcha. Il movimento Apostolico-Dolciniano dal 1260 al 1307, (...)

13We should remember, of course, that the synodal legislation on the suspected doctrines might have been inspired by older materials, particularly a compilation of heretical statements allegedly made in the first case of “free-spirit” heresy by people in the Swabian Ries between 1260 and 128021. No clear borrowings from that set of “errors” can be detected, but since the oldest copy of this collection attributes – probably reliably – their refutation to Albertus Magnus, the Dominican master of Cologne, there is a chance some of its lore was known to the clerics of that see assembled in 1307. One suspects they also had heard of the Italian “Apostles” of Gerard Segarelli (d. 1300) and his successor Fra Dolcino (d. 1307), as well as the related “sect” of the Spiritus Libertatis in Umbria. A provincial council at Würzburg in 1287 had warned against “the Apostles”, condemned by Pope Honorius IV the year before and increasingly viewed as a major threat to the Church – to the point that Pope Clement V called a crusade against them in 130722. As we have seen, the synodal statutes of Cologne (1307) and Trier (1310) mentioned Apostoli in connection with the measures against the beghards. Martina Wehrli-Johns has revived older suggestions of a spread by the “Apostles” into the Rhineland by 1307 or even earlier23, but there is no evidence of their actual presence that far north at those times24. At most we may suppose that rumors about the Spiritus Libertatis affected clerical views of beghard preaching in some fashion; and of course, beghards might have invoked the original apostles as models, as did virtually all religious movements of the Middle Ages.

• 25 HFS, p. 79–80.
• 26 Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, p. 104–158; Wehrli-Johns, “Mystik”, p. 226–231.
• 27 The three archdioceses of the Rhineland were represented at Vienne, either by the archbishop (Col (...)
• 28 Field, The Beguine, p. 193-194.

14In any case, that same Spiritus Libertatis was definitely on the minds of Church leaders meeting at Vienne in 1311-1312 when they debated what to do about the Spiritual Franciscans and the legacy of Peter of John Olivi, two important agenda points of the Council. Pope Clement V opened the Council six months after having condemned the Umbrian sect25, and putative links between the latter and the Spiritual Franciscans hovered over the proceedings on the usus pauper question.26 Surely the perceived existence of a sect in Italy driven by moral freedom while being “in the Spirit” gave extra weight to reports from the Rhenish delegations27 about yet another sect with apparently similar aspirations along the Rhine. To counter that new danger, several participants in Marguerite Porete’s trial – the one “Free Spirit” who actually conveyed her ideas to parchment – were at hand28; hence, we may assume, the list of eight errors we find in Ad nostrum.

• 29 Walter Simons, “In Praise of Faithful Women: Count Robert of Flanders’s Defense of Beguines Again (...)

15The multifaceted background of Cum de quibusdam and Ad nostrum accounts for the variety of measures they instigated, not to mention a great deal of confusion in regions where beguines and beghards were a common sight, namely the Low Countries, the Rhineland, and parts of central and northern Germany. Even before the official publication of the decrees on 1 November 1317, news about the decisions had filtered down to lower echelons of the clergy. Drawing up his testament on 11 July 1316, Giles of Repen, a priest in Tongeren (in the diocese of Liège, within the Empire) who wanted to bequeath land to the local beguinage of St Catherine, was aware of the danger and designated an alternate beneficiary of the bequest in case, “God forbid”, the beguinage “were destroyed by the Roman Curia”29.

• 30 Ghent, Rijksarchief, Begijnhof van O.L.V. Ter Hooie, charter nr. 41 of 25 February 1318 (contempo (...)
• 31 Vilvoorde, Carmelite convent Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Troost, Archief, nr. 214A, fol. 3v and nr. 206, (...)

16He was a wise man. In the southwestern part of the Low Countries, the bishop of Tournai implemented Cum de quibusdam on 25 February 1318. Having decided – quite correctly, as we have seen – that beguine life as a collective, quasi-religious enterprise was now illegal, his officialis ordered rural deans in the diocese to announce the decretal to women living in such communities, to warn them against the consequences of violating it (excommunication), and to confiscate goods they held in common30. East of Tournai, in the neighboring diocese of Cambrai, beguines at Vilvoorde (in Brabant, also in the Empire) were excommunicated because they refused to observe Cum de quibusdam and lay down their habits; they relented eventually and on 25 November 1319 auxiliary bishop John of Viseu allowed the “women formerly known as beguines” (domicelle seu mulieres que beghine vocari consueverunt) to receive absolution by the rural dean of Brussels after confessing their sin and performing appropriate penance31.

• 32 A petition by count Robert of Flanders to Pope John XXII, probably written in early 1319, vividly (...)
• 33 Liège, Archives de l’État, Béguinage de Saint-Christophe, chartes, nr. 29, ed. M. D.–D. Brouwers, (...)

17These measures were particularly devastating in the Low Countries, where urban beguines often (though not always) united in “court beguinages” (curtes beguinarum, begijnhoven, cours de beguines, Beginenhöfe), walled neighborhoods in which beguines resided in private homes as well as “convents” (where novices were trained), making use of their own church, hospital, and common funds for the poor and sick. While theoretically Cum de quibusdam allowed members of those “courts” to continue their individual devotional practices (without their beguine habit, of course), the loss of collective property impaired the normal functioning of the courts and fatally crippled their support of novices, poor, and elderly women32. The dissolution of the overarching community structure naturally also undermined group discipline, as shown at the old and very large beguinage of Saint-Christophe in Liège, home of (probably) more than a thousand women. On 28 June 1320 two external clerics, aided by the bishop’s officialis, appointed by the bishop to administer “the property of the corporation that formerly was the beguinage” (bonorum quondam beghinagii corporis seu collegii), called for help of all priests in the city of Liège – and potentially “the secular arm” (auxilium bracij secularis) – to restore order in the now rudderless community of Saint-Christophe, where beguines previously expelled for sexual license had returned, pregnant, and were now living with their lovers in houses of the former beguinage, along with women who tried to continue their devout life33.

• 34 Voigt, Beginen, p. 206-212, 273-276, mentions examples but nevertheless claims all of this was vo (...)
• 35 In their policy regarding beguines in the years 1317-1330, Church authorities of the Low Countrie (...)
• 36 For Flanders, see above, note 32. PSB, p. 148-153, nr. 4, published an undated answer by Pope Joh (...)
• 37 Also found in the undated letter to the bishop of Strassburg mentioned above (see note 36) and in (...)
• 38 Ed. in Friedberg, Corpus, vol. 2, col. 1279–1280 (dated 20 June 1328, see Tarrant, “Clementine De (...)
• 39 On 19 January 1336 (Vilvoorde, Carmelite convent Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Troost, Archief, nr. 214A, (...)
• 40 Makowski, “A Pernicious Sort”, p. 47-50, considers why Ratio recta featured so rarely in the writ (...)

18A somewhat different situation presented itself in Germany, where beguines lived not in large courts but in autonomous houses, sometimes owned by an individual (for instance the founding member of the group), in which case the “escape clause” of Cum de quibusdam could be applied more readily. But there, too, women were forced to dispose of common property and in some areas shunned the label “beguine” and possibly beguine dress34. Even more importantly, suspicion of heresy, articulated by Ad nostrum with regard to beghards and beguines specifically located in Alemannia, naturally was more pronounced in these parts, although not everywhere35. Both in the Low Countries and the Rhineland authorities asked the papacy to clarify the decrees36. Pope John XXII gestured toward further instructions on 13 August 1318 in Ratio recta (Extrav. Comm. 3.9.1), which conceded there were “women called beguines living in their parents’ home or in their own home, sometimes in other homes they rent or own together”, who “lived rightly” and whom he therefore did not want to suppress; in fact, bishops should protect them from harassment. While John allowed those faithful beguines to live alone or even together (the latter option forming a new element in papal policy)37, he explicitly “did not want to approve with this letter the statu[s] beghinarum nor their practices”, and once again ordered bishops to act against suspect beguines, even if they no longer wore the habit and changed their status38. Moreover, it is unclear to whom this letter was sent or how it was published. It certainly did not circulate widely; it appears to have been unknown in the Low Countries (and perhaps also in the Rhineland?) until its inclusion in the Extravagantes communes by John’s successor, Pope Benedict XI (1334–1342), who reissued Ratio recta with small changes in 133639; even then, canon lawyers did not discuss it until the late fourteenth century40.

• 41 Ed. CDIN, vol. 1, p. 170-171, nr. 175 (with corrections in vol. 2, p. 386), for Tournai; Huanan L (...)
• 42 Simons, Cities, p. 133-134.
• 43 See Mollat, Lettres communes, nrs. 16015, 16016, 19808, 22537, 22538.
• 44 In May 1327 King Charles IV of France issued new statutes for the beguinage of Paris, stating tha (...)
• 45 Simons, Cities, p. 133-134 and Florence Koorn, Begijnhoven in Holland en Zeeland gedurende de mid (...)
• 46 ADN, 40 H 552/1336, ed. Lu, “Marguerite Porete”, p. 480-485 (see above note 41); the document was (...)
• 47 Simons, “In Praise”, p. 347.
• 48 Simons, Cities, p. 135. The fate of beguine convents outside the “court” structures is not clear; (...)

19Only in late 1320 and 1321 did pope John XXII issue more precise instructions for the implementation of Cum de quibusdam. The new directive, Cum de mulieribus, sent out to the bishops of Tournai, Cambrai, and Paris (whose offices passed it on to bishops in Germany, including Cologne and Utrecht) on 31 December 1320, and to the bishop of Arras on 24 November 1321, once again acknowledged that some beguines might be praiseworthy––even some of those practicing a common life (here the new decree concurred with Ratio recta); it ordered bishops to review the women’s way of life, and if they were indeed beyond reproach, to protect them against harassment until the Holy See made another decision in their matter, and to warn such women not to engage in speculation about the Trinity and the other “insane” arguments mentioned in Cum de quibusdam41. Although this decree did not “settle” the question of the status beguinarum and never made it into the body of canon law (after all, Cum de mulieribus was only a set of executive directives), it did form a basis for episcopal action in favor of beguines in some dioceses, albeit slowly, and only after serious lobbying by beguines and their supporters42: reiterated for Liège and dioceses in France between 1322 and 132543, Cum de mulieribus generated episcopal inquiries in the large beguinages of the dioceses of Cambrai, Arras, Tournai, Liège (and Paris44), followed by letters of protection, between 1323 and 1328 (the bishop of Utrecht granted protection for beguines in his diocese after a more peremptory review in 1323)45. The report of one such inquiry, at the beguinage of St Elizabeth in Valenciennes on 4 August 1323, mentions Marghoneta, a former member of the community who was condemned for heresy and in whom, thanks to Huanan Lu, we recognize Marguerite Porete46. All court beguinages visited by agents of the bishops, including that of Tongeren (whose survival seemed in doubt as early as 1316, as we have seen), received approval. The women resumed their former life as beguines and regained their gray habits, a matter of great importance for beguine identity and noted with evident satisfaction by a beguine of Ghent47, but the recovery of their collective property took time and more inquiries were to follow in the 1330s48.

• 49 See Hugolinus Lippens, “Le droit nouveau des mendiants en conflit avec le droit coutumier du cler (...)
• 50 Wehrli-Johns, “Mystik”, p. 246.
• 51 At that time, Franciscan Tertiaries were not a religious order by the norms of canon law, but the (...)
• 52 Incorporated in the unofficial Extrauagantes Iohannis XXII, ed. J. Tarrant, Vatican City: Bibliot (...)
• 53 Many recent studies have shown that a massive transition by beguines to the Franciscan Third Orde (...)

20Meanwhile in the Rhineland, the dynamic that had led to Ad nostrum and was reinforced by it had not yet run its course. Attention now also went out to Franciscan and Dominican friars guiding the women, whether they were formally charged with supervising beguine convents or served as confessors of individual beguines. Moreover, in contrast to the Low Countries, where the large court beguinages formed autonomous parishes with their own churches and clergy, beguines of the Rhineland were usually subject to the same parochial authority as ordinary lay people. The growing influence of Dominican and Franciscan friars over beguines in Rhenish cities thus came at the expense of the secular clergy and had important financial repercussions for those parish priests. The issue became part of the wider debate, brewing since the mid-thirteenth century and treated at Vienne as well, about the entrenched rights of the secular clergy, threatened by papal privileges for the Mendicant orders49. The problem posed itself in its most acute form when lay women, like beguines, made profession as Tertiaries, i.e. became members of the Franciscan Third Order for lay “penitents”, which bound them more tightly to Franciscan supervision. Accordingly, the implementation of the Clementine decrees in the Rhineland became wrapped into a larger set of ecclesiological contests that in this age of strife between Pope John XXII and Emperor Louis of Bavaria (ruled 1314–1347) necessarily acquired a political dimension as well50. On a more practical level, the implications were these: becoming Tertiaries might51 save beguines from the accusation (articulated in Cum de quibusdam) that they did not live according to an approved rule, but it exposed them to greater suspicion (triggered by Ad nostrum) that they embraced Free-Spirit or other heretical positions associated with the Spiritual Franciscans and their Tertiary cousins in southern France, the Beguins, condemned in Sancta Romana on 30 December 131752. In certain areas of Germany, and at certain times, this could be hazardous; it surely explains why few beguine communities benefiting from elite support chose that route upon the publication of the Clementines53.

• 54 R. E. Lerner, “Weltklerus und religiöse Bewegung im 13. Jahrhundert. Das Beispiel Philipps des Ka (...)
• 55 See the discussion in Walter Simons, “Beginnings: Naming Beguines in the Southern Low Countries, (...)
• 56 Walter Simons, “Worlds Apart? Beguine Communities of Nivelles and the Abbey of St Gertrude, from (...)
• 57 Simons, Cities, p. 285-286; ADN, 40 H 545/1276, 40 H 630/1839, and Simon Le Boucq, Histoire ecclé (...)

22The first beg(h)uini emerge in Latin sources almost simultaneously with the appearance of the term beguinae, originally a pejorative term intended to mock and discredit the piety of lay women. Robert Lerner found the earliest reference to such men in Philip the Chancellor’s “Distinctions” of c. 1220, where Philip doubted the religio of beghuini “who meet and talk with ‘little women’ behind locked doors”, comparing them to the false prophets seducing mulierculas in 2 Timothy 3:654. Around the same time, continuations of the Annales Colonienses applied the term as a generic synonym of heretics55. There is some evidence to suggest that in the earliest days of the beguine movement, a few lay men were closely associated with local beguine communities. John, the husband of proto-beguine Marie d’Oignies, served the leper colony of Willambroux near Nivelles between c. 1191 and 1211, together with Marie, several other women, and his brother Guido, a priest56. Some of the early beguinages in Flanders and Hainaut that were originally hospitals can be imagined as “double”-beguinages, with a large community of women (beguine in Latin) serving female residents at the hospital, and a smaller community of men (fratres, beguini in Latin) staffing a hospice for men on the same grounds, as for instance at St Elizabeth’s in Lille from c. 1239 until about 1245, and at St Elizabeth’s in Valenciennes from c. 1239 until 125657. But such close proximity of the sexes, always seen as problematic for religious communities, did not last long.

• 58 See Part Four. Begardos: Bruges, Stadsarchief, Reeks 438, oorkonden 1ste reeks, nr. II (22 Decemb (...)

23The first autonomous convents of beguini, unattached to communities of beguinae, are attested around 1245, again in the same Flemish-Hennuyer area: a convent of beghins existed by 1246 in Douai, in so-called “Walloon-Flanders” (the small area of southern Flanders where Walloon French was spoken) and by 1252 also in Bruges, one of the largest cities of Dutch-language Flanders, where the term “beghards” (begardos), makes its appearance, derived from the same root beg-, with the suffix -ard, characterizing a male58.

• 59 See Part Four.

24If beghard convents thus first arose in Flanders, by the third quarter of the thirteenth century we find them also further east, in the small Brabantine city of Diest (1257) and the Brabantine/Liégeois city of Maastricht (1265?). The vast majority of beghard convents in the Low Countries date from the period after 1270: they were established in Middelburg (1271), Nivelles (1272), Brussels (1277), Tienen (1277), Sint-Truiden (1284), and other cities, including Aachen and Cologne, by the early fourteenth century59.

• 60 Examples: Bruges c. 1285, 1292 and c. 1295 (Maurits Gysseling and Willy Pijnenburg, eds., Corpus (...)
• 61 Raymaekers, Het kerkelijk en liefdadig Diest, p. 300; Rob Weckx, “De Diestse schepenakten van 126 (...)
• 62 Walter Simons and Paul Trio, “Begijnen, begarden en tertiarissen in het middeleeuwse Ieper”, Jaar (...)
• 63 ABS, p. 172; Helga Johag, Die Beziehungen zwischen Klerus und Bürgerschaft in Köln zwischen 1250 (...)
• 64 Simons, “Lives of the Beghards”, p. 241; I owe the conversions to Tim Soens and Sam Geens of the (...)
• 65 This seems also the (cautious) conclusion drawn by Johag, Beziehungen, p. 212.

25Most, but not all, beghards worked in the textile industry. Wherever these convents generated a cache of records, we find evidence of beghard workshops with looms for weaving wool or linen cloth (sometimes both), and of guild-imposed restrictions on their use60. This is not to say that all beghards were simple proletarian workers. Some of their leading figures came from the “best” families and were wealthy. Jan Stokere, master of the beghards in Diest in 1263–1271, belonged to the city’s “patriciate” class, was alderman in 1248, and sponsored several charitable and ecclesiastical organizations61. Of the 22 beghards at the Ypres convent known by name between 1298 and 1319, at least two were scions of the Paeldincs and Oudinzeles, both among the city’s most prominent lineages62. The two beghards who initiated the Olvunde community in Cologne in 1291, both of them probably burghers, were able to purchase buildings and land with their own funds63. And in the main convent of Bruges in 1292, every brother was expected to contribute an entry fee of 3 £ par. (50 s. for lodging and 10 s. for the common fund that supported the elderly and infirm members). That was about 40 days of pay for a skilled worker or about 276 days of living costs (housing excluded) for a person, which probably made it out of reach for lowly textile laborers64. In other words, while the rank and file probably consisted of artisans of middling but not insubstantial means, members of the urban elite occupied prime positions in these beghard communities and brought with them, we may assume, influential support at the town hall65.

• 66 ABS, p. 171; other examples in Hugo Stehkämper, Bürger und Kirchen in Köln im Hochmittelalter, Co (...)
• 67 Theo Coun, Oorkonden van de graven van Loon. Deel 2. Oorkonden van Arnold IV en Jan (1227–1278), (...)
• 68 HA, Abdij Sint-Truiden, charters, nr. 279, ed. Charles Piot, Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Saint-Tron (...)
• 69 Henri Pirenne, ed., Le livre de l’abbé Guillaume de Ryckel (1249–1272). Polyptique et comptes de (...)
• 70 See Sean L. Field and Walter Simons, “A Prophecy Fulfilled? An Annotated Translation of the Sourc (...)
• 71 See Part Four: Sint-Truiden, Beghards.

26Throughout the thirteenth century, beghards might also live alone, in cities where they ultimately formed convents (at Cologne, a certain Engelbert, “beghard”, owned a house in the Gereonstrasse as early as 1258, and several other such cases are known around 130066), but sometimes even in rural settings. In February 1263, William of Kermt donated several pieces of land he held in fief from the count of Loon to the Cistercian nuns of Herkenrode near Hasselt. When eighteen years later he promised to give more land after his death for distribution to the poor at the abbey gate, William was living near the abbey as a “beghard” (Willelmus de Kempte, begardus, qui nobiscum moratur in Herkenrode)67. Another document from the same region and roughly from the same period offers details of such an arrangement. In 1257, William of Rijkel, abbot of the ancient Benedictine monastery of Sint-Truiden, recorded that a certain Renier of Hulst had donated to his abbey his farm and all of his property at Hulst. In return, the abbey accepted him for the rest of his life as a lodger within the cloister enclosure, where he would receive the same daily food allowance as the monks (but not wine) and meat portions like members of the familia, as well as clothing and nursing care. He would serve at the table and work at the granary when the abbot asked him, and he could not leave the enclosure nor practice a worldly trade. Combining the benefits of a wealthy retiree with service duties, Renier’s condition was made even more curious by one other stipulation: although Renier could not commit himself to a rule because of his weak body, “he promised to live in chastity, religiously, and rightfully in the manner of beghards” (caste tamen, religiose et honeste ad modum becgardorum promisit de cetero se habere). Master Renier of Tongeren, the bishop of Liège’s agent charged with supervision of beguines and recluses in the diocese, co-sealed the abbot’s document, which cites among the witnesses two lay men, “brother Walter and brother Robin, beghards”, who did not live at the abbey68. Thanks to abbot William’s detailed notebook for the years 1249-1260, we know that in addition to those three, at least four other beghards lived in Sint-Truiden. A Theodericus becghardus received wages as one of the abbey’s five servants in 1250 and presumably resided with the monks in the enclosure. An Arnold becgardus, location unknown, was given a muid of rye in the August harvest of 1256, probably as a return on a life-rent he bought from the abbey. Another beghard, Herman, who lived near the parish church of St Gangulf, collected a daily ration of bread in 1253 as one of eight people hand-picked by abbot William to be granted such distributions for one year; others chosen that year were five recluses attached to different churches in the city and two beguines. At the beginning of Lent of the following year, 1254, William did the same for eight others: a Franciscan friar, struck by leprosy, whom William called “a holy man” (vir sanctus); “Peter the beghard, who lives near the parish church of St Peter, a poor and religious man”, William noted (Petrus de Sancto Petro becgardus, vir pauper et religiosus); and six women, each called “a beguine and religious maiden” (becgina, puella religiosa)69. William of Rijkel was in many ways a conventional and rather worldly Benedictine. Before joining the monastery in 1249, he had served as a secretary of Count William of Holland (king of Germany in 1248-1256), and he is best known as a hard-nosed administrator of his abbey’s estates. But he had a keen eye for the newer forms of religious life and the appeal of lay charisma. He founded the beguinage of Sint-Truiden in 1258 and from c. 1265 until his death in 1274, he supported the young stigmatized laywoman, Elizabeth of Spalbeek, who lived with her mother and sisters some fifteen kilometers north of Sint-Truiden70. Whether he was also instrumental in finding a collective home in his city for those scattered beghards is not certain: their convent, with a weaving shop, is recorded only from 1284 onwards71.

• 72 Ernest W. McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture. With Special Emphasis on the (...)

27A larger point may be made here: in all of the above data on beghards in the Low Countries and the Lower Rhine between c. 1230 and c. 1280, not a murmur of disapproval can be heard. We know they had their detractors, who mocked their piety and questioned their sincerity72 - as happened to beguines – but broad sections of society respected them and both ecclesiastical and secular leaders supported them.

• 73 Raymaekers, Het kerkelijk en liefdadig Diest, p. 298, note 1 and p. 461.
• 74 Examples: Bruges 1290 (Brugge, Rijksarchief, Kerkarchief Onze-Lieve-Vrouw te Brugge, oorkonden nr (...)

28New developments toward the end of the thirteenth century not only changed the course of beghard history but also bring into focus a new type of beghards, the lollards. Firstly, just about everywhere, the existing beghard convents acquired a chapel, served by a priest. Originally, beghards attended religious services in their respective parish churches; in at least one case, in Diest, beghards worshipped at the church of the main beguinage (which formed an autonomous parish), where the right side of the choir was known as the chorus beghardorum until 132273. However, starting in 1277 and until the 1320s, from Bruges to Cologne, over Ghent, Mechelen, Tienen, Zoutleeuw, Maastricht, and Aachen, beghard convents built their own chapels where daily mass was said and perhaps vespers were also sung74. It was yet another sign of high-level support for the beghards, since construction was expensive, the chaplains needed to be assured a steady income, and of course parish clergy needed to approve the new chaplaincies, which invariably cut into their own income.

• 76 Vannérus, “Documents…Malines”, p. 237-238, nr. 2.

30Four months later, on 24 July 1286, William I of Avesnes, bishop elect of Cambrai, ordered all priests of Mechelen to ensure that any beghard of the city who has been expelled from his convent “because of excesses or for any other reasonable cause”, or “who left his convent foolishly”, would lay down the beghard habit, on pain of public excommunication after seven days76. Weavers formed a large, mobile, and often rebellious population in cities of the Low Countries and Lower Rhine. The 1270s saw heightened social unrest in Flanders because of economic conflict with England, disrupting the textile industry in 1270-1274 and escalating disputes about labor and governance in major cities, as expressed in the Moerlemaye of 1280–1281, the first great Bruges revolt. But it is hard to see how Guy’s measures against problematic beghards would fit into that context, and the intervention by the bishop of Cambrai in Mechelen clearly points to issues of religious discipline rather than social or political strife. Neither of these missives necessarily implies heresy but at the very least they reveal tensions among beghards.

• 77 Saint-Omer was located in the Dutch (Flemish)-speaking part of Flanders, but by 1300 French began (...)
• 78 For all of these quotations, see Part Four, entries for Cologne, Lollards (a); Saint-Omer, Lollar (...)

31I would suggest that a third major development, the appearance of “begging beghards” or lollards, and their female counterparts, the swesteren, explains those tensions. In the last years of the thirteenth century, urban records of private law (wills, donations to ecclesiastical and charitable organizations) for the first time provide evidence about communities of lay men and women who, while they are generally subsumed under the label of beghards and beguines, nonetheless are distinguished from them by certain recurring qualifications. The men are called “beghards of voluntary poverty” (beggard[i] voluntarie paupertatis: Cologne, 1306)—a phrase never applied to the “old-style” beghards—, or “poor, begging beghards” (pauperis becgardis mendicantibus: Cologne, 1317), or, in the vernacular languages, “brothers…beghards who demand ‘Bread for God’ (brueder…die man heischt Backerde, und brodt um Gott heischen: Cologne, 1358, in German), “the voluntary poor whom one calls ‘Bread for God’” (ly povre de volenté que on dist broot omme gode: Saint-Omer, 1331, in a curious mix of French and Dutch77), “brethren of the willing poor” (broeders van den willighen haerme: Bruges, 1348, in Dutch)78. First emerging in Cologne, the new type of beghards spread in the following decades throughout the southern Low Countries, and the most popular name by which they became known, “lollards”, is of Flemish/Dutch origin.

• 79 Godefroid Kurth, ed., La Chronique de Jean de Hocsem, Brussels, Kiessling, 1927, p. 127 (see also (...)

32Current scholarship on the first recordings of the term “lollard” on the continent, long before it became applied in England to denote followers of Wyclif, points to a passage in the chronicle of the liégeois canon Jean de Hocsem (d. 1348), about a group of “wandering hypocrites, called lollards, or praisers of God” (quidam gyrovagi, qui lollardi sive Deum laudantes vocantur), deceiving noble ladies in Brabant and Hainaut in 1309. The rather fantastic story is based on hearsay (Hocsem wrote in 1334-1348, in Liège, at considerable distance in time and space from the events), but it is partially confirmed by the Tournai abbot, Gilles li Muisis (d. 1352), writing in 1347-1349 that those “men going jointly about the land feigning religion in their actions and dress … in those days were commonly called ‘Praise God’” (quidam se mutuo coadunantes, euntes per patriam, fingentes se religiosos actu et habitu…et vocati fuerunt tunc temporis tales religionem fingentes vulgariter “Loes Dieu”)79. Whether any lollards truly played a role in this bizarre episode is doubtful, but the two sources indicate that by 1334-1349, the term “lollards” was an insult used by detractors in much the same way as was “beghards” since the early thirteenth century, to denote (itinerant) men with dubious claims to devotion. French-speakers apparently thought it was derived from the phrase Louez Dieu, “praise God”.

• 80 Ghent, Rijksarchief, Bisdom Gent, S 501, 502, 503 (see also Part Four: Ghent, Lollards). I first (...)
• 81 See Part Two, notes 70-74.
• 82 Part Four: Antwerp, Lollards, and Veurne, Lollards; Jan Van Acker, “Het ontstaan en de vroegste g (...)
• 83 See Pierre Bougard and Maurits Gysseling, L’impôt royal en Artois (1295–1302), Louvain, Imprimeri (...)
• 84 The phenomenon left multiple traces in Flemish/Dutch and is clearly linked to social strife, see (...)

33In reality, the earliest use of the term “lollard” precedes those two French examples by more than a decade and features the term in a different light. It is found in the accounts of the Poor Table of St Nicolas parish in central Ghent, which recorded, in the local Dutch vernacular, annual subsidies made to “Brother Jacob de Bake, lollard” (broeder Jacob de Bake, lollaert) from 1321 until 132480. Poor Tables (also known as Holy Ghost Tables) were semi-official institutions of the Low Countries with oversight of the parish dole. The accounts were kept annually and contemporaneously. Payments were usually made out only to individuals (sometimes also to institutions) deemed trustworthy and genuinely indigent. A regular dole distribution of this kind bore the stamp of social approval, sanctioned by leading men of the parish. Jacob, who must have been a resident of the parish (de Bake was a common family name in Ghent), presumably took charge of a house where “lollards” and other poor people could find shelter. That arrangement would fit with what we know of lollard settlements in Antwerp and Veurne in the mid-fourteenth century81. By 1346, the Ghent lollards were living on the edge of the city and were known in local Dutch as “brethren who live by the walls and are called lollards” (broeders up de veste … die men heet lollarts). In Antwerp, the earliest documents (1346) refer to them in local Dutch as “humble men called ‘lollards’” (matemanne die men heet lollaerde). In Veurne, in 1351, they were “willing poor called lollards, who beg for their bread” (den ghewilleghe aermen lieden die men heet lollaerts, die hare broot bidden, also in Dutch)82. The term made some inroads into German lands in the second half of the fourteenth century but never dominated there. The most plausible etymology of the name is strikingly similar to that of “beguine” or “beghard”: just as the (proto-) Indo-European root begg- generated terms that evoke unclear speech, stammering or murmuring (a beguina is a woman whose claim to devout speech cannot be trusted; compare the French bégayer), the root loll- led to the Middle Dutch verb lollen, murmuring prayers – hence the invented “French” etymology, loes Dieu, which we find in the works of Hocsem and li Muisis83. The process is part of a larger socio-linguistic phenomenon associating subordinate groups with subversive orality84. As with beguines and beghards, the lollards’ apparent piety was not sanctioned by ecclesiastical recognition. In the Ghent, Antwerp, and Veurne cases just cited, however, that piety gained popular acclaim nonetheless.

• 85 Part Four: Aachen, Lollards.
• 86 Cyriel Vleeschouwers, De oorkonden van de Sint-Baafsabdij te Gent (819–1321), Brussels, Koninklij (...)

34As the fourteenth century advanced, the difference between old-style and new-style beghards became so obvious that contemporaries often distinguished them by different names, “beghards” for the former, “lollards”, “begging beghards”, or “willing poor [beghards]” for the latter. Occasionally, in certain parts of Germany, they were called “Weaving beghards” (Webbegarden) and “Bred beghards” (Brotbegarden) respectively, as for instance in the city accounts of Aachen in 139185. That usage goes to the heart of the distinction between the two, expressed in many of our sources. As we have seen, beghards in settled communities made a living in the manufacturing of woolen or linen cloth, or in auxiliary tasks like combing wool. Although they used common dormitories and refectories, and pooled resources to support ailing or elderly brothers in their community, they did not forsake private property, and each brother was in principle expected to earn his own income. We also noted that by the late thirteenth century collective prayer and a (limited) office service in the convents’ chapels became customary among beghards, justifying the abbot of St Bavo’s assessment that in 1315, the beghards of Ghent “were leading a contemplative life” (vitam gerentes contemplativam)86.

• 87 Andrew Brown and Jan Dumolyn, eds., Medieval Bruges, c. 850–1550, Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge Univ (...)
• 88 Critics of beghards sometimes associated them with begging, and a late (1326) reference demonstra (...)
• 89 Edmond Faral and Julia Bastin, eds., Œuvres complètes de Rutebeuf, vol. 1, Paris, A. et J. Picard (...)
• 90 See above, notes 18-20. Historians often mention a decree against beghards using the slogan, supp (...)
• 91 Annales colmarienses maiores, ed. Philipp Jaffé, in MGH, SS, vol. 17, p. 183-232 at p. 227-228; s (...)
• 92 Cause and effect are difficult to distinguish here because we may be ignoring precedents, but we (...)

35None of this was true for the lollards, as I will call them henceforth. The references to their “voluntary” or “willing poverty” that we have seen, were apt: lollards did not allow private property except perhaps a few personal belongings, and any earnings made were shared with others in the community, which in turn owned very little. Although some of the brothers may have worked in textiles (as did around 50% of the working population in industrial centers like Ghent87), their houses did not have weaving workshops. At least part of their income must have come from begging “for bread, for the love of God”, which they did publicly and quite ardently, if we can believe the bishops’ complaints, again in contrast to the traditional beghards88. The slogan Brot durch Gott was almost half a century old when lollards adopted it, probably in imitation of the Mendicant friars. In his “L’État du Monde” of shortly before 1265, Rutebeuf has the friars of Paris (Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites and Brothers of the Sack) marching through the city shouting “Give bread to the friars, for God”89. Reports of suspect “beghards” using the phrase started with the decrees of the Council of Mainz in 1310 (their public begging had been denounced by the archbishop of Cologne in 1307) and became a staple of synodal (and later also papal) decrees against them90. The terms applied to the lollards in secular sources, examined above, indicate that, from that time on, the slogan served as a signifier for them in the public mind as well. Several incidents suggest that co-opting the “Mendicant” cry was intentional, part of a deliberate strategy to present an alternative to the friars. How else should we understand a story in the Annales colmarienses maiores, of eighty “beghards” who descended upon the Dominican convent of Basel at the time of the Dominican provincial chapter meeting of 1302, to demand alms? Obviously it was a staged performance, which they repeated the next year in Colmar, now “thirty” men strong, filing in rows of two or three and begging for alms in front of the convent where Franciscans of the Cologne province were holding their annual meeting91. Historians may appreciate the “in your face” bravado of these men, but we should remember that it may have earned them the lasting animosity of the Mendicant leadership92. (These “begging challenges” are not mentioned later.)

• 93 Gałuszka and Kras, The Beguines of Medieval Świdnica, p. 80, 87, 184, 222, 230, 254, and Letha Bö (...)
• 94 See Part Four, entries for these houses.
• 95 Part Four: Veurne, Lollards.
• 96 As has been noted by Johag, Beziehungen, p. 145-147 and Böhringer, “Merging”, p. 176-178.
• 97 Public begging by religious women was unusual.
• 98 From HFS, p. 92, one might conclude (the phrasing is ambiguous) that, in the sense of “female lay (...)

36Finally, lollards distinguished themselves from traditional beghards by a close association with a new type of “beguines”, called swesteren in German and Dutch (swestrices, swestriones, and variants, in Latin). Swester or sister was of course a common medieval German term used for nuns, hospital sisters, and sometimes also for beguines, but in the last decade of the thirteenth century, first in Cologne, it acquired a special meaning: a lay woman who lived in voluntary poverty and relinquished private property (in contrast with traditional beguines, who generally – there were exceptions – were allowed to hold personal property) to share life and goods with like-minded women in a house or “convent” (in Cologne often called an einung, or union, a term also known by the sisters of Świdnica in 1332 and in fifteenth-century Strassburg93). Although secular sources rarely mention it, these swesteren must also have distinguished themselves from traditional beguines in their dress. They were sorores benevole pauperes que suester dicuntur (convent of the Kupfergasse in Cologne, 1299), voluntarie pauperes scilicet beggine and pauperes beghine que nunc dicuntur swesteren (convent of Zederwald in Cologne, 1302 and 1317), beghine voluntarie pauperes (convent behind the Allerheiligen hospital in Cologne, 1316; a will of 1317 refers to them as pauperibus benevolis scilicet swestris), pauper[es] soror[es] and sorores dict[e] suestere (Louvain, 1333 and 1334), puellis pauperibus propter Deum pro pane suo euntibus (Spitze convent in Cologne, 1339) and, in French, povres volontaires, demandans pain pour l’amour de Dieu (Mons, 1351)94. A curious and possibly unique term appears in Veurne in 1377, where the swesteren are called lollighen in Dutch, or “female lollards”95. The terminology summarized above bears inconsistencies, observers sometimes hesitating between “beguine” and “sister”96, but the qualifying phrases, often similar to those used for the men, are striking, and the Cologne 1339 and Mons 1351 references attest that – and this is quite remarkable97 – these women went out begging just like the male lollards, using the same slogan as the men. It is also important to clarify that originally the term swester did not carry a connotation of heresy or suspect behavior98, and records of civil administration or private transactions in the Cologne area and the Low Countries continued to use it after 1317 (when Church decrees began to apply the term to female suspects of heresy), except during the height of the anti-swesteren campaign, from 1323 to 1333.

• 99 Ed. EQ, vol. 4, p. 32-35, nr. 35 (21 April 1317).
• 100 Johannes de Tiela, lollardus, is a witness in HBHIC, Zwartzusters Den Bosch, inv. nr. 38 (10 Febr (...)
• 101 Details can be found in Part Four: Antwerp, Lollards; Antwerp, Swesteren; Bruges, Lollards; Bruge (...)

37The partnership between lollards and swesteren described in Rhenish episcopal legislation of 1307-1310 and in Ad nostrum, discussed earlier, is thus not an invention of the authorities but reflects a real commonality. It is expressed in wills, as when Adolf de Revele of Cologne made donations to the “common good-willing poor, namely swesteren and beghards” of Cologne (communibus pauperibus benevolis, scilicet swestris et becgardis, 1317)99; in the presence of a lollard at a joined meeting of two swesteren communities in ‘s-Hertogenbosch in 1361100; or in the simultanous creation of houses for lollards and swesteren in Antwerp (1345) and again in Bruges (1348). The Antwerp case is particularly illuminating. The two foundation charters, one for the men and the other for the women, were drawn up on the same day and are practically identical; the entire text of the endowment, including the description of the residents and instructions for running the convent, is exactly the same for the men’s house and for the women’s house101.

• 102 See Part Four: Cologne, Swesteren, a, b, d, e, f.
• 103 Letha Böhringer, “Die Schwestern und Töchter der Odelind von Pyritz. Ein überregionales Netwerk v (...)

40Perhaps more importantly, our current data also suggest the first communities of swesteren were formed before lollards started theirs. This is certainly true for a convent in Cologne’s Kupfergasse founded in 1299 and at least two others attested in the city before 1306, when the first lollard house came about. As a matter of fact, two Cologne convents of “beguines” founded in 1282 and 1291 were known as swesteren houses in the fourteenth century; if these women were actually swesteren from the start, their communities preceded the men’s houses by more than a decade102. In two new publications, Letha Böhringer has drawn attention to Odelind of Pyrzyce, the founder of the Cologne house established in 1291, who was recognized as inspirational by the so-called Hooded or Cowled Sisters interrogated by an inquisitor in far-away Świdnica, Silesia, in 1332, and by swesteren in Swabian Augsburg in 1348103. At the present state of our research, there is no reason to believe Odelind was the “founder” of the entire movement of swesteren and lollards (none of the houses I examined appears to be linked to her), or that the practices described in the interrogation of 1332 were imposed by her and/or adopted by swesteren and lollards everywhere. Still, Odelind must have been a charismatic personality, and more broadly, swesteren clearly played a large role in the movement. In short, we should not assume these women were mere followers of the suspect men, as the archbishop of Cologne (1307), the Council of Mainz (1310), and indeed Ad nostrum (1317) pictured them, in line with the old stereotype of mulierculas seduced by false prophets. To those decrees and their effects on both swesteren and lollards, we will turn in Part Two.