Facts and Documents Illustrative of the History, Doctrine and Rites of the Ancient Vallenses and Albigenses

may have been, and whatever opportunity he might have had of obtaining exact information respecting what had happened (even on Mr. Faber’s supposition that he spoke of the Albigenses) more than two centuries and a half before, he does not in fact say anything of Albigenses or Crusaders—or of any community, of any kind, joining any other community. He simply charges the inhabitants of a certain valley with being heretics at that time (certainly as late as A.D. 1489) and with having been so from time immemorial, or (as he explains the phrase) upwards of a century; and he traces the origin of the sect in those parts to some fugitive Waldensians who had been formerly driven out of Lyons.

Leger, as will be seen, attributes it to Albertus de Capitaneis; and Perrin quotes it as his; and I cannot help thinking that I have seen something to that effect in Morland, though I cannot find it. In his account, however, of the manuscripts contained in the volume entitled Codex G., Morland places this one as No. 3, and entitles it “A Latin Treatise called Origin of the Waldenses, and the processes conducted against them, A.D. 1501.” I can scarcely suppose that, by the word “contemporaneous,” Mr. Faber meant us to understand a contemporary of his own; yet it would really be less incorrect to predicate that of the Inquisitor, than to represent him as “contemporaneous” with Simon de Montfort’s Crusaders. The year 1501 was longer after the death of Simon de Montfort, than before the birth of Mr. Faber.