The religious confraternities in Aquitaine date from the appearance of the routiers at the close of the twelfth century.  These routiers were then chiefly Brabancons, Aragonese, and Germans.  According to an ecclesiastical author and local historian, the Abbe Debon, the lawless bands spread such terror through the country that they stopped the pilgrims from going to Figeac, Conques, and other places that had obtained a reputation for holiness.  A canon of Le Puy in Auvergne, much distressed by the desertion of the sanctuary of Notre Dame de Puy, which rivals that of Roc-Amadour in antiquity, formed the design of instituting a confraternity to wage war against the routiers and destroy them.  A ‘pious fraud’ was adopted.  A young man, having been dressed so as to impersonate Notre Dame du Puy, appeared to a carpenter who was in the habit of praying every night in the cathedral, and gave him the mission of revealing that it was the will of the Holy Virgin that a confraternity should be formed to put down the brigands and establish peace in the country.  Hundreds of men enrolled themselves at once.  The confreres, from the fact that they wore hoods of white linen, obtained the name of Chaperons Blancs.  Upon their breasts hung a piece of lead with this inscription:  ’Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi dona nobis pacem.’  The confraternity spread into Aquitaine, and the routiers were defeated in pitched battles with great slaughter; but the chaperons in course of time became lawless fanatics, and were almost as great a nuisance to society as those whom they had undertaken to exterminate.  They were nevertheless the ancestors in a sense of the confraternities of penitents who, at a later period, became so general in Europe.

The monthly fair at Figeac offers some curious pictures of rural life.  The peasants crowd in from the valleys and the surrounding causses.  Racial differences, or those produced by the influences of soil and food—­especially water—­for a long series of generations, are very strongly marked.  There is the florid, robust, blue-eyed, sanguine type, and there is the leaden-coloured, black-haired, lantern-jawed, sloping-shouldered, and hollow-chested type.  Then there are the intermediates.  Considered generally, these peasants of the Haut-Quercy are not fine specimens of the human animal.  They are dwarfed, and very often deformed.  Their almost exclusively vegetable diet, their excessive toil, and the habit of drinking half-putrid rain-water from cisterns which they very rarely clean, may possibly explain this physical degeneration of the Cadurci.  Their character is honest in the main, but distrustful and superficially insincere by nature or the force of circumstance.  Their worst qualities are shown at a fair, where they cheat as much as they can, and place no limit to lying.  Their canon of morality there is that everyone must look after himself.  I have been assured by a priest that they never think of confessing the lies