The heat of the day had commenced when I reached the village of Lescure.  This place is of very ancient origin.  Looking at it now, and its agricultural population numbering little more than a thousand, it is difficult to realize its importance in the Middle Ages.  The castle and the adjacent land were given in the year 1003 by King Robert to his old preceptor, the learned Gerbert, who became known to posterity as Pope Sylvester II.  In the eleventh century, Lescure was, therefore, a fief of the Holy See; and in the time of Simon de Montfort the inhabitants were still vassals of the Pope.  In the fourteenth century they were frequently at war with the people of Albi, who eventually got the upper hand.  Then Sicard, the Baron of Lescure, was so completely humiliated that he not only consented to pay eighty gold livres to the consuls of Albi, but went before them bareheaded to ask pardon for himself and his vassals.  Already the feudal system was receiving hard blows in the South of France from the growth of the communes and the authority vested in their consuls.  What is left of the feudal grandeur of Lescure?  The castle was sold in the second year of the Republic, and entirely demolished, with the exception of the chapel, which is now the parish church.  Of the outer fortifications there remains a brick gateway, with Gothic arch carrying a high machicolated tower, connected to which is a fragment of the wall.  To this old houses, half brick, half wood, still cling, like those little wasps’ nests that one sees sometimes upon the sides of the rocks.

On entering the small fourteenth-century church, I found that it had been decorated for a funeral.  A broad band of black drapery, upon which had been sewn at intervals Death’s heads and tears, cut out of white calico, was hung against the wall of the apse, and carried far down each side of the nave.  To me all those grinning white masks were needless torture to the mourners; but here again we are brought to recognise that taste is a matter of education.

More interesting than anything else in this church is the Romanesque holy-water stoup, with heads and crosses carved upon it, and possibly belonging to the original chapel of the castle.  The chief archaeological treasure, however, of Lescure is a church on a little hill above the village, and overlooking the Tarn.  It is dedicated to St. Michael, in accordance with the mediaeval custom of considering the highest ground most appropriate to the veneration of the archangel.  It is Romanesque of the eleventh century, and belonged to a priory of which no other trace is left.  The building stands in the midst of an abandoned cemetery; and at the time of my visit the tall June grasses, the poppies and white campions hid every mound and almost every wooden cross.  Over the gateway, carved in the stone, is the following quaint inscription, the spelling being similar to that frequently used in the sixteenth century: 

    ’Sur la terre autrefois nous fumes comme vous. 
    Mortels penses y bien et pries Dieu pour nous.’