Waldo and the Poor of Lyon

The Chronicle of Laon, written some forty-five years afterwards, tells the story under the year 1173. Peter Waldo, a citizen of Lyon who had grown rich by lending at interest, heard a minstrel recite the life of Saint Alexis and went next morning to ask a master of theology which was the surest way to God. The master answered with the saying of Jesus to the rich young man (Matthew 19:21). Waldo left his wife the land and houses, made restitution to those he had wronged, gave a large part of his money to his two small daughters, whom he placed in the order of Fontevraud, and spent the greatest part on the poor, feeding all comers three days a week through a famine. He threw money to the poor in the street, crying that no one can serve God and mammon (Matthew 6:24), and then begged his own bread, until his wife appealed to the archbishop (Chronicle of Laon 1173) (Chronicle of Laon 1173 (MGH SS 26, pp. 447–448)).

By 1177, the chronicle goes on, he had companions who gave away their goods as he had done, and they began to rebuke sins, their own and other people’s, in private and in public (Chronicle of Laon 1177 (MGH SS 26, p. 449)).

Walter Map, one of the clerics summoned to the Lateran council held by Pope Alexander III, saw some of them there. He calls them simple and unlettered. They gave the pope a book in French containing the Psalter and many books of both Testaments with a gloss, and pressed for the right to preach. Map was set to examine two of their leaders and boasts that he made the assembly laugh at them. He describes them as having no fixed homes, going two by two, barefoot, clad in wool, owning nothing and holding all things in common, and warns that if they are let in the clergy will be driven out (Walter Map, De nugis curialium 1.31 (James, pp. 65–66)). The Chronicle of Laon reports the outcome: the pope embraced Waldo and approved his vow of poverty, but forbade him and his companions to preach unless the priests asked them to. They kept the rule for a short time, the chronicler says, and then disobeyed (Chronicle of Laon 1178 (MGH SS 26, p. 449)).

A decree of Pope Lucius III, issued with the emperor Frederick I beside him, then placed under perpetual anathema those who, in its words, falsely call themselves Humiliati or Poor of Lyon, in one list with the Cathars, and with them all who preached in public or private without authority from the pope or the local bishop. Those found in heresy who did not at once abjure it were to be left to the secular power for punishment (Lucius III, Ad abolendam PL 201, cols. 1297–1298).

Each of these writers was a critic or a judge of the movement. The Waldensian Church of today tells its own beginnings differently. Waldo, it says, sold his goods for the poor and to have Scripture put into the language of the people, and preached with no intention of founding a new church. Its members lived on as a hidden movement in the Alps and elsewhere, visited by travelling preachers, and joined the Reformation, a step it dates from the synod of Chanforan in 1532 (Waldensian Church, Our History Le origini; Adesione alla Riforma protestante).