ABSTRACT
How was the Church to face the problems posed by heresy and disaffection? How to prevent its spread, win back its adherents, define exactly what constituted heresy - all these were urgent questions to which there were in practice no easy answers. The boundaries between heresy and orthodoxy were not clear cut. Many of the heretics were comparatively simple folk whose statements of doctrine and sentiment could hardly be compared with scholastic definitions; and some of the statements of eminent theologians, like Abelard, were thought heretical by other theologians of his generation but became accepted orthodoxy in the next. Closely akin to doctrinal deviation, in the common view, was disobedience. When Samuel denounced Saul for his disobedience to the Lord he said defiance was as sinful as witchcraft, as evil as idolatry (i Kings-i Sam.-15: 22–3) and this became a commonplace in medieval attitudes to persistent disobedience. In the ancient world, and under Roman law, burning had been the traditional punishment for witchcraft. 2 It was doubtless by a natural analogy that the mob or the secular arm sometimes lit bonfires for heretics in the early eleventh century. By the twelfth century a tradition was being established, though not based as yet on many precedents, that the appropriate fate of the 76obdurate heretic should be burning; and this might seem to minds attuned to persecution particularly suitable, since custom and biblical interpretation conspired to identify heresy with persistent disobedience to authority, persistent disobedience with witchcraft.
