Cagot

The Cagots were a persecuted minority who lived in the west of France and northern Spain: the Navarrese Pyrenees, Basque provinces, Béarn, Aragón, Gascony and Brittany. Evidence of the group exists as far back as 1000 CE. The name they were known by varied across the regions where they lived.
The origins of the Cagots remain uncertain, with various hypotheses proposed throughout history. Some theories suggest they were descendants of biblical or legendary figures cursed by God, or the descendants of medieval lepers, while others propose they were related to the Cathars or even a fallen guild of carpenters. Some suggest descent from a variety of other marginalized racial or religious groups. Despite the varied and often mythical explanations for their origins, the only consistent aspect of the Cagots was their societal exclusion and the lack of any distinct physical or cultural traits differentiating them from the general population.
The discriminatory treatment they faced included social segregation and restrictions on marriage and occupation. Despite laws and edicts from higher levels of government and religious authorities, this discrimination persisted into the 20th century.
The Cagots no longer form a separate social class and were largely assimilated into the general population. Very little of Cagot culture still exists, as most descendants of Cagots have preferred not to be known as such.

Name

Etymology

The origins of both the term Cagots and the Cagots themselves are uncertain.
It has been suggested that they were descendants of the Visigoths
defeated by Clovis I at the Battle of Vouillé,
and that the name Cagot derives from caas and the Old Occitan for Goth gòt around the 6th century.
Yet in opposition to this etymology is the fact that the word cagot is first found in this form in 1542 in the works of François Rabelais.
Seventeenth century French historian Pierre de Marca, in his Histoire de Béarn, propounds the reverse – that the word signifies "hunters of the Goths", and that the Cagots were descendants of the Saracens and Moors of Al-Andalus after their defeat by Charles Martel,
although this proposal was comprehensively refuted by the Prior of Livorno, Abbot as early as 1754.
Antoine Court de Gébelin derives the term cagot from the Latin caco-deus, caco meaning "false, bad, deceitful", and deus meaning "god", due to a belief that Cagots were descended from the Alans and followed Arianism.

Variations

Their name differed by province and the local language:

In Gascony they were called Cagots, Cagous and Gafets
In Bordeaux they were called Ladres, Cahets or Gahetz
In the Spanish Basque country they were called Agotes, Agotak and Gafos/Gaffos
In the French Basque Country the forms Agotac and Agoth were also used.
In Anjou, Languedoc, and Armagnac they were called Capots, and Gens des Marais
In Brittany they were called Cacons, Cacous, Caquots and Cahets. They were also sometimes referred to as Kakouz, Caqueux, Caquets, Caquins, and Caquous, names of the local Caquins of Brittany due to similar low stature and discrimination in society.
In Bigorre they were also called Graouès and Cascarots
In Aunis, Poitou, and Saintonge they were also called Colliberts, a name taken from the former class of colliberts.
Gésitains or Gésites, alongside the French spellings Gézitains and Gézits, are also found in records, referencing Gehazi the servant of Elisha who was cursed with leprosy due to his greed. With the recording descendants de la race de Giezy as an insult regularly used against Cagots. Giézitains is seen in the writings of Dominique Joseph Garat. Elizabeth Gaskell records the anglicised Gehazites in her work An Accursed Race.
Other recorded names include Caffos, Essaurillés, Gaffots, Trangots, Caffets, Cailluands and Mézegs.

Previously some of these names had been viewed as being similar yet separate groups from the Cagots.

Origin

The origin of the Cagots is not known for certain, though through history many legends and hypotheses have been recorded providing potential origins and reasons for their ostracisation. The Cagots were not a distinct ethnic or religious group, but a racialised caste. They spoke the same language as the people in an area and generally kept the same religion as well, with later researchers remarking that there was no evidence to mark the Cagots as distinct from their neighbours. Their only distinguishing feature was their descent from families long identified as Cagots. Records of Cagots go as far back as the year 1000 CE, with the charter of the under the name chrestiens and the ancient charter of Navarre that referred to them as gaffos.

Biblical legends

Various legends placed the Cagots as originating from biblical events, including being descendants of the carpenters who made the cross that Jesus was crucified on, or being descendants of the bricklayers who built Solomon's Temple after being expelled from ancient Israel by God due to poor craftsmanship. Similarly a more detailed legend places the origins of the Cagots in Spain as being descendants of a Pyrenean master carver named Jacques, who traveled to ancient Israel via Tartessos, to cast Boaz and Jachin for Solomon's Temple. While in Israel he was distracted during the casting of Jachin by a woman, and due to the imperfection this caused in the column his descendants were cursed to suffer leprosy.

Religious origin

Another theory is that the Cagots were descendants of the Cathars, who had been persecuted for heresy in the Albigensian Crusade. Some comparisons include the use of the term crestians to refer to Cagots, which evokes the name that the Cathars gave to themselves, bons crestians. A delegation by Cagots to Pope Leo X in 1514 made this claim, though the Cagots predate the Cathar heresy and the Cathar heresy was not present in Gascony and other regions where Cagots were present. The historian Daniel Hawkins suggests that perhaps this was a strategic move, as in the limpieza de sangre statutes such discrimination and persecution for those convicted of heresy expired after four generations and if this was the cause of their marginalisation, it also gave grounds for their emancipation. Others have suggested an origin as Arian Christians.
One of the earliest recorded mentions of Cagotes is in the charters of Navarre, developed around 1070. Another early mention of the Cagots is from 1288, when they appear to have been called Chretiens or Christianos. Other terms seen in use prior to the 16th century include Crestias, Chrestia, Crestiaa and Christianus, which in medieval texts became inseparable from the term leprosus, and so in Béarn became synonymous with the word leper. Thus, another theory is that the Cagots were early converts to Christianity, and that the hatred of their pagan neighbors continued after they also converted, merely for different reasons.

Medical origin

Another possible explanation of their name Chretiens or Christianos is to be found in the fact that in medieval times all lepers were known as pauperes Christi, and that, whether Visigoths or not, these Cagots were affected in the Middle Ages with a particular form of leprosy or a condition resembling it, such as psoriasis. Thus would arise the confusion between Christians and Cretins, and explain the similar restrictions placed on lepers and Cagots. Guy de Chauliac wrote in the 14th century, and Ambroise Paré wrote in 1561 of the Cagots being lepers with "beautiful faces" and skin with no signs of leprosy, describing them as "white lepers". Later dermatologists believe that Paré was describing leucoderma. Early edicts apparently refer to lepers and Cagots as different categories of undesirables, With this distinction being explicit by 1593. The Parlement of Bordeaux and the Estates of Lower Navarre repeated customary prohibitions against them, with Bordeaux adding that when they were also lepers, if there still are any, they must carry clicquettes. One belief in Navarre were that the Agotes were descendants of French immigrant lepers to the region. Later English commentators supported the idea of an origin among a community of lepers due to the similarities in the treatment of Cagots in churches and the measures taken to allow lepers in England and Scotland to attend churches.
From the 1940s to 1950s a study of blood type analysis was performed on the Cagots of in Navarre. The blood type distribution showed more similarity with those observed in France among the French than those observed among the local Basque. Geneticist Pilar Hors uses this as support for the theory that the Cagots in Spain are descendants of French migrants, most likely from leper colonies.

Other origins

In Bordeaux, where they were numerous, they were called ladres. This name has the same form as the Old French word wikt:ladre#Old French, meaning leper. It also has the same form as the Gascon word for thief, which is similar in meaning to the older, probably Celtic-origin Latin term bagaudae, a possible origin of agote.
The alleged physical appearance and ethnicity of the Cagots varied wildly between legends and stories; some local legends indicated that Cagots had blonde hair and blue eyes, while those favouring the Arab descent story said that Cagots were considerably darker. In Pío Baroja's work Las horas solitarias, he comments that Cagot residents of had both individuals with "Germanic" features as well as individuals with "Romani" features, this is also supported by others who investigated the Cagots in Bearn and the Basque Country, such as who stated the "ethnic type" and names of Cagots were the same as the Basque within Navarre. Though people who set out to research the Cagots found them to be a diverse class of people in physical appearance, as diverse as the non-Cagot communities around them. One common trend was to claim that Cagots had no ears or no earlobes, or that one ear was longer than the other, with other supposed identifiers including webbed hands and/or feet, or the presence of goitres.
Biographer Graham Robb finds most of the above theories unlikely, highlighting the lack of distinguishing features among the Cagots, arguing that the only real differences were "after eight centuries of persecution, they tended to be more skillful and resourceful than the surrounding populations, and more likely to emigrate to America. They were feared because they were persecuted and might therefore seek revenge." Robb proposed the hypothesis that the Cagots are the descendants of a fallen medieval guild of carpenters. This hypothesis could explain their being restricted in their choice of trade. He further suggests that red webbed-foot symbol Cagots were sometimes forced to wear might have been the guild's original emblem. There was a brief construction boom on the Way of St. James pilgrimage route in the 9th and 10th centuries; this could have brought the guild both power and suspicion. A subsequent collapse of their business would have left a scattered, yet cohesive group in the areas where Cagots are known.
Robb's guild hypothesis, alongside much of the work in his The Discovery of France, has been heavily criticised for " to understand most of the secondary works in his own bibliography" and being a "recycling of nineteenth-century myths", and that while it offers many detailed impressions of history, it does not provide much in the way of extended analyses and argumentations.
For similar reasons due to their restricted trades, the philosopher suggests in his work L'invention du racisme: Antiquité et Moyen-Âge, that a possible origin is as a culturally distinct community of woodsmen who were Christianised relatively late.
The medievalist, Benoît Cursente, has proposed that the Cagots developed as a group due to the rapidly changing social relations in the region of Béarn, coinciding with, and influenced by, the period when lepers were becoming segregated across France and Spain in the 13th century.