Thus horrific scene is a Medieval illustration of a group of people with leprosy being burned at the stake. Government authorities in southern France were consumed with mass hysteria in 1321, and rounded up scores of people with this disease — they were convinced that the lepers were planning on poisoning wells in order to spread their infection.
As one of the investigating Inquisitors, Bernard Gui, wrote: “In 1321 there was detected and prevented an evil plan of the lepers against the healthy persons in the kingdom of France. Indeed, plotting against the safety of the people, these persons, unhealthy in body and insane in mind, had arranged to infect the waters of the rivers and fountains and wells everywhere, by placing poison and infected matter in them and by mixing (into the water) prepared powders, so that healthy men drinking from them . . . . Would become lepers, or die, or almost die . . . “. There had been famine intermixed with a revitalized crusader zeal in the years before the suspected plot, and fear and disgust had long made pariahs out of those suffering from leprosy. These were conditions ripe for evoking mass hysteria against a vulnerable population. Indeed, when the lepers were accused of the attempted poisoning, many were tortured until they confessed. And after their confessions, they were executed.
Source(s): “Lepers, Jews, and Moslems: the Plot to Overthrow Christendom in 1321,” Malcolm Barber, _History_, vol. 66, no. 216 (1981), pp. 1-17. Illumination is BL Royal 20 C VII, f. 56v .
