16th century AD

The incompetence and scandalous misconduct of local clerics also encouraged the laity's irreverence towards them. Records of disciplinary cases prosecuted in the officialite, or ecclesiastical court of the bishopric of Saintes, from 1545 to 1552 reveal that Catholic priests from La Rochelle were officially censured for insolence toward parishioners, neglect of parochial duties, and the consecration of bigamous marriages arranged between spouses allowed to wed without proper examination.(15) In 1546, it also came to light that nuns at the local convent of Saint Claire had been leaving their cloister without authorization, conducting sacrilegious love affairs, and even marrying(.16)

Enduring popular allegiance to ancient folkways and widespread beliefs about the good and bad magical powers of clerics also compromised church discipline among French westerners. Throughout the provinces of Aunis and Saintonge surrounding La Rochelle, the laity treated Catholic clergy reservedly, not only as potent intermediaries with heaven, but also as potentially dangerous sorcerers easily capable of using spells to kill farm animals, to conjure up plagues of locusts, and to unleash disastrous hailstorms. Among the Saintongeais peasantry, the association of malevolent cures with devastating storms produced the indigenous phrase "priests' shanks" (jambes de pretres) to describe rays of sunlight shining through thick, lowering cloud banks.(17) Many parishioners firmly believed that their cures could climb into the sky, ride the darkening nimbus, and call down storms on laymen at will. In 1791, for example, in the adjoining Angoumois region, National Guardsmen had to take into custody four cures to save them from lynching by an angry mob of local residents accusing them of magically inducing a severe hailstorm.(18) Nearby, the unfortunate cure of ChampagneMouton barely escaped assassination in July 1838 after his farming parishioners denounced him as the sorcerer instigating a calamitous series of thunderstorms which had ruined their harvest.(19)

Communities throughout early modem France shared westerners' apprehensions over the capacity of priests to inflict material losses on lay people through malevolent magics. However residents of provinces on the French mid-Atlantic coast (Normandy, Poitou, Aunis, Saintonge, and Angoumois) manifested exceptional dread of priestly hexes that rendered new grooms impotent and new households discordant. Locally, the nouement de l'aiguillette (literally "the knotting of the cord") became one of the most feared incantations allegedly practiced by clerical and lay sorcerers. Public anxiety over such magical attack was not uniformly spread over the kingdom of France in early modern times. The charm appears to have been unknown in Artois, Hainault, the Jura, Lorraine, and Picardy.(20) By contrast, early modem sources identify Poitou, the French mid-Atlantic littoral, and the coastal districts of Languedoc as regions whose inhabitants often practiced and greatly feared the nouement.(21)