in the fourth century. We hear of it breaking out in eleventh-century Italy, then, on a huge scale, in the second half of the thirteenth century, after which it spread all over Europe and became endemic. The flagellants marched in procession, led by priests, with banners and candles, and moved from town to town, parading before the parish church, and lashing themselves for hours on end. The German flagellants, with their rituals, hymns and uniforms, were particularly ferocious: they used leather scourges with iron spikes; if a woman or a priest appeared, the ritual was spoiled and had to be started again; it culminated in the reading of a ‘heavenly letter’, after which spectators dipped pieces of cloth in the blood and treasured them as relics. The Church was ambivalent towards flagellants. In 1384 Clement VI had encouraged public flagellation in Avignon: hundreds of both sexes took part. And the pillar of Spanish orthodoxy, the Dominican anti-Semite and rabble-rouser, Saint Vincent Ferrer, led a party of flagellants through Spain, France and Italy, following the instructions of a vision in 1396. Thus there was orthodox flagellation, heretical flagellation, and apparently secret flagellation too. Generally speaking, if both sexes took part, it was permitted. Nearly all unofficial male flagellant movements ended in anti-clericalism, heresy or violence. Then the Inquisition was Called in, and executions followed. Christianity also had its orthodox tradition of apostolic poverty, and its theory that the world, in its pristine state, was egalitarian and just, before the irruption of sin produced the rule of the strong and the degradation of the weak. In the later Middle Ages, many millenarian movements launched themselves on crazy Careers from these propositions. They took two main forms, some combining both. The first group, usually termed ‘Free Spirits’, were antinomians, of a type St Paul had had to deal with in Greece. They believed themselves to be perfect and above moral norms. The Abbot of St Victor, a fourteenth-century orthodox mystic, wrote of them indignantly: 'They committed rapes and adulteries and other acts which gave bodily pleasure; and to the women with whom they sinned, and the simple people they deceived, they promised that such sins would not be punished.’ Some taught that women were created to be used by the brothers of the Holy Spirit; a matron, by having intercourse with one of the brethren, could regain her lost virginity; this was linked to their belief that they had rediscovered the precise way in which Adam and Eve had made love. They were often arrested for attempting to seduce respectable middle-class wives; or for eating in taverns and then refusing to pay. 'They believe that all things are common,’ noted the Bishop of Strasbourg in 1317, 'whence they conclude that theft is lawful to them.’ These men were often executed, sometimes with hideous cruelty. But many free spirits were not fraudulent or antisocial. In Flanders and the Rhine valley, the orthodox Brethren of the Free Spirit formed one of the largest and most admirable religious movements of the later Middle Ages, running schools and hospitals for the poor, and engaging in a variety of welfare work. Female free spirits, of Beguines, though not exactly nuns since they did not live in convents, worked among the poor in the Rhineland cities - at one time there were 2,000 of them just in Cologne ~ and were models of piety and orthodoxy. Rome did not like these patterns of religious behavior, since they did not fit into established categories. So the bishops and the Inquisition kept a close watch, and frequently acted to break up groups of brethren or beguines who looked like toppling over into heterodoxy. The second broad category combined millenarian legality with an overt assault on clericalism and the established Church. The belief that the millenium was imminent was the signal for an attack on the rich they were to be dragged to the ground in an earthly apocalypse before being committed to eternal flames in the next world. Such ideas were expressed in the sermons of John Ball during the Peasants' Revolt in England; they recur constantly in France and Germany during the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Bohemia, the only part of Latin Christendom where heterodoxy successfully established itself before the sixteenth century, egalitarians formed the radical wing of the Hussites after 1419; they had communal chests and kibbutz-type communities. These movements were the obverse side of the Augustinian coin: they were the ‘alternative society’ to the total Christian society of which Augustine had been the ideologist and which had been Successfully brought into existence in the West during the 87