The Waldensians

The Poor Men of Lyons, c. 1170–1532

Three and a half centuries before Luther, a merchant of Lyons sold what he had, gave it to the poor, and began to preach the Gospel in the language of the street. The men and women who followed him were driven from the city, cursed by a pope, hunted by inquisitors, and pressed back into the high valleys of the Alps. When news of the Reformation finally climbed those valleys, their preachers went down to meet it. The reformers of Basel received them warmly. Oecolampadius told them:

Christ is in you as he is in us, and we love you as brethren.1 Johannes Oecolampadiusto the Waldensian barbes, 1530

This brief page follows the outline of the chart “Pre-Reformation Movements” in Church History Charts: the rise of the movement, its notable facts, its characteristic teaching, and its meeting with the Protestant Reformation. The life of its founder is told on the page Peter Waldo.

Rise and Background

The twelfth-century church was rich, and its Scriptures were locked in Latin. Peter Waldo, or Valdes, was a wealthy merchant of Lyons. About 1170, the story runs, he was at supper with friends when one of them fell dead. Troubled for his own soul, he asked the priests how he could become righteous before God, and found no answer that gave him peace. He found it instead in the Scriptures. He had portions of the Bible translated into the language of the people, took Christ’s words to the rich young ruler as addressed to himself (Matthew 19:21), and gave his goods to the poor.2 A Dominican of Lyons writing in 1225 put it with an enemy’s brevity: Suis omnibus venditis, officium apostolarum usurpavit, “having sold all his goods, he usurped the office of the apostles.”3

That was the heart of the matter. Waldo sent out preachers, two by two, who carried books of Scripture from house to house, often in the guise of peddlers. They had no ordination and asked no license of the bishop. The archbishop of Lyons forbade them to preach, and when they would not stop, Pope Lucius III anathematized Waldo and the “Poor Men of Lyons” in 1184.4 Driven from Lyons, they scattered into southern France, Spain, and Germany, and into the Alpine valleys of Piedmont and Dauphiny, and later into Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary. Waldo himself is said to have died in Bohemia early in the thirteenth century.5

Notable Facts

  • Many names. Foxe records that they were called “the pore people of Lions” around Lyons, “Turrelupius” in Flanders, “of a desert where wolves did haunte,” and Chagnardes in Dauphiny, “But most commonly they were called Waldoys, of Waldo,” who first taught them the Word of God.6
  • Outlaws from the start. In 1194 Alfonso II, king of Aragon, ordered all “Waldenses, Poor of Lyons, and other heretics” out of his dominions and threatened anyone who sheltered them.7
  • Preachers called “uncles.” Their ministers were the barbes, “that is to say, Uncles.” They were unmarried, worked at a trade, and traveled in pairs between scattered congregations.8
  • A people of the Book. In 1532 their barbes showed visiting reformers manuscript copies of the Scriptures in their own tongue, “copied correctly by hand so long ago as to be beyond memory,” and still “to be seen in many families.”9
  • Long persecution. They were hunted in southern France, northern Italy, and Austria.10 Their own tradition remembered a Christmas attack in 1400 in which “the bodies of fourscore little children were found frozen to death in the stiffened arms of their mothers,” and the suffocation of refugees in mountain caves in 1488.11
  • Bohemian kin. In Bohemia, Waldensian preachers came into contact with the followers of John Hus, and the Hussites were influenced by them.12
  • They outlived their enemies. The Waldensian church survived the massacres of 1545 and 1655 and the exile that followed 1685, and received civil and religious freedom in Piedmont in 1848. It exists to this day.13

Characteristic Teaching

The medieval Waldensians were a movement of preaching and practice before they were a school of doctrine. The chart summarizes their emphases: a simple communal life, Scripture preached in the vernacular, the Sermon on the Mount, lay preaching, women preachers, and the denial of purgatory.14 They took Christ’s words in Matthew 5 literally, and so refused oaths and the sword. They rejected prayers for the dead and the worship of saints and relics, and held that the sacraments of priests living in open sin were of no value.15

On the eve of their meeting with the Reformation they set their faith down in writing. Their confession of about 1530 affirms the Apostles’ Creed and the canonical Scriptures, and then confesses:

That Christ is our life, and truth, and peace, and Righteousness, and Pastor, and Advocate, and Sacrifice, and Priest, who died for the salvation of all those who believe, and was raised for our justification. … And likewise, we firmly hold that there is no other Mediator and Advocate with God the Father, save Jesus Christ.16 Waldensian Confessionc. 1530

The same confession rejects “that purgatory imagined by the Antichrist,” abominates holy water, saints’ feasts, compulsory fasts, “and principally the Masses,” and acknowledges only two sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist.17 The barbes who carried it to Basel summed up their whole history in a sentence: “Turning away from Antichrist … we turn towards Christ.”18

Their weaknesses were real, and the reformers saw them at once. The barbes confessed to Oecolampadius that “through weakness and fear they had their children baptised by Romish priests, and that they even communicated with them and sometimes attended mass.” They believed “that all men have some natural virtue,” and admitted that “nothing troubles us weak people so much as what we have heard of Luther’s teaching relative to free-will and predestination.”19 Oecolampadius answered them plainly, and lovingly: “We must enlighten these christians, but above all things we must love them.”20

Connection to the Protestant Reformation

The Waldensians sought out the Reformation; it did not have to find them. The earliest contact with Luther appears in 1523. In 1526 a synod at Laux sent two barbes on a book-buying tour of Protestant cities, and Martin Gonin, pastor of Angrogna, came home with “much good news and many pious books.”21 In 1530 a synod at Mérindol in Provence sent George Morel and Peter Masson to Oecolampadius at Basel, to Bucer and Capito at Strasbourg, and to Haller at Bern. On the way home Masson was arrested at Dijon and executed. Morel escaped with the reformers’ letters and told his brethren “how many and great errors they were in.”22

On September 12, 1532, the year the chart marks as their acceptance of the Reformation, the Waldensian churches met in the open air at Chanforan in the valley of Angrogna, with William Farel and Anthony Saunier present from Switzerland. After six days of debate the synod adopted a declaration that broke with the medieval past. It permitted oaths, opened marriage to ministers, acknowledged only two sacraments, and confessed the doctrine of grace in words Farel might have written:

All those who have been and will be saved, have been chosen before the foundation of the world. … Those who are saved cannot be lost. … Anyone who champions free will denies God’s predestination and grace.23 Synod of ChanforanSeptember 12, 1532

The Waldensians resolved to worship “openly and publicly to give glory to God” and to take no further part in Roman rites. Two barbes who opposed the break withdrew and went to their brethren in Bohemia.24 At Farel’s urging the synod also resolved to have the Bible translated from the Hebrew and Greek into French. These poor Alpine Christians gave Pierre Robert Olivétan “500 gold crowns—an immense sum for them,” and his French Bible was printed at Neuchâtel in 1535.25 The movement that began with a vernacular Scripture helped pay for the Bible of the French Reformation.

Union with the Reformation brought fiercer persecution. In April 1545 an army sent under the Mérindol edict swept the Luberon in Provence, “devastating town after town with death, destruction, and exile.”26 The Piedmontese churches drew up a confession in 1560, modeled on the French Confession of their Huguenot brethren, and defended their valleys by force in 1561.27 On the “Piedmontese Easter” of April 24, 1655, the duke of Savoy’s soldiers fell on them again. Cromwell intervened, and Milton wrote:28

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold.29 John MiltonOn the Late Massacre in Piemont

The Waldensians are the clearest case of a medieval movement that passed into the Reformation by conscious choice. They brought to it their martyrs and their love of the Scriptures; they received from it a clearer gospel. Both sides recognized the gift. When Farel and Saunier explained the faith of the Reformation, “several of the Waldenses had exclaimed that it was the doctrine taught from father to son among them.”30 The same Lord who kept the light burning in those valleys for three hundred years brought them out into the day.

Forerunners   Peter Waldo   The Lollards

Notes

  1. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, vol. 3 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864), bk. 5, chap. 5, “The Waldenses Appear (1526 to October 1532).” D’Aubigné interrupts the sentence with “said the pious doctor.” ↩
  2. Diana Kleyn with Joel R. Beeke, Reformation Heroes, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2009), chap. “Peter Waldo”; d’Aubigné, Time of Calvin, 3: bk. 5, chap. 5, where the barbes of 1530 tell the same story of the friend who “suddenly fall dead.” See also Peter Waldo. ↩
  3. Stephen of Bourbon, quoted in d’Aubigné, Time of Calvin, 3: bk. 5, chap. 5, n. 455. ↩
  4. Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. “Peter Waldo”; “Pre-Reformation Movements,” in Church History Charts, which notes that they were anathematized “for preaching without church’s consent.” ↩
  5. Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. “Peter Waldo.” On the date of his death, see Cautions below. ↩
  6. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 4th ed. (London: John Day, 1583), vol. 2, “A notable history of the persecution and destruction of the people of Merindol and Cabriers.” Online at EEBO-TCP. ↩
  7. G. H. Orchard, A Concise History of Baptists, on the edict of Ildefonsus (Alfonso II), king of Aragon, 1194. ↩
  8. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2; d’Aubigné, Time of Calvin, 3: bk. 5, chap. 5. ↩
  9. d’Aubigné, Time of Calvin, 3: bk. 5, chap. 5. ↩
  10. “Pre-Reformation Movements,” Church History Charts. ↩
  11. d’Aubigné, Time of Calvin, 3: bk. 5, chap. 5, relating what the Waldensian deputies told the reformers at Grandson in 1532. ↩
  12. Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. “Peter Waldo”; “Pre-Reformation Movements,” Church History Charts. See the page on Jan Hus. ↩
  13. Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. “Peter Waldo.” ↩
  14. “Pre-Reformation Movements,” Church History Charts. ↩
  15. Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. “Peter Waldo.” ↩
  16. Waldensian Confession (1530), arts. 7–8, in James T. Dennison Jr., comp., Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2008–2014), vol. 1. ↩
  17. Ibid., arts. 9–13. ↩
  18. d’Aubigné, Time of Calvin, 3: bk. 5, chap. 5. ↩
  19. Ibid. ↩
  20. Ibid. The quotation joins two sentences d’Aubigné separates with “he said.” ↩
  21. Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 1: introduction to the Waldensian Confession (1530); d’Aubigné, Time of Calvin, 3: bk. 5, chap. 5. ↩
  22. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, on Merindol and Cabriers, where Masson appears as “Petrus Latomus”; d’Aubigné, Time of Calvin, 3: bk. 5, chap. 5. ↩
  23. Declaration of the Synod of Chanforan (1532), C. 19–21, trans. Guido Stucco, in Dennison, Reformed Confessions, vol. 1. See also C. 1 (oaths), C. 13–16 (marriage), and the article on the sacraments. ↩
  24. d’Aubigné, Time of Calvin, 3: bk. 5, chap. 5. ↩
  25. Ibid., chaps. 5 and 9; David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 343. ↩
  26. Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 1: introduction to the Waldensian Confession of Provence (1543); Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2. ↩
  27. Dennison, Reformed Confessions, introduction to the Waldensian Confession (1560). ↩
  28. Dennison, Reformed Confessions, introduction to the Waldensian Confession (1655); Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. “Peter Waldo.” ↩
  29. John Milton, Sonnet 18, “On the Late Massacre in Piemont,” quoted in Dennison, Reformed Confessions, introduction to the Waldensian Confession (1655). ↩
  30. d’Aubigné, Time of Calvin, 3: bk. 5, chap. 5. ↩