Between 1664 and 1670 Jean de Doat was at work visiting archives in southern France and selecting documents to be transcribed by a team of scribes working under his direction. His commission was from Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and the two aims of copying were the conservation of the rights of the crown and to serve history. Many of the originals are no longer extant. Consequently the copies that were made – which were bound into 248 volumes now kept in the French national library – are of extraordinary interest to historians, as is also the matter of their transmission. How and why were some chosen and others not? Doat's only known writings are his reports on the mission addressed to Colbert's librarian. He listed achievements, criticised his employees and accounted for money. It is only the project-manager's compartment of his mind to which we have direct access.

This has dictated the indirect approach adopted in this chapter, which provides a close-up picture of just one visit made by Doat, to the Dominican convent in Toulouse in November 1668. It sketches the setting: the timing, the appearance and character of the convent at the time and what might have struck him about the place and the people in it.

The medieval archive

Raymond Gros of Toulouse turned up one spring morning in 1236 at the Dominican convent in Toulouse. He had been a full heretic (hereticus perfectus) for about twenty-two years, and now turned into a super-grass. He had so many beans to spill that the inquisitors authorised local chaplains to work alongside Dominican and Franciscan friars receiving his confession, writing it down over many days. The text was still there among the records of the Toulouse inquisitors in the early 1300s. The Dominican who saw it then, Bernard Gui, was a man inclined to laconic understatement. He just said it was big.

This is the story of these records in a nutshell. The early friars breathed the air of Toulouse: a city of notaries, authenticated documents and record-keeping. They were part of this culture and did likewise: wrote things, got them witnessed and kept them in an ever-growing archive. Around 1300, then, Gui had at his disposal a treasure house and in his dual capacity of inquisitor and historian he ransacked it.