Records which survive of interrogations, principally of Waldensian followers, in Fribourg in 1430 preserve for us the figure of a k. person who had clearly been much seen on the streets of Fribourg in the 1420s, a town gossip. The woman in question was called Surer, nicknamed ‘the Fat’. One of the reported street-corner conversations has Surer the Fat talking to an earnest credens, a follower of the Waldensian Brothers. Her opening gambit was this: ‘The confessors of the sect’, she said, ‘must be very wealthy’. As an inquisitive gossip she knew about the offerings made to the Waldensian Brothers by their many lay followers in Fribourg, and from other witnesses we know that Fribourg street-corner conversations were rife with rumours about the Waldensians, both general ones about their evil character and more specific ones about their diabolist practices. These may have included a particular allegation about wealth which had first acquired currency in later fourteenth-century Austria.
Democracy in Ghana: Everyday Politics in Urban Africa by J. W. Paller