CIRCUMCELLIONS. - Name given in Roman Africa to groups of unemployed and unruly peasants and farm laborers, perpetrators of numerous acts of violence of every kind. The Donatists made use of them, and among them found their most fanatical and exalted followers.
The name is explained by St. Augustine (Contra Gaud., I, 28, 32): genus hominum... victus sui causa cellas circumsens rusticanas ("who, to procure a living for themselves, wander around the huts of the peasants"); he adds (Enarr. in Ps., CXXXII, 3) that they were also commonly called circelliones, and he ironically contrasts them, as fanatical wanderers, with the monks. This has led some, such as Isidore of Seville, to regard them as a kind of wandering monks, and some moderns to see in them ascetics. Nor is it accurate to recognize in them a true and proper sect.
According to St. Optatus, they were the agonistici ("militants") of Donatism; the same author (III, 4) recalls their leaders Axidus and Fasir, their deeds of violence, and the frenzied zeal, a veritable suicidal mania, with which they sought "martyrdom." St. Augustine recalls that at first they used only clubs, but afterward had weapons of every kind; they were accompanied by women, they got drunk, etc.; shouting Deo laudes they committed true and proper acts of brigandage against dwellings, Catholic churches, and persons.
It is probably owing to the memory of such deeds, described by St. Augustine, that an author of the 16th century, A. Krantz (Metropolis sive historia ecclesiastica Saxoniae, VIII, Cologne 1520, ch. 18), followed later by others down to Moroni, gives this name to a Swabian sect which, according to the Annales Stadenses of Albert, abbot of St. Mary of Stade (in MGH, Scriptores, XVI, p. 371), undertook in 1248 to support the excommunicated and deposed emperor Frederick II, asserting on the other hand that the Pope and the religious Orders were heretics, that their absolutions were invalid, etc.