Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

up in the thirteenth century for the guidance of the papal penitentiary in dealing with hard cases, precedents were inserted to show how usurers should be handled.70 About the same time appeared St. Raymond’s guide to the duties of an archdeacon, which contains a long list of inquiries to be made on visitation, covering every conceivable kind of extortion, and designed to expose the various illusory contracts⁠—fictitious partnerships, loans under the guise of sales, excessive deposits against advances⁠—by which the offence was concealed.71 Instructions to confessors define in equal detail the procedure to be followed. The confessor, states a series of synodal statutes, is to “make inquiry concerning merchandising, and other things pertaining to avarice and covetousness.” Barons and knights are to be requested to state whether they have made ordinances contrary to the liberty of the Church, or refused justice to any man seeking it, or oppressed their subjects with undue tallages, tolls or services. “Concerning burgesses, merchants and officers (ministrales) the priest is to make inquiry as to rapine, usury, pledges made by deceit of usury, barratry, false and lying sales, unjust weights and measures, lying, perjury and craft. Concerning cultivators (agricolas) he is to inquire as to theft and detention of the property of others, especially with regard to tithes⁠ ⁠… also as to the removing of landmarks and the occupation of other men’s land.⁠ ⁠… Concerning avarice it is to be asked in this wise: hast thou been guilty of simony⁠ ⁠… an unjust judge⁠ ⁠… a thief, a robber, a perjurer, a sacrilegious man, a gambler, a remover of landmarks in fields⁠ ⁠… a false merchant, an oppressor of any man and above all of widows, wards and others in misery, for the sake of unjust and greedy gain?” Those guilty of avarice are to do penance by giving large alms, on the principle that “contraries are to be cured with contraries.” But there are certain sins for which no true penitence is possible until restitution has been made. Of these usury is one; and usury, it is to be noted, includes, not only what would now be called interest, but the sin of those who, on account of lapse of time, sell dearer and buy cheaper. If for practical reasons restitution is impossible, the offender is to be instructed to require that it shall be made by his heirs, and, when the injured party cannot be found, the money is to be spent, with the advice of the bishop if the sum is large and of the priest if it is small, “on pious works and especially on the poor.”72

The more popular teaching on the subject is illustrated by the manuals for use in the confessional and by books for the guidance of the devout. The space given in them to the ethics of business was considerable. In the fifteenth century, Bishop Pecock could meet the Lollards’ complaint that the Scriptures were buried beneath a mass of interpretation, by taking as his illustration the books which had been written on the text, “Lend, hoping for nothing again,” and arguing that all this teaching upon usury was little enough “to answer⁠ ⁠… all the hard, scrupulous doubts and questions which all day have need to be assoiled in men’s bargains and chafferings together.”73 A century later there were regions in which such doctrine was still being rehearsed with all the old rigor. In 1552 the Parliament which made the Scottish Reformation was only eight years off. But the catechism of the archbishop of St. Andrews, which was drawn up in that year, shows no disposition to compromise with the economic frailties of his fellow-countrymen. It denounces usurers, masters who withhold wages, covetous merchants who sell fraudulent wares, covetous landlords who grind their tenants, and in general⁠—a comprehensive and embarrassing indictment⁠—“all wretches that will be grown rich incontinent,” and all “who may keep their neighbor from poverty and mischance and do it not.”74

On the crucial question, how the ecclesiastical courts dealt in practice with these matters, we have very little light. They are still almost an unworked field. On the Continent we catch glimpses of occasional raids. Bishops declare war on notorious usurers, only to evoke reprisals from the secular authorities, to whom the moneylender is too convenient to be victimized by anyone but themselves.75 At the end of the thirteenth century an archbishop of Bourges makes some thirty-five usurers disgorge at a sitting,76 and seventy years later an inquisitor at Florence collects 7,000 florins in two years from usurers and blasphemers.77 In England commercial morality was a debatable land, in which ecclesiastical and secular authorities contended from time to time for jurisdiction. The ecclesiastical courts claimed to deal with cases of breach of contract in general, on the ground that they involved læsio fidei, and with usury in particular, as an offence against morality specifically forbidden by the canon law. Both claims were contested by the Crown and by municipal bodies. The former, by the Constitutions of Clarendon,78 had expressly reserved proceedings as to debts for the royal courts, and the same rule was laid down more than once in the course of the next century. The latter again and again forbade burgesses to take proceedings in the courts christian, and fined those who disregarded the prohibition.79 Both, in spite of repeated protests from the clergy,80 made good their pretension to handle usurious contracts in secular courts; but neither succeeded in ousting the jurisdiction of the Church. The question at issue was not whether the usurer should be punished⁠—a point as to which there was only one opinion⁠—but who should have the lucrative business of punishing him, and in practice he ran the gauntlet of all and of each. Local authorities, from the City of London to the humblest manorial court, make bylaws against