On Thu, 9 May 1996, JH Arnold wrote:

> dear jessalyn and cluse
> i wonder if in your work you have seen any connections made between 
> heresy and usury?  heresy = heretical sects,  or usury = a heresy in 
> itself ... this is a question,  not a plug for my own theories [i don't 
> have any]!
> 
> cheers
> john arnold
> centre for medieval studies,  york, england
> 
Dear John,

Sorry for the delay in replying, but I've been playing tour-guide to 
family this week.  I have run across connections made between usurers and 
heretics in my work--it's one of the themes I've become interested in.  
Usurers are linked in practice with heretics by the penalties imposed 
upon them in council decrees.  If you read through Mansi and Cheney and 
Powicke, council decrees for heretics and usurers look remarkably 
similar.  Both were banned from public offic and church posts, clerks 
were told not to act as advocates for either in court, episcopal 
inquisitions were held to ferret out manifest and hidden usurers 
(including forced witnesses, public lists of usurers followed by 
excommunication and banning from sacraments and Christian burial), if a 
usurer died unrepentant, his possessions were to be seized by the secular 
authority (even as heretics' possessions were often seized) nasty things 
were done to their corpses, including exhumation and ritual exclusion 
from the community (couldn't be buried in sacred ground, often thrown on 
dung heaps or dragged through the city, etc.).  I doubt that the 
similarity of the canons against heretics and usurers were a coincidence, 
as many of the people who passed anti-usury and anti-heresy canons 
preached against both heresy and usury--Stephen Langton, and Robert of 
Courson among them. I'd be happy to provide specific references, but I'm 
writing from the computer room].

Fulk of Toulouse either formed or reformed the White confraternity to 
combat usury and heresy, and usurers brought before his episcopal court 
often faced charges of usury and heresy combined.  On the whole question 
of how heresy was related to usury, see John Hine Mundy, Liberty and 
Political Power in Toulouse 1050-1230.   Columbia U Press, New York, 
1954, pp60-3, 79-85, 287-8, 294, etc.

There is also a somewhat indirect connection made between usurers and 
Jews and heretics in Peter Chanter's Verbum Abbreviatum [PL 205].  Peter 
first compares usurers to Jews, saying that 'Isti etiamnomen Judaeorum 
adepti sunt.' Like Jews, they are protected by princes, who say 'These 
are our Jews.'  However, Christian usurers are worse than Jews, because 
they charge interest to both the alien and to their brothers, unlike the 
Jews, who follow the proscription of Deuteronomy 23 [PL 205: 158].  He 
then accuses prelates and priests of not enforcing the canon against 
usury found in Third Lateran, and points to the social damage usurers 
create through their exactions.  'And Jeremiah.  The partridge hatches 
eggs which it did not lay' so such a man makes riches and not justly, in 
the middle of his days his riches will abandon him, and in the end he 
will be a fool.  Indeed the perdix is an unclean bird, which can be taken 
for a  heretic, or a usurer, who gathers others' riches.' [PL 205: 159].  

James of Vitry makes the same indirect connection in an exemplum from a 
sermon ad mercatos.  [Crane #172].  A certain insane man's relatives put 
an image of the BVM in front o him, and prayed that God would heal him.  
He said, 'Mary, don't believe them, for I am more healthy and wise than 
them'  And when his relatives rebuked him and insisted that he adore the 
ymaginem crucifixui, he said: I am able to adore you, but never to love 
you.  THus usurers whenever they adore the crucifix, when they enter the 
church, but according to the custom of the Jews they give blows when they 
despoil churches and persecute Christ in his members.  This 
rationalization--usurers, Jews, and heretics attack CHrist by attacking 
his members and thus are the Saracens within, and thus deserving of 
repression, is a common one among the members of Peter the CHanter's 
circle, including Robert of Courson, Fulk of Neuilly, and others who went 
on to combine anti-usury preaching and legislation with crusade recruiting.

I think I've gone on enough, but I would be greatly interested to see 
what others think of the connection between the three groups.

Jessalynn Bird
[log in to unmask]



%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%