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THE THEOLOGY OF DEBT IN LATE
MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE
Exploring debt’s permutations in Middle English texts, Anne
Schuurman makes the bold claim that the capitalist spirit has its
roots in Christian penitential theology. Her argument challenges the
longstanding belief that faith and theological doctrine in the Middle
Ages were inimical to the development of market economies, show-
ing that the same idea of debt is in fact intrinsic to both. The double
penitential–financial meaning of debt, and the spiritual paradoxes it
creates, is a linchpin of scholastic and vernacular theology, and of
the imaginative literature of late medieval England. Focusing on the
doubleness of debt, this book traces the dynamic by which the
Christian ascetic ideal, in its rejection of material profit and wealth
acquisition, ends up producing precisely what it condemns. This title
is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available
Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
is Associate Professor of English at the University
of Western Ontario. She is the author of Shame and Guilt in Chaucer
() and co-editor of An Epistle of Noble Poetrye ().
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Founding Editor
Alastair Minnis, Yale University
General Editors
Marisa Galvez, Stanford University
Daniel Wakelin, University of Oxford
Editorial Board
Anthony Bale, Birkbeck, University of London
Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Cambridge
Christopher C. Baswell, Barnard College and Columbia University
Mary Carruthers, New York University
Rita Copeland, University of Pennsylvania
Roberta Frank, Yale University
Alastair Minnis, Yale University
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Fordham University
This series of critical books seeks to cover the whole area of literature written in
the major medieval languages – the main European vernaculars, and medieval
Latin and Greek – during the period c.–. Its chief aim is to publish and
stimulate fresh scholarship and criticism on medieval literature, special emphasis
being placed on understanding major works of poetry, prose, and drama in
relation to the contemporary culture and learning which fostered them.
Recent titles in the series
Jennifer A. Lorden Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry: The Poetics of Feeling
Harriet Soper The Life Course in Old English Poetry
Taylor Cowdery Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production
from Chaucer to Sidney
Olivia Holmes Boccaccio and Exemplary Literature: Ethics and Mischief in the
“Decameron”
Joseph Taylor Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages
Mark Faulkner A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century: Language and
Literature between Old and Middle English
Mark Chinca and Christopher Young Literary Beginnings in the European Middle
Ages
Andrew M. Richmond Landscape in Middle English Romance: The Medieval
Imagination and the Natural World
David G. Lummus The City of Poetry: Imagining the Civic Role of the Poet in
Fourteenth-Century Italy
Richard Matthew Pollard Imagining the Medieval Afterlife
A complete list of titles in the series can be found at the end of the volume.
Published online by Cambridge University Press
THE THEOLOGY OF DEBT
IN LATE MEDIEVAL
ENGLISH LITERATURE
ANNE SCHUURMAN
The University of Western Ontario
Published online by Cambridge University Press
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: Schuurman, Anne, author.
: The theology of debt in late medieval English literature / Anne Schuurman,
The University of Western Ontario.
: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, . | Series:
Cambridge studies in medieval literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.
: (print) | (ebook) |
(hardback) | (paperback) | (epub)
: : English literature–Middle English, -–History and criticism. |
Debt in literature. | Penance in literature. | Theology in literature. | Economics in literature. |
LCGFT: Literary criticism.
: . (print) | LCC PR.D (ebook) |
./–/eng/
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Published online by Cambridge University Press
For Zoë
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Contents
Acknowledgements page viii
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction: Middle English Debt and the Spirit
of Capitalism
Counterfeit Money: Debt and Form in the Middle
English Charter Lyrics
Secret Debts: Credit and Faith in the Spendthrift
Knight Romances
Home Economics: The Marriage Debt in The Wife of
Bath’s Prologue and Tale and The Merchant’s Tale
“What is ynogh to mene”: Measuring Debt in Langland’s
Piers Plowman
Piers Plowman and the Inappropriable
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
vii
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Acknowledgements
My debt of gratitude has been accruing for many years, but it is one that I am
happy to owe. The research and writing of this book were supported by a
generous grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council
of Canada. The line of inquiry that ended up here began at the University of
Alberta when I was finishing my doctoral dissertation on shame and guilt
in Chaucer’s narrative poetry, and for this I am grateful to Stephen R. Reimer;
his insightful comments and questions, many of which I had no answers for
at the time, brought me to the right point of departure. I would like to thank
Andrew Galloway for chairing a fruitful session on economics and Middle
English literature at the IMC in Leeds and Kara Gaston for inviting me to speak
at the University of Toronto’s Premodern Research Symposium, where
I received kind encouragement and excellent questions about the Middle
English charter lyrics. At the University of Western Ontario, I am grateful to
my colleagues for their support and helpful comments on various aspects of the
project, particularly Jane Toswell, Richard Moll, Alison Conway, Bryce Traister,
Kate Stanley, Mary Helen McMurran, and Matthew Rowlinson. Warmest
thanks to Emily Pez and Rebecca Power for their careful eyes and meticulous
work in copy-editing the book and preparing the index. Emily Hockley and
George Laver at Cambridge University Press were amiably supportive during the
review process and have guided the book to production with unfailing compe-
tence. The book was greatly improved thanks to the astute and generous
suggestions of two anonymous readers for the Press. I am continually dazzled
and humbled by the learnedness and integrity of my fellow medievalists.
I would like to thank my father Henry Schuurman for the general and
the particular – for being my first teacher and for invaluable conversations
about debt, the Franciscans, and the nature of money. To Sofia, Isabel,
and Ada, I am deeply and affectionately thankful for the gift of perspective.
Finally, the debt I owe to my wife Zoë Sinel, my ideal interlocutor, my most
incisive and faithful reader, is truly measureless. Every good idea took shape
in our conversations. Any errors or oversights that remain are mine alone.
viii
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Abbreviations
AFH Archivum Franciscanum Historicum
CCSL Corpus christianorum. Series latina
CSEL Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum
EETS Early English Text Society
MED Middle English Dictionary
OED Oxford English Dictionary
PL Patrologiae cursus completus. Series latina, general editor J. P.
Migne (Paris, –)
ix
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Introduction
Middle English Debt and the Spirit of Capitalism
Men sal alswa yhelde rekkenynges sere
Of al gudes þat God has gefen þam here,
Als of gudes of kynde and gudes of grace
And gudes of hap þat men purchace.
[. . .]
I drede many in arrirage mon falle
And til perpetuele prison gang,
For þai despended þa guds wrang.
Forwhi God has gyfen here nathyng.
Of whilk he wille noght haf rekkenynge.
The Prick of Conscience, lines –
This passage, from the popular mid-fourteenth-century Northumbrian
poem The Prick of Conscience, depicts the last judgment as a cosmic audit
and Christ as an accountant of souls, weighing debits against credits and
measuring profits. Those who invested wisely the goods of God are
blessed, while those who failed to turn a profit or who fell into debt are
damned for eternity. As it instructs its readers on the “wrechednes” of
human nature, the day of judgment, the torments of hell, and the joys of
heaven, the poem continually reminds them that “Na syn þan unrekend
sal be.” This refrain conjures an image of Christian morality as a ledger, a
business of mathematical calculations, but it also instills a profound
penitential self-awareness, since all sins, no matter how small or hidden,
will be counted on the day of reckoning. The Prick of Conscience thus
articulates with stark and terrifying clarity the economic formulae that
provide the essential scaffolding of late medieval penitential doctrine. The
poem draws on Jesus’s teachings in the New Testament, such as the
parable of the talents, which, with its injunction to make the most of
one’s God-given goods, provides the most direct Biblical source of the
passage quoted above. The idea of sin as a debt is enshrined in the Lord’s
Prayer, which asks, “foryyue to vs oure dettis, as we foryyuen to oure
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Introduction: Debt and the Spirit of Capitalism
dettouris”; and the idea that the sacrifice of Christ is a payment for this
debt of sin, a payment that redeems the souls of sinners consigned to hell,
is developed extensively in the writings of Paul.
As I will show in this book, late medieval writers, both poets and
theologians, followed Biblical tradition and put the idea of debt at the
centre of their soteriological, economic, and poetic visions. Geoffrey
Chaucer and William Langland were two such fourteenth-century
English writers for whom debt served as a key metaphor, a productive
economic tool, and a theological linchpin. Both use commercial and
economic language to describe the debt of sin and the mechanisms of
the final reckoning. Langland’s monumental dream-vision Piers Plowman
concludes with the Latin phrase “Redde quod debes” (pay what you owe)
repeated five times in the final two passūs. Chaucer’s Parson, his ideal
representative of the clerical estate, defines sin as that which deprives man
of his ability to “paye [. . .] his dette to God.” For the Parson, the gift of
life itself creates a debt, one that sin compounds by expending the spiritual
credit we might use to pay for our lives. In Middle English romance, the
knight’s obligations to his fellows and his king are often framed as debts, so
that the ability to repay what one owes functions as a crucial marker of
individual honour. In fabliaux, unpaid debts are, likewise, a source of
shame, while the power that a creditor wields over his debtor is a frequent
source of irony and humiliation. And in the Middle English devotional
lyrics known as the “Charters of Christ,” the metaphor of sin as a debt is
extended to imagine the redemption as a legal land transfer and the duty of
charity as a rent paid to Christ.
The language of debt is pervasive in Middle English, as it is in the Bible,
and yet in the formidable body of scholarship on the sacrament and history
of penance, there is no work to date that focuses specifically on the
conceptualization of sin as a debt. The field of economic history offers
richly detailed studies of debt and credit in medieval English and European
economies, but the growing number of literary studies on economic
themes have yet to grapple with the centrality of debt in Middle English
writing. Much of this literary critical work focuses on the rise of com-
mercialism in late medieval England and seeks to understand the attitudes
and responses of Middle English writers to mercantilism and
monetization, but scholars have yet to consider the importance of debt
in these contexts, or the remarkable fact that, for late medieval writers, the
penitential and the financial meanings of debt were inextricable.
On the contrary, debt is typically assumed to function merely as a
metaphor in Middle English literature, as a well-worn figure of speech
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Introduction: Debt and the Spirit of Capitalism
that does not tell us anything new about the nature of sin in theological
terms, or about the realities of debt, credit, and exchange in economic
terms. Critical readings of Langland’s insistence that salvation depends on
paying one’s debts, for example, or of Chaucer’s definition of sin as a debt
to God, tend to take for granted a one-way metaphorical relation between
the spiritual tenor and the economic vehicle. Christ’s blood is not a literal
payment but a figurative one. In a debt of sin one owes contrition but not
money. Derek Pearsall, for instance, noting that “commercial metaphors
are the stock-in-trade of both biblical parables and Franciscan exempla,”
warns against giving too much weight “to the literal significance of poetic
metaphor.” And yet, Middle English writers consistently deploy debt
language in a way that exposes the slipperiness of vehicle and tenor in
economic metaphors. As I will show, much of fourteenth-century spiritual
vocabulary is economic precisely because economics are a spiritual
business, just as, in The Prick of Conscience, matters of the soul are
inherently economic.
The allegorical slipperiness of debt may be understood by analogy with
the doctrine of the Incarnation, insofar as the embodiment of the divine in
human form served as a figure of linguistic figuration in medieval theories
of signification. In his well-known formulation of this figuration,
Augustine writes,
When we speak, the word which we hold in our mind becomes a sound in
order that what we have in our mind may pass through the ears of flesh into
the listener’s mind: this is called speech. Our thought, however, is not
converted into the same sound, but remains intact in its own home,
suffering no diminution from its change as it takes on the form of a word
in order to make its way into the ears. In the same way the word of God
suffered no change although it became flesh in order to live in us.
As Mark D. Jordan puts it, for Augustine, it is not only that the words of
the Bible “convey the Word, it is that they are like the Word.” God
represents Himself, makes Himself accessible to humankind, in the figure
and form of Christ, just as language represents things in signs so they may
be apprehended by the human mind. And yet, at the same time, the
Incarnation is also an event, a real thing in itself; according to the patristic
theologian Tertullian, “the virgin conceived in the womb, not figuratively
[non figurate]; and she brought forth Emmanuel, God Jesus with us, not
metaphorically [non oblique].” As Cristina Maria Cervone observes, for
medieval theologians, “Logos is substantive, not linguistic.”
Both signifier and signified, and metaphor of metaphor, the Incarnation
generates dizzying paradoxes. Similarly destabilizing and capacious, debt
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Introduction: Debt and the Spirit of Capitalism
or, in Latin, debitum, is both a metaphor and a thing in itself in medieval
Christian theology. As a metaphor for sin, it contrasts with or comple-
ments other Biblical images, such as burden, stain, or pollutant, using the
economic condition of owing or being in arrears to illustrate the condition
of guilt or lack. As a thing in itself, a debt is simply something owed to
another, an obligation or duty as such, and not necessarily one that can be
quantified monetarily. In this way, in its semantic relation to sin, debt is a
Janus-word, at once the obligation and the breaking of the obligation,
simultaneously denoting and allegorizing. And it is so not only in English
and in Latin but in most Indo-European languages: for example, in Greek,
opheilō designates the state of being a financial debtor as well as having a
duty, while in German, Schuld means both moral guilt and financial debt.
In this light, there seems little danger of pushing too far “the literal
significance of poetic metaphor.” Indeed, tracing the workings and signif-
icance of debt in late medieval literature requires that we extend the literal
significance of poetic metaphor as far as it will go, and beyond, even as
Middle English writers dissolved stable boundaries between spiritual alle-
gory and economic reality in their representations of debt.
When, in his fragmentary essay “Capitalism as Religion,” Walter
Benjamin invited us to “consider the demonic ambiguity” of the
German word Schuld, he was reflecting on the word’s double religious
and economic meaning. Recent scholarship suggests that debt is defined
by doubleness in other ways, too. Scholars analyzing the workings of the
new “debt age” or the “contemporary culture of debt” often focus on debt
as a tool of political oppression and a driver of unjust and unsustainable
economic growth. But a prominent thread weaving through this critique
of debt is the idea that debt has become the central fact and problem of
twenty-first-century social, political, and economic life, not only because of
the injustice and despair it inflicts but also because of the consolation and
enjoyment it offers. On the level of the individual, in an economic context
of wage stagnation, job insecurity, and rising costs of living, indebtedness –
borrowing to pay for the essentials of life, as well as for prestige or luxury
consumer goods – is, often, the only avenue of participation in the global
capitalist economy; in this context, debt appears to be the only path to
human flourishing. The fact that the liberatory potential of debt is
usually short-lived or even illusory, and often serves in fact to compound
the burden of debt, has proven no deterrent to ever-greater amounts of
borrowing. On the corporate level, the level of the state and the financial
industry, these operations writ large make possible myriad forms of profit
and production. Entire federal budgets have become single lines in
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Separate Spheres?
sovereign debts so large they seem to exist only in a realm of pure
abstraction; new money itself, increasingly, is created through debt. The
productive capacity of debt is, in essence, a “power to turn ideas into
realities through investing and purchasing, creating the economic world –
a power that Marx did not hesitate to call divine.”
Separate Spheres?
The allegorical slippage inherent in debt is counter-intuitive because we are
accustomed to thinking of the domains of religion and economics as
utterly and ideally separate, and we owe this notion of separateness in no
small part to medieval texts and theologians themselves. In other words,
debt is typically read as mere metaphor precisely because medieval writers
so often condemned the materialization of spiritual things as a type of
corruption. Even as he inscribes an economy of salvation that valorizes
labour, venture, and wage payment, Langland’s sharp and frequent attacks
on dishonest merchants, bribe-takers, simoniacs, and especially on friars
who carry out their spiritual offices in service of crassly materialist motives,
seem to evince a rejection of the burgeoning profit economy “in the
interests of what he calls ‘truth’ – that value of an ideal feudal society
which encompasses both justice and feudal loyalty.” Langland’s protest,
moreover, aligns at many points with the Church’s own “historical resis-
tance to the money economy” and with theologians’ and preachers’
condemnation of merchants and profit-motivated activity. Indeed, the late
medieval suspicion of money, markets, and commercialism seems, at first
blush, to be unanimous and ubiquitous, and it is buttressed by a long
history of Christian exhortations to otherworldliness. Gratian’s Decretum
states that “a merchant is seldom, or never, able to please God.” St.
Francis compares money to excrement; Peter Damian recounts a vision
in which a piece of silver given to him by an abbot causes his intestines to
swarm with vermin. The Church’s official prohibition of usury invoked
the unnaturalness of generating money, not from labour or production,
but from money itself, and the wrongfulness of selling time. Jesus may
have used economic metaphors, but he also overturned the tables of the
moneychangers in the temple and instructed his disciples to give up all of
their material possessions in order to follow him. The currents of
asceticism and contemptus mundi run deep in the Biblical tradition and
in medieval Christian thought.
In critical readings of late medieval texts, the perception of an inherent
tension between theology and economics produces an interpretive
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Introduction: Debt and the Spirit of Capitalism
paradigm rooted in a dichotomy of spirit and matter, and rooted also in an
imperative to clearly distinguish “temporal þing” from “goostly þing.”
In such readings, the problem with Langland’s corrupt friars and their easy
penance is not only that they pursue personal gain when they should be
shepherding souls but also that they reify spiritual truths and elevate gross
matter above inner feeling. Likewise, the problem with The Prick of
Conscience’s calculating Christ is that human actions, both good and sinful,
are reduced to tallies on a ledger with no regard to context or even,
possibly, intention. Lee Patterson argues that the most important aspect
of late medieval English reformist thinking is “its insistence on the priority
of the inner to the outer, of the meaning to the form, of the spirit to the
letter, in every aspect of religious life.” Similarly, David Aers contends
that the early capitalist ethos, with its emphasis on individualism and the
production and consumption of material goods, was alien to Langland’s
“neo-Franciscan” values of poverty, penitence, and community.
According to Pearsall, Langland’s “social ideals always remain those of
agrarian and manorial culture, revealing the poet’s inability to approve of
mercantilism in any form beyond a ‘primitive form of barter or
exchange.’” And John A. Yunck characterizes Langland’s satire as an
“instinctively conservative” outcry “against a world dominated by money
or meed [. . .] [Langland’s] is the voice of the Common Christian Man
crying in the economic wilderness.” These critical perspectives are based
implicitly on the assumption that inner spirit and outer matter can and
should be conceptualized as distinct, and that confusion between the two
categories in medieval texts must be an effect of satire or complaint, or, if
the confusion is uncritical and unironic, as in the case of Conscience, of a
crude and harsh penitential doctrine. Modern reception of Chaucer’s anti-
clerical satire, too, has depended upon a clear conceptual division between
matter and spirit, economics and religion. In Chaucer’s The Friar’s Tale
and The Summoner’s Tale, the clerical abuse of penitence consists of
extorting money and material goods from sinners in place of spiritual
payment; in The Summoner’s Tale, extortion plays out in passive-aggressive
terms, in the friar’s pastoral efforts to convince Thomas that he ought to
give to the friary, so that their prayers will pay the debt that he owes for his
bodily health and his eternal soul. The punchlines of Chaucer’s jokes seem
to depend on the belief that a measuring, quantifying theology is a
perversion of “true” spirituality. John V. Fleming has argued that “the real
thrust of the comedy is [its] exposure of literalism.” As Glending Olson
puts it, for Chaucer, “God is beyond rational calculation.” As with
Langland’s attacks on the friars, the problem with Chaucer’s clergy is that
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Separate Spheres?
they attempt to quantify the unquantifiable, and they confuse the “letter”
for the “spirit” for their own selfish ends.
This interpretive paradigm relies implicitly on a disciplinary division
between economics and theology, or between fields of inquiry based on
quantification and measurement and those based on speculation and
hermeneutics. Built into this division is the preeminence of the economic
over the theological, insofar as the causality moves in one direction:
economic forces shape (or pervert) theological ideas. A clear example of
this economic preeminence can be found in Joel Kaye’s excellent and
influential book, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century. Kaye
argues that the increased use of money in European economies in the
thirteenth century imported into other spheres of knowledge a propensity
for calculation and quantification. He explains the “measurement frenzy”
of the natural philosophers associated with Merton College in the four-
teenth century, the so-called Oxford Calculators, as, in part, a result of
monetization. The implication here is that such quantitative preoccupa-
tions had not been a theological activity prior to the rapid expansion of the
market economy. Describing the movement of ideas from Oxford to Paris,
Kaye writes,
by the second quarter of the fourteenth century, masters at the University of
Paris began to adopt the intellectual interests and methods of the English
Calculators. As they did so, the passion to measure and quantify [. . .]
quickly invaded every realm of scholastic thought, including theology.
Soon not only entities that had never been measured before, but also those
that have never been measured since, were subjected to a kind of quanti-
tative analysis [. . .] such as the strength of Christian charity, [. . .] or the
means by which the quality of grace increases in the soul.
Kaye emphasizes the vital contributions of these Oxford scholars to
modern science and mathematics, and yet the upshot of his causal account
is that the attempt to measure theological entities was an interim step on
the way to casting off theology altogether, a means to the end of liberating
quantitative methods from theological aims that would allow science and
mathematics to progress unfettered.
I propose to call this interpretive paradigm the separate spheres paradigm,
insofar as it conceives of economics and theology as constitutive of two
ideally separate modes. In this paradigm, the shift from feudalism to
capitalism is a shift from the traditional bonds of hierarchy and commu-
nalism (theological, non-rational, medieval) to individualism and compet-
itive acquisition (economic, calculating rationality, modern); feudalism
corresponds to the “religious” mode, and capitalism to the “rational”
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Introduction: Debt and the Spirit of Capitalism
mode. Lester K. Little locates the division in the mid-eleventh century,
arguing that advances in commerce, industry, and banking “marked the
emergence of a wholly different attitude, one that calculated values to see
whether any particular activity or transaction would be profitable.”
In Little’s account, the “new economy” rendered many aspects of
Christian morality obsolete and set ordinary people adrift in the face of
“acute problems involving impersonalism, money, and moral uncer-
tainty.” Little argues that the Church’s moral teaching had to catch up
to new economic realities, and that it was the Franciscan and Dominican
orders who, paradoxically, in their adherence to voluntary poverty, suc-
ceeded in formulating “a new moral theology” in which mercantile activ-
ities were permissible and even laudatory. Little’s thesis is important and
fruitful in many ways, but the point I wish to emphasize is that he, too,
considers theology to be reactive to, not generative of, economic change.
The paradigm of separate spheres is implicit in Little’s analysis because he
explains the comparative success of the Franciscans and Dominicans as a
result of their “rationality” in confronting the profit economy, “in sharp
contrast to the puzzlement and confusion of those who sought uniquely
religious solutions.” For Little, the mendicant orders succeeded in adapt-
ing their spiritual ideas and practice to the new economy only by making
those ideas and practices less spiritual, strictly speaking, and more rational,
more in line with the calculating ethos of the age.
The idea that the religious faith and theological doctrine of the Middle
Ages were essentially inimical to the development of market economies
was given its most famous articulation by the German sociologist Max
Weber. In Weber’s profoundly influential thesis, modern capitalism
emerged in Protestant societies with the demise of the Roman Catholic
Church’s authority, resulting in the secularization of labour and the
liberation from religious censure of trade and wealth accumulation.
Weber singled out Calvinism in particular as the denomination with the
closest “inner affinity” with capitalist commerce. “Here,” writes Weber
of Calvinist piety, “is the most fertile ground for the growth of that
attitude to work as an end in itself, as a ‘calling,’ that capitalism
demands.” By contrast, according to Weber, the “traditionalist” medie-
val attitude toward work sees it as a means to the end of meeting one’s
basic needs, while even in fourteenth-century Florence, “the center of the
‘capitalist’ world at that time,” money, trade, and markets were seen as
“morally dubious.”
Applying Weber’s thesis to the English context, Christopher Hill argued
that only following the Reformation was “the sordid sin of avarice
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Separate Spheres?
transmuted into the religious and patriotic duty of thrift.” Richard
Tawney likewise emphasized the incommensurability of medieval theology
and modern economy, contending that the Reformation in England
“broke” the “theological mould which shaped political theory from the
Middle Ages.” Freed from the moral restraints imposed on economic
behaviour by the Catholic Church, and called forth by revolutions in
agriculture, commerce, and urbanization, in Tawney’s account homo eco-
nomicus emerges sometime in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, using
means–end rationality to pursue goals dictated by self-interest. This ratio-
nal, self-interested individual is the basic unit of modernity, and regards his
medieval ancestor as a being wholly alien. Over the course of the twentieth
century, this essential view, that medieval economic growth was stifled by
religious strictures and social disapproval, was refined and restated in
various forms by economic historians.
Arguably, the separate spheres approach, particularly in its Weberian
form, is out of step with more recent work in medieval economic history,
work that has increasingly clarified our picture of the sophistication and
complexity of the late medieval English economy. There is no doubt that
the entire Western Christian world underwent profound and radical
changes in economic and social organization from the first feudal age
(roughly –) to the late medieval period (–). This latter
period was characterized above all by a commercial revolution that did
indeed transform England with the emergence of more highly organized
markets, including credit markets; an increase in the value and volume of
coinage in circulation; urban expansion and the rise of new towns; the
proliferation of non-agricultural occupations; and a market-oriented peas-
antry. But, as studies by Bolton, Britnell, Davis, Nightingale, Wood, and
others have shown, these changes emerged far earlier than was previously
thought – far earlier, that is, than the Protestant Reformation – developed
gradually and unevenly, and, far from supplanting feudalism, were typi-
cally supported by feudal structures and values. Consequently, the general
movement in economic history in recent decades has been in the direction
of dismantling or nuancing the dichotomies that structured earlier
accounts of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Views of the early
Middle Ages as non-commercial or as governed by a “natural” economy
have been discounted as caricatures, as have views of an opposition
between an innovative urban economy and a stubborn rural feudalism.
Historians now recognize the interdependence of rural and urban econo-
mies, as well as the central role played by markets and trade, both when
urban populations burgeoned from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries
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Introduction: Debt and the Spirit of Capitalism
and in the demographic collapse that followed the Black Death. Money
and credit were widespread in rural areas, and there is much evidence that
people at all levels of society, including the peasantry, had a firm under-
standing of market mechanisms much earlier than was previously recog-
nized. At the same time, towns were embedded in feudal hierarchies
both through their governing structures and through local trading net-
works. Increasingly, any notion of a sharp distinction, let alone a
rupture, between an agrarian Middle Ages and a proto-capitalist early
modernity is difficult to maintain. Rather, feudal structures, monetization,
and various forms of mercantilism co-existed for centuries, well before and
beyond the fourteenth century, defying clear periodization. In what fol-
lows, I draw on this work in economic history, particularly insofar as it
supports a rejection of periodization, to contextualize my readings of
Middle English literature and theological texts. As I aim to show, the
persistence of periodization – the ways in which it provides the very
structural foundations of literary history – has obscured the relevance of
medieval theology for understanding the emergence of capitalist forms,
ideas, and behaviours. Once we begin to read outside the theoretical
structure of periodization, well-known texts that have long been thought
to lament the rise of the market or the loss of feudal bonds of loyalty, or to
critique the commodification of human values and relationships, become
legible and meaningful in new and often surprising ways.
Weber does not have a prominent place in medieval studies in any direct
way: literary historians of the Middle Ages rarely, if ever, cite his work.
And yet, his premise that medieval theology is fundamentally at odds with
the forces of monetization and mercantilism remains definitive and deter-
minative in literary studies. As Kathleen Davis has shown, the division
between “a religious Middle Ages” and “a secular modernity” is remarkably
persistent, surviving a veritable onslaught of critiques of “teleological and
stage-oriented histories,” and continuing to shape studies of the politics of
time. Not only does this division inform readings of anti-fraternal and
anti-clerical satire in Langland and Chaucer; it can also be discerned in the
fact that theological ideas and religious practices are routinely hived off as
irrelevant in scholarship on the rise of the market economy in late medieval
literature. The editors of a recent collection of essays on Money, Commerce,
and Economics in Late Medieval English Literature, for instance, acknowl-
edge that traditional periodization, which marks the period of –
as the transition from feudalism to capitalism, is “oversimplified”; and they
note, too, that current medieval criticism is increasingly aware of the
“sophistication of medieval economic thought.” But the four key factors
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Separate Spheres?
they identify as economically salient are climatic, demographic, political,
and commercial, while the scholastics Thomas Aquinas, Jean Buridan,
Thomas of Chobham, Albertus Magnus, and Peter John Olivi are credited
merely with seeking to “reconcile, at varying levels of specificity, the
practices of merchants and traders with medieval Christian principles.”
Again, medieval theology can only be at odds with or reactive to, not
generative of, economic reality.
The passages quoted above from The Prick of Conscience, The Parson’s
Tale, and Piers Plowman, in keeping with the picture of a complex and
mercantile Middle Ages, suggest that in late medieval culture, theological
and economic modes and objects of inquiry were not as easily distin-
guished as modern disciplinary boundaries would have them. Kaye iden-
tifies monetization as a well-defined series of material changes, changes
that prompted in turn a kind of misplaced rationalization in the field of
theological speculation. But medieval thinkers did not, themselves, con-
sider theology and economics to be separate fields of thought; on the
contrary, as Diana Wood points out, “the medieval world was not one of
econometrics and global markets, but one of ‘theological economy.’”
Ideas about material goods and resources – ideas about acquisition, con-
sumption, supply, and distribution, as well as the mechanisms and prin-
ciples at work in the process of monetization – all such ideas did not
“invade” theology but were aspects of theology. Theological speculation
provided the intellectual soil out of which the passion to measure and
quantify grew. The Oxford Calculators were theologians first and fore-
most, the products of medieval scholasticism, for whom the measuring of
spiritual quanta was neither impossible nor absurd, and for whom the
management of material resources for the common good was a moral task
that used practical and mathematical tools to achieve spiritual ends. And
yet, the late medieval chorus of complaint and anxiety about money and
merchants has made the longstanding association of Protestantism and
capitalism hard to shake, seeming to lend support to the separate spheres
paradigm in spite of the economic evidence that belies it. This chorus
raises important questions about the relationship between theological ideas
and economic realities. Did the teachings of the Church against
mercantilism and acquisition fall on deaf ears? Do they reflect the insular-
ity and hypocrisy of a cloistered religious elite? Is the longstanding per-
ception of medieval Catholic otherworldliness simply a matter of
confusion between prescriptive and descriptive textual evidence?
The argument of this book is that answers to these questions may be
found in the late medieval idea of debt, as that idea is worked out not only
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Introduction: Debt and the Spirit of Capitalism
in scholastic theology but also in vernacular theology, in the imaginative
literature of late medieval England. In this idea, I argue, we can see the
dynamic by which the Christian ascetic ideal, in its rejection of material
profit and wealth acquisition, ends up producing precisely what it con-
demns. On the surface, it seems that England’s bustling textile industry or
the weekly profits of a fourteenth-century London alewife have little to do,
conceptually and practically, with scholastic theories of sin and atonement,
or with penitential instruction on the vices and their remedies. And yet, the
same concept of debt is intrinsic to both. Regular bullion shortages
throughout the late medieval period meant that the currency often used
in commercial transactions was money of account: the system of pounds,
shillings, and pence given prominence in the late eighth century by
Charlemagne. Account money works essentially as a system of continually
circulating IOUs; it is, in other words, a system of debt and credit. This is
the same period in which the nature of sin as a spiritual debt to God is
expounded countless times in penitential manuals and handbooks, homi-
letic literature, and poetry for the purposes of educating the laity on the
matter of what they owe and how they might pay it, whether in almsgiving
or other acts of penance. Spiritual and material quanta were not easily
distinguished, as debates over pardons and indulgences and the doctrine of
transubstantiation attest. The double penitential–financial meaning of debt,
and the moral paradoxes it creates, was certainly not lost on Chaucer, whose
sharp psychological explorations of clerical corruption mine the ironies
born of the late medieval Church’s sacramental materialism. Nor was it
lost on Langland, whose vision of the ideal social order transforms the debt
of sin into an economic virtue and a source of profit.
There is little evidence that the economic changes that began in the
eleventh or twelfth century in fact involved a loss of communal bonds or a
newfound capacity for rational calculation. If the shift from feudalism to
capitalism cannot be charted in this way, and if the emergence of effective
marketing systems and a money economy were not novel upheavals of the
early modern period but had in fact been underway in various stages for
centuries, then we must re-think the assumption that medieval theology
was inimical to economic growth and to the development of the structures
and mindsets that made capitalism possible. In the chapters that follow,
I read key literary texts of the late fourteenth century as works of economic
theology, tracing the ways in which these texts inscribe debt as a produc-
tive, even a transformative, economic relation precisely through, not in
spite of, their expression of penitential themes. Such a focus on imagina-
tive, theological, and devotional texts insists that the economic is not
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Economic Theology and the Spirit of Capitalism
separate from the social and the moral; rather, in the late medieval world,
economy is born out of a penitential ethos that is both described and
prescribed in the literature of the period. At the same time, this focus
shows at a fine grain how poetry and theology do not simply react to
economic changes with lament, nostalgia, or critique; they also serve to
shape economic values.
Economic Theology and the Spirit of Capitalism:
Weber Revisited
The distinction between “the modern” and “the traditional” is founda-
tional and almost absolute in Weber’s vast corpus, and it is this distinction
that effectively rules out medieval theology and literature as sources of
insight or evidence in Weber’s sociology of economics. This fact seems, on
its face, to make Weber irrelevant in turn for a study of late medieval
economic theology. At the heart of Weber’s analysis in The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism, however, is the crucial perception that capi-
talism as an economic system is grounded on and animated by a “spirit,” or
Geist, which lies outside and prior to any particular economic device,
practice, or structure. This spirit we may define as “an embodied moral
sensibility, which precedes action or organisation and amounts to a col-
lective psycho-moral disposition.” The second crucial perception that we
can take from Weber is that the spirit of capitalism works diachronically to
turn asceticism into unbridled consumption and gratification, calculation
into play, and means–end rationality into the irrational pursuit of profit for
profit’s sake. Weber makes this second point explicitly when he distin-
guishes the aims of Calvinist reformers from the consequences of their
purely religious motives: “And we shall therefore have to be prepared for
the cultural effects of the Reformation to be in large measure – perhaps
even, from our particular point of view, predominantly – unforeseen and
indeed unwished for consequences of the work of the Reformers, often far
removed from, or even in virtual opposition to, everything that they
themselves had in mind.” Weber clarified and strengthened this point
in subsequent responses to critiques of his work, critiques in which the
otherworldly piety of Calvinist reformers was held up as evidence that their
worldview and their doctrine could have nothing to do with the worldly
excesses of modern capitalism. Indeed, the primary aim of The Protestant
Ethic, as well as much of Weber’s writings on rationalization and secular-
ization, was to work out precisely how the Christian ascetic ideal ends up
producing precisely what it condemns.
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Introduction: Debt and the Spirit of Capitalism
To this end, Weber identifies a type of self-governing, “inner-worldly”
ascetic as the agent of capitalism. In the opening pages of The Protestant
Ethic, Weber proposes a genealogy of this type:
Today’s capitalism, then, which has come to dominance in economic life,
creates and trains, by means of “economic selection” the economic subjects –
entrepreneurs and workers – that it needs. [. . .] In order that this kind of
conduct of life and attitude to one’s “profession,” adapted as it is to the
peculiar requirements of capitalism, could be “selected” and emerge victo-
rious over others, it obviously had first to come into being, and not just in
individuals, but as an attitude held in common by groups of people. The
origin of this attitude is therefore what needs to be explained.
In Weber’s understanding of capitalism as a form of subjectivization, a
process of creating and training the economic subjects it requires, the
“spirit” of capitalism is at once an “attitude” (Einstellung) and an “ethic”
constituted by the pursuit of profit as an end itself. Crucially, for Weber,
this ethic is not an instrumentalist ethic. The pursuit of profit he identifies
as the dominant feature of the Calvinist ethic is “so completely devoid of
all eudaemonistic, let alone hedonist, motives, so much purely thought of
as an end in itself that it appears as something wholly transcendent and
irrational, beyond the ‘happiness’ or the ‘benefit’ of the individual.” In its
irrational element and aim, the spirit of capitalism transforms practices of
the methodical conduct of life into a transcendent end-in-itself.
Not surprisingly, therefore, Weber contends that the rational asceticism
of medieval monasticism, particularly that of the Benedictines, Cluniacs,
and Cistercians, “was also the decisive practical ideal of Puritanism.”
Both aimed at releasing “man from the power of irrational impulses and
from dependency on the world and nature, to subject him to the suprem-
acy of the purposeful will, and to subordinate his actions to his own
continual control and to the consideration of their ethical conse-
quences.” Monasticism serves as a spiritual precursor to Calvinist
Puritanism, as a model of a methodical conduct of life that nevertheless
remained cloistered from the world and the economic order, whereas
Puritanism imported such conduct into secular life. Weber here draws
a clear distinction between the ideals of monasticism and those of “ordi-
nary medieval man,” whose life was characterized by “an unsystematic
series of individual actions that he carried out to make up for particular
sins or as advised by the priest, or, toward the end of his life, as a kind of
insurance policy.” For Weber, the rationalizing mentality, the “system-
atisation of the ethical conduct of life” that was to become the spiritual
impetus of capitalism, remained hermetically sealed, as it were, within the
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Economic Theology and the Spirit of Capitalism
monastery walls until the rupture of the Reformation set it loose upon the
world at large. Thus he cites the seventeenth-century English writer John
Bunyan as the one responsible for enshrining the image of God as a
bookkeeper: in Bunyan’s depiction of the salvation economy, Weber
notes, “Anyone who goes into the red may just be able to pay off the
accumulated interest with the proceeds of his own merits, but will never be
able to pay off the principal.”
In fact, this image of God and the concomitant understanding of sin as a
debt that cannot be fully discharged is first elaborated and disseminated en
masse in the late medieval flowering of vernacular literature in England and
in Europe. This, I argue, is the cultural site where the systematization of
the ethical conduct of life is imagined for the first time not only as a
possibility for all people but as a requirement. The image of God as a
bookkeeper is enshrined and taught to “ordinary” people not for the first
time by Bunyan but in such texts as The Prick of Conscience, in Franciscan
preaching manuals, penitential handbooks, forms of confession, and above
all, in vernacular poetry. Weber pinpoints the Reformation, and Puritan
theology in particular, because of what he perceived as its tendency to
transform, in the words of Arjun Appadurai, “salvational uncertainty into
capitalist methodicality.” It is precisely the loss of the Church’s peniten-
tial apparatus that leads, in this account, to the Protestant’s lonely search
for signs of his election in the tangible profits of worldly success. My
challenge to Weber, then, is not only a challenge on the grounds of
periodization; I am not arguing simply that the historical timeline of the
“spirit of capitalism” must be extended backward in time to include
medieval asceticism, although this is part of it. More important is the idea
that medieval penitential theology works to engender and promote the
spirit of capitalism, not by sowing salvational uncertainty but by marking
the sinner, that is, the individual, as a debtor.
This book reconsiders and revises Weber’s spirit of capitalism in order
to understand and theorize late medieval debt. In doing so, it makes use of
recent work in cultural theory, philosophy, and anthropology that has
identified Weber’s sociology of economics as a necessary and vital resource
for understanding the contemporary globalized economy and the debt
crises that characterize it. In his analysis of the role of language in the
marketplace, Appadurai engages Weber on the role of uncertainty and
calculation to argue that the failure of the US financial system in
– was “primarily a failure of language,” focusing on the central
role played by derivatives, written contracts whose value is based on an
agreed-upon underlying financial asset, in the contemporary economy.
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Introduction: Debt and the Spirit of Capitalism
Derivatives are promises that Appadurai analyzes, following Austin, as a
type of performative – utterances that, “if produced in the right condi-
tions, create the conditions of their own truth.” This work reminds us
that, contrary to the assumptions inherent in the separate spheres para-
digm, modern economics are not a purely rational, calculating endeavour,
divorced from the realm of human values, beliefs, and relations. Rather,
the promises that comprise the contemporary financial system are expres-
sions of faith in the future realization of profit. As Appadurai writes, the
derivative is one of several “magical practices (by which I mean both
coercive and divinatory performative procedures) at the heart of global
capitalism and, in particular, the financial sectors. These practices are
premised on a general, absolute, and apparently transparent faith in
the market.”
Italian philosopher Elettra Stimilli draws on Weber to argue that debt
has today become a “form of life” that shapes the desires and passions of
the subjects it governs, such that the capitalist subject is one not bound
externally by juridical constraints, who enjoys a formal freedom of the will,
and yet chooses a kind of economic and institutional bondage. Stimilli’s
reinterpretation of Weberian ascesis offers a crucial starting point for the
argument of this book. Conventionally, Weberian ascesis is understood
simply as self-discipline in the form of renunciation. In this view, ascesis
has no value in itself; it is, rather, instrumental to achieving a higher aim
external to itself, be it economical (as profit) or soteriological (as
salvation). In Stimilli’s reading, however, Weberian ascesis names any
practice aimed at actualizing the human potential to act autotelically, that
is, for the sake of action itself and with no other goal external to action
itself. Stimilli proposes to regard ascesis as praxis geared to the “aimless
productivity that intimately characterizes [human life] and the ability of
human action to possess its own end.” Sin-as-debt in the Middle English
texts surveyed here is a form of life in the sense defined by Stimilli: it is not
only a sum owing but a condition to invest in and to cultivate through
practices of ascesis. For Chaucer, Langland, and the writers of late medi-
eval romance and lyric, the idea of sin-as-debt demands a penitential
ascesis: the cultivation of a calculating and rationalizing inner self through
the habitual ordering of actions and feelings into the categories of vice and
virtue. It also demands the shaping of subjectivity to its own “purposeless
purposiveness,” an autotelism that exceeds any narrow concern with
economic utility and instrumentality. In late medieval “nominalist”
theology in particular, such as that associated with William of Ockham,
the autotelic capacity of human action – the capacity of human action to
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Economic Theology and the Spirit of Capitalism
be an end-in-itself – is extolled in Paul’s subsumption of the law by grace,
which nullifies the means–end performance of works and renders human-
ity’s debt to God the condition of the divine gift of grace; as such, this debt
is inherently unpayable and infinitely reproducible. For less radical
thinkers, too, such as Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas, the sacraments
of penance and of marriage demand the freely willed cultivation of one’s
own indebtedness, which is sanctioned by grace as the end-in-itself of
human praxis. I explore each of these facets of debt – its paradoxical
relations to grace, freedom, and the will – in successive chapters on the
Middle English charter lyric, the marriage debt in Chaucer’s poetry, and
the problem of measure and limit in Langland’s Piers Plowman. Together,
these chapters show the power of debt to shape the desires and passions of
the subjects it governs, such that the penitential subject, like the capitalist
subject, is one not bound externally but one whose will is shaped and
affected by economic factors of desire, need, and scarcity.
Stimilli’s thesis centres The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
and the debates it provoked over the course of the twentieth century, in
the context of economic theology, a field of research that has taken on a
new shape and significance since the publication of Giorgio Agamben’s
Homo sacer series, particularly The Kingdom and the Glory. In this work,
Agamben delineates two paradigms deriving from early Christian theology.
The first is the juridical paradigm of political theology, expounded in the
work of Carl Schmitt, among others, and premised on the transcendence
of sovereign power. The second, which is of primary concern here, is the
immanent order of the economy. The Kingdom and the Glory, the fourth
volume of the series, focuses on the complex relation between economic
theology and Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, which he also called
gouvermentalité or economic power. In particular, Agamben challenges
Foucault’s implicit model of periodization in terms analogous to, and, at
times, synonymous with, those of the present project. Whereas Foucault
posits a pre-modern era of supreme or sovereign power that shifts to a
modern era of nation-states characterized by governmental rule and bio-
power, Agamben argues that Christianity itself, in its earliest centuries,
institutes a bipolar system of power in which sovereignty and governmen-
tality work in tandem. Agamben pushes back the historical time frame of
Foucault’s analysis but also undermines the search for a decisive shift or
rupture in which the medieval gives way to the modern, pre-modern
sovereign power to modern economic power. At the same time,
Agamben takes his cue from Foucault’s identification of Christian pastoral
power as the blueprint for biopower, and the crucial link Foucault draws
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Introduction: Debt and the Spirit of Capitalism
between the operations of economy and that of governmentality. Agamben
credits Foucault for situating “the origin of governmental technologies in
the Christian pastorate” insofar as both share “the idea of an economy, that
is of a management organised on the familial model of individuals, things,
and riches,” but he sets out to correct Foucault’s neglect of “the theological
implications of the term oikonomia.”
To this end, The Kingdom and the Glory opens with an extended
reflection on the etymology of the word economy, beginning with
Aristotle’s distinction between the oikos and the polis, and culminating
with the distinction made in early Christian theology between the econ-
omies of the Trinity and of the world. For Aristotle, oikonomia means
household administration, that is, “a functional organisation, an adminis-
trative activity that is bound only to the rules of the ordered functioning of
the house (or of the company in question).” As the term is used by the
Stoics in the third century BCE, it expresses “the idea of a force that
regulates and governs the whole from the inside.” And in its broad sense
of governing, the verb oikonomein “acquires the meaning of ‘providing for
the needs of life, nourishing.’” In the New Testament, Paul makes
frequent use of the term oikonomia to describe the task assigned to him
by God of preaching the mystery of the redemption. In so doing, he
reflects the gradual expansion of the semantic field of the word, from the
sense of household management in particular to management or adminis-
tration in general, an expansion that ends up rendering Aristotle’s exclu-
sion of the oikos from the polis “obsolete.” Over the course of this
expansion, it becomes possible to conceive of the political as economic,
the polis as a kind of oikos. Likewise, Paul refers to himself and to the
members of his ekklēsia “using exclusively terms that belong to the lan-
guage of domestic administration. [. . .] Christ himself (even though the
name is synonymous with ‘eschatological king’) is always defined with the
term that designates the master of the oikos (that is, kyrios, or dominus in
Latin) and never with terms that are more openly political, such as anax
[king] or archon [ruler].” The Christian community envisioned in the
New Testament, for instance, in I Timothy :, is not the city but the
house of God (oikos theou). In this light, the Christian Church is an
economy and Christian theology is an economic discourse.
Agamben’s analysis of the Christian theological origins of economic
power has profound implications for understanding the use of economic
language to convey theological ideas in medieval literature. Above all, it
establishes the fundamental inextricability of the economic from the
theological as categories of thought and analysis, particularly in Christian
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Allegories of Debt
and post-Christian contexts. In light of Agamben’s analysis, in other
words, it becomes impossible to maintain the separate spheres interpretive
paradigm. This calls for a radical re-configuring of the historical relation
between pre-Reformation doctrine and practice, on the one hand, and
capitalist principles and behaviour, on the other. More precisely, for my
purposes here, it calls for a new approach to literature that has long been
thought to reflect the old story in which the otherworldly asceticism of
medieval Christianity precludes or resists the calculating, rationalizing
spirit of modern capitalism.
Allegories of Debt
The chapters that follow pay close attention to the paradoxes of represen-
tation, or what I have called the allegorical slippage, created by debt’s
polysemy. In the contemporary financialized economy, debt is profitable
because it creates something out of nothing; it is profitable because of its
inherent capacity to invent, even to conjure, what Marx called “fictional
capital.” The imaginary and fictionalizing tendencies of debt in the
contemporary world are becoming ever more apparent as scholars across
fields from economics to philosophy to anthropology begin to work out
the ways in which capitalism is an economic system founded not on
production or exchange but on debtor–creditor relationships, and a system
that expands and sustains itself through the financialization of debt, which
may be defined simply as the use of credit instruments (contracts, bonds,
derivatives) in exchange. The sheer extent to which financialization gen-
erates money out of thin air, not by charging interest on loans but ex
nihilo, prompts Appadurai to suggest that the spirit of capitalism, “which
had solid links to trade, manufacture, labour and profit (as reflected in
some sort of balance sheet),” has now “given way to an entirely different
spirit in which finance has become a magical space, in Weber’s sense,
rather than an ethical space, where what now counts is profits without
known causes and not the methodical rationality of calculation.” I argue
throughout this book that the spirit of capitalism sketched out – partially
and imperfectly – by Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the spirit of debt
that now animates global finance are not “entirely different” but are
ultimately two facets of the same phenomenon. One dominant thread
running throughout the book is the idea that the Christian ascetic ideal
ends up producing precisely what it condemns because of debt’s creative,
transformative power. Debt not only turns deficit into profit; as we will
see, it has the capacity to turn a whole range of values, objects, and desires
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Introduction: Debt and the Spirit of Capitalism
into their opposites – scarcity into abundance, aversion into appetite,
bondage into freedom.
The primary case studies vary in genre from lyric to romance to dream-
vision, but much of the book’s attention focuses on works by Chaucer and
Langland. Langland features prominently because Piers Plowman, more
explicitly and thoroughly than any other poem in English, articulates an
economic theology in which the impetus of vernacularity dovetails with
the forces and effects of the market. Langland also offers the most sus-
tained treatment in Middle English of debt understood as a financial and
spiritual condition, as an anguishing dilemma at the heart of the Christian
life, wherein the best attempts to remedy sin seem inevitably to create ever-
greater economic disparity and injustice. Chaucer is a primary focus
because his poetry is unrivalled in the precision and insight with which
it anatomizes the structural, social, and psychological dynamics of debtor–
creditor relations. Where Langland’s dream-vision is concerned with the
spiritual and social crises of debt, Chaucer’s satirical fictions lend them-
selves to a moral critique, in large part because Chaucer expresses more
cynicism than Langland does about the spiritual basis of our debts to each
other. If Langland espouses an economic theology of debt and then
entertains doubts about its theological viability, Chaucer articulates a
critical anthropology of debt, in which the claims of the creditor are,
often, specious and self-interested.
It is also true that the focus on Chaucer and Langland excludes a range of
other possibilities; indeed, there is an embarrassment of riches facing the
scholar writing about debt in Middle English texts. Were it not for
constraints of space and time, it would have been entirely possible to focus
also on the works of the Gawain-poet, not only on Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, which I discuss in Chapter , but also on Pearl, which
inscribes an economic theology of value (“prys”) in its use of the parable
of the vineyard and its vision of the heavenly city. In Confessio Amantis,
Gower, too, explores the theological valences of financial debt, embedding a
lengthy consideration of faith and false religion in the middle of his
treatment of avarice (Book V, lines –). The placement of this
passage has baffled Gower’s readers, and it irritated Macauley, who consid-
ered it “a very ill-advised digression.” But Gower’s definition of avarice as
an economic sin by which money is wrongly and unprofitably kept out of
circulation, and his grounding of this sin in failures of faith and belief
suggest, first, that the passage on false religion is not a digression at all, and,
second, that Book V of Confessio Amantis might be considered alongside the
spendthrift romances I discuss in Chapter , as a valorization of economic
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Allegories of Debt
faith and the risk-taking ethics of credit . The “petitionary verse” of Thomas
Hoccleve, on the other hand, positions the poet as a debtor, as a supplicant
in dire financial need, abjectly dependent on the king for his survival. For
Hoccleve, the debtor–creditor relation, defined in the context of the
fifteenth-century English court and bureaucracy, elicits not only petition
but also confession, and what Knapp memorably terms “aggressive self-
denigration,” as the constitutive elements of his textual self-fashioning.
The transformative power of debt – sometimes generative, often constrain-
ing – shapes the poetry of Gower and Hoccleve as it does the work of the
Gawain-poet, Langland, and Chaucer. I hope that what follows serves as an
opening to further work along these lines.
Chapter uses the Middle English “Charters of Christ,” or charter
lyrics, to outline a medieval theory of money as a kind of debt. The
charter lyric is a genre defined by the use of a conceit that is at once legal
and economic, a conceit that imagines the management of the sinner’s
unpayable debt as a bureaucratic exercise. These poems pretend to be
deeds, grants, or writs by which Christ cancels the debt owed to God by
sinners, or, alternatively, bequeaths the kingdom of heaven to the
faithful. In exchange for the remission or the inheritance, the charter
stipulates that humankind owes a “rent” to Christ of love and the regular
observance of the sacrament of penance. The form of the charter lyrics
imitates the form of legal documents, using the verbal formulae and
visual markers designed to ensure legal and documentary authenticity as
a kind of spiritual guarantee: the lyrics are sincere forgeries. I argue that
the kind of belief at work in this act of forgery is a monetary belief. The
lyrics function as close analogues to money in that they measure debt
and depend for their value on the creditor’s right to repayment. At the
same time, like money, they depend for their operation on the commu-
nity’s active willingness to participate in a shared fiction. Tracing the
analogy of lyric and money not only sheds light on a late medieval
devotional form, it also tells us much about the monetary belief that
makes debt profitable.
Chapter reads the late medieval romance of the spendthrift knight as
an exemplum of economic faith. A character borrowed from folklore, the
spendthrift knight falls into debt through excessive largesse, and conse-
quently into exile from the aristocratic community. The plot of the
spendthrift romance is organized around the protagonist’s debt recovery
and eventual social triumph when newfound wealth allows him to reclaim
the status he lost through penury – reclaim it and improve it. Two of
the romances I consider in this chapter, Sir Amadace and Sir Launfal,
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Introduction: Debt and the Spirit of Capitalism
dramatize a range of conceptual links between economic status and social
image, money and illusion. I argue that what makes these romances
amenable to and generative of commercial values is their valorization of
credit, typically expressed in the narratives as honour or trouthe, as the
knight’s essential faithfulness. Such faithfulness is manifest primarily and
dramatically in a willingness to risk, but the risks taken by the spendthrift
knight are not on the battlefield. Rather, he takes economic risks, variously
extending and accepting credit, in cycles of exchange that end up gener-
ating profit for the knight and for his community. I argue, too, that
Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are
best understood as variations on the spendthrift knight romance. The
“trouthe” that Arveragus insists on keeping is a type of credit: it is an
index of belief and value, an expression of faith made through risk. In all
four texts, belief as such in relations of social and material exchange, belief
that defies strict rationality and that makes risk and sacrifice both possible
and profitable, motivates gifts and market transactions alike, and binds
individuals in creditor–debtor relationships that are both reciprocal
and hierarchical.
I argue in Chapter that the canon law precept of the marriage debt,
often called simply the debitum, which was formulated particularly by
Augustine, Gratian, and Thomas Aquinas in the course of establishing
marriage as a sacrament, indicates a mode by which power is exercised on
and through the bodies and the wills of married parties. It is a mode by
which individuals are enjoined to a voluntary subservience – a free bond-
age. When Chaucer’s Wife of Bath boasts that the “free” gift of her body
produces a relationship of indebtedness and hierarchy, she is neither
misconstruing nor literalizing the debitum. Her generosity, which is both
free and not free, gives her “power” over her husbands, who in turn must
freely choose to pay. The ways in which this giving is both free and not
free, and the kind of power it produces, are the subject of this chapter.
In the Wife’s Prologue, economic power is figured in the marriage debt; in
the Tale, a parallel master–debtor relation plays out in the re-education of
the rapist-knight, who must pay the marriage debt to the ugly old woman
in exchange for his life. The power that the loathly lady figure wields over
the penitent knight in The Wife of Bath’s Tale is a kind of power that leaves
its subjects formally free but freely compliant, aiming at the production of
internal conditions rather than external constraints. The same dynamic
shapes the plots of other medieval texts featuring the marriage debt, from
Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale to the tales told on Days and of
Boccaccio’s Decameron, all of which I consider as illustrative analogues.
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Allegories of Debt
These texts identify marriage, and marital sex in particular, as a key site
where debt makes subjects, where political power is enacted in and
through the free wills of human beings.
Langland’s depiction of the social, psychological, and economic dimen-
sions of sin-as-debt, the subject of Chapters and , illuminates with
painstaking clarity what Benjamin called debt’s “demonic ambiguity.”
On the one hand, the calculations of debt make possible the exchange of
equivalents that epitomizes for Langland the principle of justice, the
principle that governs a moral economy that is both spiritual and material
in its purview and its effects. For Langland, measure and calculation are
necessary for the moral life, as they are for salvation. Insofar as gift or
symbolic exchange involves open-ended obligations and rests on personal
relations of rank, it is much more liable to the abuses of power that
Langland deplores. By contrast, “mesure” is not only the ideal of justice
but also one definition of money itself. This is the crucial point for
Langland’s economics and his theology: monetary exchange, along with
the careful accounting practices it demands, as long as it is conducted
honestly and fairly, serves as a metaphor of penitential exchange, not
paradoxically, not in spite of its corrupting power, but because it is
conducive to balance and order, to ascesis understood as the practice of
virtue and the ethical habits of self-regulation required for true and
effective penance. On the other hand, for Langland, the unpayable and
infinitely reproducible nature of debt, manifest precisely in the ascesis
instituted by grace, produces a troubling limitlessness. The ascesis of debt
is, in this way, self-undermining. The debt that cannot be repaid correlates
to needs that cannot be measured, and to desires that cannot be checked
and boundaries that cannot be known. Many readers have seen Piers
Plowman as a poem of crisis, a poem that fractures under the weight of
its own ambivalence. I argue here that the demonic ambiguity of debt
offers a plausible explanation of the conflicting impulses at work in
this text.
Langland’s relationship with the mendicant orders, and the possibility
that he himself was a Franciscan, has been the subject of much debate in
critical studies of Piers Plowman. Chapter returns to the question of
Langland’s Franciscanism in order to trace the poem’s attempt to solve the
problem of debt through the Franciscan theory of poverty and use. In the
body of anti-mendicant writing that developed first at the University of
Paris in the thirteenth century and that culminated with the archbishop
Richard of Fitzralph’s condemnation of poverty as “þe effect of sin,”
profitable labour replaces renunciation as the clearest sign and expression
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Introduction: Debt and the Spirit of Capitalism
of Christlike humility, while private property triumphs over common
use. Langland’s allegorical representations of poverty, particularly in
the figures of Recklessness and Need, respond to this idealizing of labour
and offer compelling arguments for the mutually reinforcing benefits of
spiritual and material poverty. The vision of Pentecost that founds the
Church on earth reconciles the claims of justice, according to which
everyone must pay what they owe, with the ideals of use and stewardship
in the form of bureaucracy.
In all of these texts, the workings of debt confound clear and stable
distinctions between material and spiritual economies, and they con-
found also the assumptions inherent in traditional periodization.
Reading debt in these texts can unsettle what Kathleen Biddick has called
“the supersessionary fantasies” inherent in Christianity and modernity
alike. At the same time, tracing the theological roots of the late
medieval economic imaginary, in which unpayable and infinitely repro-
ducible debts promise future profit and salvation, can illuminate the cost
of our continuing investment and belief in those promises. Indeed,
precisely because the economic practices and structures of the late
Middle Ages do look very different from those of the early twenty-first
century, and because twenty-first-century economics has largely forgot-
ten its theological roots, it is illuminating to read medieval theological
writings for their economic import – that is, for the penitential spirit they
teach and seek to inculcate.
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Counterfeit Money
Debt and Form in the Middle English Charter Lyrics
Ihesus Christ his Charter great
That bloud & water so did sweat
And had his Heart I-wounded sore
To saue Mankinde for euermore
Christ hath cancelld the writt of Mans dett
And by this Charter him free hath sett.
“Magna Carta de libertatibus Mundi”
The circulation of the counterfeit money can engender [. . .] the real
interest of a true wealth. Counterfeit money can become true capital.
[. . .] Is there a real difference here between real and counterfeit
money once there is capital? And credit? Everything depends on the
act of faith.
Jacques Derrida, Given Time I: Counterfeit Money
The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept
of authenticity.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction”
Bodleian Library manuscript Ashmole , dating from the fifteenth
century, contains astrological and medical treatises as well as a collection
of religious lyrics in English. Several of these lyrics are “complaints of
Christ,” poignant laments narrated dramatically in the first person from
the cross. Others are dialogues between the virgin and child, with a similar
aim of evoking sorrow and tenderness. But one lyric, an example of the
genre known as the Charters of Christ, takes a decidedly different form,
aiming less at evoking pitiful emotion and more at settling accounts.
Perhaps inspired by the lyric’s legal and economic cast, the scribe copying
it added the following lines to his text:
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Counterfeit Money: Debt and Form in the Charter Lyrics
xiiij M yeres of pardoun
wyth-oute popes twelve
Eche of them vj yeres by themselfe
Patriarkes Archebysshops & bysshopys Also
Mekell pardoun haue graunted therto
The some of þe indulgence rekene or þou gois
Is xxtivj M yeres xxxti yeres & vj days.
A note written under the lyric by a sixteenth-century hand explains this
addition: “This is a version of what was called Carta Christi or
Testamentum Domini: [. . .] and pretends to grant an indulgence of
, years and [sic] days.” The fifteenth-century scribe, in other
words, turned the poem into an indulgence, and an extremely generous
one at that. With the word pretend, this remarkably dispassionate obser-
vation about a remarkable scribal emendation points us in the direction of
several pertinent questions. The Oxford English Dictionary reminds us that,
at least since the late fourteenth century, the verb pretend often has been
used with negative connotations, meaning “to allege or declare falsely or
with intent to deceive.” But it can also mean, more innocently, “to make-
believe in imagination or play.” Did the scribe believe that by altering the
poem in this way he would create an efficacious indulgence? Did he want
someone else to believe this? It is unlikely that the poem was altered in a
spirit of play, if by play we mean that the scribe did not take the business of
sin and pardon seriously, but even more unlikely that it was altered with an
intent to deceive. How, then, are we to understand this flagrant act
of forgery?
If Chaucer’s Pardoner is to be taken as representative, we might con-
clude that indulgences were frequently and notoriously pretend docu-
ments. There is much evidence to suggest that ecclesiastical authorities
knew that inauthentic indulgences circulated with some regularity. And
even as the Pardoner confesses his self-interested financial aims (“myn
entente is nat but for to wynne” [VI.]), it seems equally clear that the
trade in fake or forged indulgences was as bustling as it was both because it
was lucrative and because it was relatively easy to pull off. As Alastair
Minnis has shown, the profitability and the fakeability of indulgences were
inextricable because most people did not understand the real nature of the
transactions they were participating in. The idea of indulgences relied on
“belief in the largesse of divine love,” and yet,
[t]he depth of semi-comprehension, and downright confusion, was extraor-
dinary. Such a situation was ripe for exploitation – and exploited it was, by
learned and lay, by high and low, by popes and pardoners. It afforded a
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Counterfeit Money: Debt and Form in the Charter Lyrics
major business opportunity for the real-life models of the quaestores pre-
sented by Langland, Chaucer, and the Tudor dramatist John Heywood.
In Heywood’s play of The Foure PP the pardoner-figure is intimately
associated with falsehood: ‘Ryght selde is it sene or never / That treuth
and pardoners dwell together’. (–)
At the same time, Minnis cautions against the view that the use of
indulgences was universally a matter of “establishment exploitation of
populist gullibility.” On the contrary, in many cases the people’s demand
for indulgences was tolerated by the Church despite the legal and theo-
logical misgivings of the elite. Considered in this light, in which the use of
indulgences seems ineluctably to feed spiritual cathexes by means of
commerce and convenient fictions, the forgery of the altered lyric begins
to appear less flagrant and certainly less remarkable.
The altered lyric also appears less remarkable in the context of the
charter lyric genre, which is defined by a striking and constitutive mimesis
that consists essentially of two interwoven metaphors. In one, salvation is
figured as a legal grant given by Christ, a grant that pays or cancels
humankind’s debt of sin, and in the other, Christ is figured as the sealed
document that records and disposes the grant. Christ is both giver and gift,
legal actor and legal act. In exchange for the grant, the charters stipulate
that humankind owes a “rent” to Christ of love and the regular observance
of the sacrament of penance. A type of fictional contract, the lyrics imitate
legal documents, using the verbal formulae designed to ensure authenticity
as a kind of spiritual guarantee, for instance, by opening with the incipit
used in bonds and other legal instruments, “Sciant presents et future. . .”
(Let all present and to come. . .), and concluding with a dating clause,
claiming “þis was yeue at Caluary / þe first day of þe greet mercy.”
As Emily Steiner has shown, the idea to allegorize the gift of salvation as a
fictional charter seems to have originated in the Franciscan preaching
manual the Fasciculus morum, which contains a Latin charter granting
possession of heaven to Christ’s spiritual heirs. The earliest of the English
lyrics is known as the Long Charter (–), a poem whose versions
range in length from (A-text) to lines (C-text) and that includes a
charter in its retelling of the life and Passion of Christ. The slightly later
Short Charter (–), of which the altered lyric on Ashmole is
one, consists of a brief proem declaring man’s freedom from debt and a
-line rhyming charter that claims to be sealed with the blood of the
crucified Christ.
The charter lyrics share conceptual ground with the forgeries that
proliferated throughout the Middle Ages, a fact which might help to
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Counterfeit Money: Debt and Form in the Charter Lyrics
explain the scribe’s audacity: it might have seemed a short and easy step
from a fake land grant to a fake ecclesiastical grant. But the lyrics are
not forgeries strictly speaking. They are, rather, imitations of documents
that function, like forgeries do, to express “the idea of the document,” as
Alfred Hiatt explains it – an idea that consists in the shape and size of a
document, its script, how or by whom it is authenticated, and its
symbolic role within a community. Several variants of the charter were
written on small rectangular pieces of parchment designed to look like
real grants of land transfer or writs of debt, complete with fake seals and
parchment tongues. Unlike “real” forgeries, the charter lyrics are osten-
tatiously fake, both by asking their readers to imagine the Passion as an
economic transaction constituted by the signing and sealing of papers, a
scene that could only be fictional if the Gospel account is taken to be
factually true, and by making little effort to be convincing in their
imitation of the physical appearance of real writs and charters. For
instance, many copies feature a seal that is drawn on roughly, rather
than a seal of imprinted wax. At the same time, it is inaccurate to say that
the charters are meant to be read as parody, for they do recount the life
and suffering of Christ faithfully, and they do present a sincere and
orthodox account of the doctrine of the Redemption and the sacrament
of penance. If they are parodies of legal documentation, they are meant
not to mock legal forms but to remind their readers of these forms, to
invoke or even borrow their authoritativeness through imitation. And
while the altered lyric in Ashmole – a poem pretending to be a
charter pretending to be an indulgence – stands out for being a fake of a
fake, it is merely taking the principle of mimesis that shapes the Charters
of Christ one step further: all charter lyrics could be understood as
imitation indulgences, insofar they are fictional representations of the
grant that pays the debt of sin.
For many medieval reformers, as for many modern historians, not only
the abuse or forgery but the very idea of an indulgence was the symptom
par excellence of the monetized materialism and corruption of the late
medieval Church. According to canonists and scholastic theologians, an
indulgence is a gift of the remission of the punishment due to sin, out of
the “superabundant merit” amassed in the Church’s spiritual treasury by
the suffering of Christ and the saints. The treasury of merit served as the
“authentically valuable” reserve or fund backing indulgences, a reserve that
was imagined both as a chest or casket “of which the Church possesses the
keys,” and as a cosmic account book, in which the credit column “exceed
[s] all punishment that is due those who now live.” The giving of such a
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Counterfeit Money: Debt and Form in the Charter Lyrics
gift was not meant to be confused with a commercial transaction, for it
generates not material but symbolic profit. “The treasury of the Church,”
writes Bonaventure, “ought to be distributed by those to whom it is
entrusted for two reasons, namely, for the glory and praise of
[Christ].” At the same time, the gift of an indulgence was not a free gift,
for it depended upon a counter-gift in the form of almsgiving or donations,
and even as the theorists and defenders of indulgences denied any com-
mercial aim, the overall result of the practice was to raise an “unbelievably
large sum of money.” Critics, both scholastic and Wycliffite, argued that
there was no Biblical evidence of such a reserve and that the very idea was
shot through with logical and moral problems. One dominant theme of
complaint concerned the flattening of distinctions between penitents:
how, for instance, could the donation of a rich man merit the same
indulgence as that of a poor man, even if they gave the same amount?
Another theme concerned the purview and power of the bishops and the
pope: if the Church really does possess the keys to the treasury, what stops
its officeholders, other than personal greed, from issuing a blanket remis-
sion of all punishment for all time? And yet, critics averred, only God can
know the amount of penance owing for any given sin. “It follows from
this,” observes Anne Hudson, glossing Wycliffe, “that contemporary papal
claims relevant to indulgences are in every instance mendacious.” The
moral critique was typically phrased in the terms of charity: the ninth point
of the Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards accuses the pope, for the purposes
of demonstrating the self-defeating logic of indulgences, of withholding
pardon uncharitably.
Wycliffite objections also focused on the absurdity of believing that a
material form so utterly mundane could possess the signifying power
claimed for it by the Church. As the first Wycliffite revision of Richard
Rolle’s psalter commentary remarks,
[M]en of lustis tellen [. . .] how her coueitouse schriftfadris assoilen hem, as
thei sey, of synne by a litil leed not weiynge a pound, hengid with an
hempyn thrid at a litil gobet of a calfskyn, peynted with a fewe blake
draughtis of enke, alle the synnes doon in manye yeeris.
In its disdain for the belief that material goods could pay the spiritual price
of sin, the Wycliffite critique evinces the separate spheres paradigm, as do
later Protestant rejections of the practice and much modern discourse on
the topic. The idea that states of being as complex and incalculable as
sinfulness and forgiveness could be measured and discharged by means of a
cosmic bank account – that one might make withdrawals from this
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possible, and in this they succeed gloriously, especially in
denominational schools.
I was a delicate and dreamy boy, and was having great trouble
with my ears, consequently my education was frequently interrupted
by sickness, and even when comparatively well it was necessary to
keep me continually interested or I would fall asleep. I was tired for
nearly fifteen years, and until I was of age never enjoyed six
consecutive months of even fair health. Meanwhile a small brother
had arrived on the scene, who brought new life into the house. He
was destined, as you shall hear, very few years.
As everything appertaining to my father had to be a credit to him,
strenuous efforts were made to bring me up to the standard; but from
the start I was a failure both physically and mentally. I was educated
one way and another; system could not be applied to me. Schools
made but little impression on me, with the exception of one particular
boarding school, kept by a Church of England parson in a small
village not far from Montreal. This parson, Canon Barr, was a crude,
rough, wicked, ignorant, self-opinionated, hypocritical old man, more
farmer than parson. His only aim seemed to be to make as much out
of his boys as possible with the least trouble. He thrashed me cruelly
on the slightest pretext, in fact he thrashed everybody in the school
and on his farm; the boys, his sons and daughters, the servants, his
horses and his dogs. I am not aware that he thrashed his wife, but as
I have seen him beat a horse in the face with his fists, and kick it in
the stomach with his long boots, it is highly probable that he laid
violent hands on his wife. The Canon was a tall, lanky, rawboned
individual with prominent nose and chin, and small eyes set very
close together. He suffered from some skin disease that made his
complexion scaly and blotchy. This affliction, no doubt, affected his
temper, for I noticed that when the disfiguring blotches were fiery
looking, he was particularly touchy. As he sat at his desk in class-
room, he was always pawing his bald head with a large bony hand,
probing his ear with a lead pencil or pen handle, or investigating his
nose. His black waistcoat, which buttoned behind, was always
decorated with spots, and his odour was that of a stableman. His
voice was harsh and loud, except when speaking from the pulpit;
then he subdued it to a monotonous sing-song drone involving four
semitones in a chromatic scale; the kind of noise the bass string of a
’cello will make if it is plucked while the peg is turned up and let
down again. I never saw him laugh heartily, but a joyless grin
disclosing large yellow teeth sometimes wrinkled his displeasing
face; and this generally occurred just before some one was beaten.
The Canon had a balky horse with a hairless tail which he really
appeared to delight in belabouring. On one occasion his little
daughter Mabel and several of the school boys were present while
he thrashed this horse without mercy. The horse was harnessed to a
heavily ladened stone-boat so that he could not bolt. Mabel
screamed a little weak “Oh!”
“Go into the house, daughter,” said the Canon.
“But father,” she began. She got no further when slash came the
whip about her poor little legs.
“Into the house,” the Canon shouted. A boy standing by with every
expression of rooted horror upon his face was suddenly discovered.
“What are you gaping at, you silly little ass?” said the old man. At
the same instant he struck him on the side of the head with his open
hand a blow which nearly felled him. I was the stricken boy.
The rod was never spared in this school, with the result that every
one lied and deceived systematically.
Sundays under the Canon were a horror. We rose at eight o’clock
and went to prayers before breakfast. After breakfast we had time to
dress and to go to Bible-class. Bible-class ended just in time for
church, and immediately after church we dined. The Canon offered
up a particularly long blessing before Sunday dinner. It always
spoiled what little appetite I had. His voice at any time was not a
pleasant one, but his hypocritical Sunday tone was exasperating.
After dinner we sat in the schoolroom and studied the lesson and
collect for the day. At three we went to Sunday School, which lasted
till nearly five. From five to six we walked with a teacher—a
pusillanimous wretch without a soul. We had tea at six and went to
church at seven. I doubt if a more perfect programme could be
elaborated for the purpose of disgusting children with religion.
The Canon’s favourite hymn was “Abide with me.” Perhaps he was
aware that the more foolish parents there were who would send
poor, helpless children to abide with him the more satisfying would
be his income.
It is not surprising that I heartily hated Church and all it implied;
with a very special hatred for “Abide with me,” in which I had been
forced to lift up my voice hundreds of times before I was fifteen years
old.
I was so unhappy in the house of Canon Barr that I decided I must
leave or die; it did not matter which. To effect my release I pretended
to have gone violently insane. It is not certain if I deceived the
Canon, but I think I did. When the foolish idea first came to me, I did
not realise what a strain acting the madman would be, or how I could
make an end of the comedy. I just played my little part and trusted to
luck.
I started moderately by doing foolish things, grinning at every one
one minute and being cross the next; striking and slapping all who
approached me. This brought the Canon down on me with his
favourite implement of torture—a nice, smooth flour barrel stave with
a handle whittled at one end. He thought it was a case of ordinary
rebellion. But one blow from the barrel stave was enough for me;
and its effect, I fancy, startled the old brute. I flew at him like a wild
cat, kicked his shins, bit him on the hand and on the calf of his leg,
and tore his gown to ribbons. Of course I was no match for the
Canon and his barrel stave, and received unmerciful punishment; but
I played the game, throwing ink bottles, rulers, books, anything that
came to hand, in the old fellow’s face, and overturning desks and
chairs like a maniac. He called on the boys for assistance. I
brandished a ruler and threatened dire vengeance in a loud
hysterical voice against any one who dared approach me, and the
boys held back. I was not subdued till the hired man came to the
rescue, and bundled me into my room and locked me up. There I
continued to howl aloud, and destroy every breakable thing. When I
had screamed myself hoarse and was tired out I lay down on my bed
and cried till I fell asleep. When I awoke it was nearly dark. There
were people in the room, so I remained quiet with closed eyes to
discover if any conversation would give me a cue for my next move
in the drama. I was rewarded for my cunning by hearing the voice of
the village doctor telling the Canon to keep me very quiet and to
send for my parents. In a minute they withdrew, and presently a lamp
and my supper were brought me by a very nervous maid.
The next day I was in a raging fever. My mother arrived in the
evening and to her I confessed. I was forgiven, taken home, and not
sent to another boarding school.
Sending children to boarding schools is an admission of incapacity
made by a great many parents who are too lazy or ignorant to
superintend the early years of a child’s up-bringing; or else it is done
in vanity as the proper thing.
There are possibly good boarding schools where children are
better than they would be at home, but I never knew one. The only
good reason for sending the young to be cared for by strangers is
when the home for some reason is not a fit place. No doubt a good
boarding school is better than a bad home; but no boarding school is
as good as a good home and wise parents. Girls brought up in
fashionable schools are notoriously ignorant and useless.
One pleasant memory remains to me of the Canon’s school. It is
that of a little girl with blue eyes, golden hair, red pouty lips and blunt
nose. She was a day scholar from the village, where her father kept
a general store. I never had much opportunity to speak to her, and
she was very shy when I did; yet it was a pleasure just to look at her.
When the Canon frightened her by shouting and pounding his desk
with his large hard hand I was maddened to the fury point. She was
a gentle little creature, truthful, believing and good-hearted; a thing
so little understood by the Canon that he called her “Little
Blockhead.” When I was robbed of my meals, which frequently
happened as punishment for some fault, “Little Blockhead” would
bring me biscuits on the sly. Whether the Canon made me forego
meals wholly as a punishment for my misdeeds, or partly in delight to
torture me and save victuals, I cannot say. But for whatever cause it
was, I really did not mind it, and sometimes even looked forward to it
so that “Little Blockhead” could feed me from her pocket.
During the miserable days at the Canon’s my little brother died
suddenly without giving me a last sweet hug and kiss. He was ten
years younger than me to a day, having been born on my tenth
birthday. This was the first real sorrow to leave its mark upon me. I
loved that brother more than anything or anybody. I had taught him
his first words, mended his playthings, and been his play-horse, his
cow, his dog—anything he desired me to be. When I was at home, it
was to me he always came first thing in the early morning, crawling
into my bed to start the day’s play, and every word of his lisping,
indistinct prattle stuck in my mind.
I was brought home by an old friend of my father’s, who came for
me with the message that my little brother was seriously ill. On
looking into the old man’s face, I was not deceived, and knew at
once that my little friend was dead. But I said nothing. I did not weep
or wail. I could not.
When we were seated beside each other on the train, and I said to
him, “Chuckie is dead!” he did not reply. He merely nodded his head,
and I rode silently home without a word or a tear. I wished to weep,
but could not. Even when I arrived home and my mother kissed me I
remained dry-eyed, but my misery was very real. It hurt me so much
my breath came short and painful.
Then we went through the ghastly meaningless mummery and
pomp of the funeral. Even then I disliked our foolish display in
burying our dead. Since that day I have buried my own dead; but it
was always done silently, privately, quickly, without display, without
pomp and without advertisement. To me death is a thing to be put
behind you. When loved ones die, there is nothing to be done or
said. It is over. First bury them, then get occupied with the affairs of
the living, being careful in your conduct that you make as few
mistakes as may be; so that when another goes away you may have
no memories of actions or words to cause self-reproach.
I had no remorse for any unkindness to my baby brother; for I had
always loved him much, even from the time when he had newly
arrived; a helpless, unseeing, unthinking bit of life. I like to dwell on
this, for it is at least one instance where humanly I did my whole
duty. My duty to him was such a simple uncomplicated thing—just to
love him and be kind. As I grew up I found duty rather a difficult and
complicated thing to see and do.
Other deaths happened as they must in a large family. In quick
succession several of our older relatives died. In those young days I
never felt very keenly the loss of old people. It seemed so natural for
the aged to die that I took it as a matter of course. I do not know that
I have changed much in this respect even now, especially when
people are both old and useless.
I lost my paternal grandparents, and my great-grandfather about
this time. I felt a genuine sorrow about grandfather’s death because
he was a dear old chap—hale, hearty, and jovial. He was suddenly,
and it may seem ruthlessly, killed by having his head crushed by a
runaway horse; but sudden death is not, despite the Prayer Book,
the worst kind of exit. He was a most cheerful old optimist, caring
nothing for the day after to-morrow, or any other day but the one he
was living; and his end was in keeping with his life. He was a third
husband of my grandmother, who had been a very beautiful
Quakeress, and my father was their only son.
CHAPTER III
Both my grandmothers were very religious, one more ostentatiously
than the other. When a young child I distinguished them by calling
one the grandmother who said prayers, and the other the
grandmother who made cakes. I had a strong preference for the one
who made cakes. Her plain fruit cake, undefiled by messy icing of
chocolate or sugar, was a production worthy of remembrance.
My great-grandfather was to me just an old man, very old and
blind, who sat by the fire all day long, and spoke little, and then in a
harsh cold voice, with a strong Scotch accent. He lived in a large
house on a dingy, but a highly respectable street, with four old
daughters and one son, who I discovered did not love him very
much.
Visiting my great-grandfather’s house was like passing suddenly
into old-fashioned long-passed times. My ancient great-aunts were
very prim and very properly made-up ladies, looking as much alike
and as smooth and shiny as four silk hats just out of bandboxes.
“Here’s Jack,” Aunt Elizabeth would say when I arrived, and I
would be gently pushed towards my great-grandfather who sat in the
hall in a big high-backed arm-chair, combing his long white beard
with his fingers. “Weel, laddie?” the old fellow would growl, and he
would reach out to feel me and pat my head with his large hand.
My great-aunts were very proud of their descent, which they
claimed from the Duke of Argyle. I never was interested enough to
ask how far they had descended from the noble duke. They helped
out a meagre fortune by keeping a genteel dressmaking
establishment patronised by a few select people. In their house I
played Blind Man’s Buff, Puss in the Corner, and other dead and
gone games; drank raspberry vinegar and ate plum cake.
My great-uncle was a curiosity. He did not drink, smoke nor work.
He was a little wizened, dried-up fellow with a much wrinkled face
the colour of a potato. He lived on his sisters, who made everything
he wore but his hat and boots, and his clothes were certainly
remarkable.
After his death I heard my father say to some card-playing cronies,
“We planted Uncle Allan to-day.” Everybody laughed, but I thought it
was hard-hearted. Nothing about my great-uncle seemed, however,
to matter, or to be serious, not even his death. He inspired neither
dislike nor fondness. He was just one of those who do not count—a
human vegetable.
A pack of cards was a thing never seen in the houses of my great-
grandfather or either of my grandmothers, but in our house they
were the main source of amusement. Father could not see the harm
in cards that the older branches of our family saw. My earliest
memories are associated with cards. Father played nearly nightly
except on Sundays. Every one who came to our house was a card-
player. The neighbours with whom we associated were card players.
Possibly cards are a safe amusement for a certain type of character.
They are like everything else—used with discretion they are good;
without discretion, and in league with drink and gambling, they are
bad.
Thus it came about quite naturally that while still young I learned
many games of cards. If father and I were left alone together of an
evening we played cribbage. If we were three—mother, he and I—
we played bezique. If we were four it was whist. If others dropped in,
or were invited, we played draw-poker for a small stake. Draw-poker
never got disreputable or blood-thirsty in our house, as a very low
stake was the rule.
Through cards I came to distrust my father’s judgment. He played
games of cards the way he felt, sometimes playing with rare skill, at
other times madly and feverishly, without thought or judgment. He
was a man of impulse. If I had wholly distrusted his wisdom, instead
of allowing myself to be dominated by his high-handedness, his life
and mine might have been very different. But I was brought up in the
days when authority of whatever kind was worshipped. To-day
authority must “show cause.” I see now that my father played the
game of life the same as he played cards—by impulse, by intuition. I
was taught to believe that what he said was sound and wise; and if I
continued in this belief for many years, it is not to be wondered at. I
had better card-sense than he; but it does not follow that my sense
was better in other things.
CHAPTER IV
When I left the Canon’s school, my father declared that every boy
ought to go to a public school. So to public school I went, where I
made but little progress. Of course I was backward for my age, and,
being shy, never plucked up enough courage to ask for help when I
should have done so. Even the dullest boys left me behind, and the
masters considered me lazy. Perhaps I was, but I do not believe it
was so much that as lack of energy. One either generates energy or
one does not. I was delicate and growing at a great rate, getting my
full height, six feet, before I was sixteen years old. It took all the
energy I had to live and grow.
What disposition to make of me, what calling to put me to, must
have been a difficult problem to my parents, for I had no great
inclination in any direction. I wanted to be let alone and not bothered.
A book, a comfortable chair, and a fire in the winter, or a shady spot
in the summer, were all I asked for. I could read books for days
together, but could not study without falling asleep. At a minute’s
notice I could sleep anywhere.
While at public school I made a few friends of my own age, but not
many. The hard playing and the big boys who were in the majority
were never drawn to me. Weaklings and cripples came to me freely.
Among these friends, many of whom I kept all my life, John stands
out particularly. Like myself, he had a delicate constitution to nurse,
and his eyesight was so poor that he wore glasses of great
thickness. He was nervous, quiet and shy. It was through him that I
became interested in music. He was an inspired musician and a poet
by nature. I had had lessons on the piano for some years, and liked
music, but I had not been musically awakened until I met John. One
of a very musical family, he played several instruments even when a
young boy, and gave me my first valuable knowledge and insight into
music. I had been taught by sundry ancient maiden ladies, who only
aimed to make a genteel living, not to make musicians. John had
been taught by his family with whom music was a religion. When I
was considered worthy to play accompaniments in the mystic circle
of his family I was very proud. I gave a great deal of time to music
both with John and alone. Many afternoons he, his two brothers, and
I, would play quartettes for hours. Generally these afternoons
passed like a charm. Sometimes they were broken by discussions of
time, style and interpretation, when some one of us would lose
patience, but they were very mild disagreements. John and I became
as brothers. His was a restful house, full of quiet peaceful people,
where father, mother, brothers and sisters all united with a common
interest in music and books. Their house was nearly a country
house, being situated in a sparsely populated suburb; and the week-
ends I often spent there gave me my happiest days.
While I was the most unsophisticated of youths when first sent to
public school, John was world-wise for his age, knowing many things
that were closed to me. His family took their religion like business—
as a part of life only. My family took religion like a disease—as a
matter of life and death—as the whole of life. Perhaps we were not
as strenuous in our devotions as the Canon, but sufficiently so to
make Sunday uncomfortable for a boy. Consequently I highly
appreciated Sundays at John’s home, where Church once was
considered full Sunday duty, the balance of the day being given over
to music, books, walks or whatever one felt like doing.
Up to this time girls had not received any attention from me. I
despised them, and was ill at ease in their company, while John was
fond of their sex, and perfectly at home among them. From him I
learned much relative to these mysterious creatures, whose
influence is so far-reaching. That I did not consider girls worth while
was probably to be accounted for by my lack of the usual health and
strength of boys of my age. After chumming with John for a year or
more girls began to interest me. But girls never liked me as a boy;
nor, for that matter, have women liked me as a man. I see now one
of the reasons for this. I thought there were only two kinds of girls—
the entirely good and the entirely bad. If, in my opinion, a girl was an
angel, I worshipped her so foolishly that I made her ill. If I thought
one was bad, I took the worst for granted, thus overshooting the
mark, and getting myself very seriously disliked. Consequently some
girls thought I was an ass, while others thought I was an abandoned
and vicious young man. In fact I was neither. Like most shy people I
used badness as a bluff, and the more nervous I was about an
advance, the more brazenly I went forward.
No girl or woman likes to be understood as entirely good or
entirely bad, which is quite natural; for none are altogether one way
or the other, but, like all humanity, are of every shade and every
colour, both good and bad.
My mistake about girls happened to be a safe mistake to make,
thereby I never got a girl into trouble, and no girl ever got me into
trouble. This, of course, does not include the case of my wife and
me, who, God knows, have given each other no end of trouble. But
in that experience was one involving good, useful, necessary trouble,
whereby we really learned things, as you shall hear later.
I have noticed that when two young people get each other into
trouble, they are seldom to blame. The blame attaches to the
parents who kept them blind, and allowed them to get the all-
important knowledge of sex by chance. The enlightment of the young
on this vital subject is still a matter little understood.
During my public school days I organised a drum and fife band.
My mother thought it was beautiful. As she was Scotch, and liked the
bagpipes, this is perhaps not remarkable. The neighbours hardly had
as much admiration for my genius, although many of them had
subscribed to the fund which armed my men with their instruments of
torture. The boy who played the bass drum was the proudest chap in
ten blocks, and could swing the sticks splendidly. The rehearsals of
this band took place in our basement dining-room, and the din we
made was no ordinary noise.
With my musicians I started a dramatic venture. I wished to be an
actor. Another subscription list was passed amongst neighbours and
friends who were always very kind and forgiving to me. I must have
had a way with me that appealed to the grown-ups. I was tall and
thin with a big head and big hands. My eyes were small and deep
set, my face pale but for a red spot on either cheek. Possibly I
appealed to people because I looked as if I did not have long to live.
Two faithful aiders and abettors in my scheme for a boys’ theatre
were Jews—Joey and Philly. They accompanied me and my
subscription list, and their fathers were my first backers. I have
always liked Jews; they are such a gentle people. “Little Blockhead”
at the Canon’s school was a Jewess; at least, her father was a Jew.
Boards, nails, and other things having been bought, we erected a
stage in a large unused coach-house. Sundry plays were examined,
and a very amusing sketch called “Bumps” was finally chosen and
put into rehearsal. Very wisely, or because of the impossibility of
getting girls, we chose a playlet with an entirely male cast.
The great wooden doors of the coach-house were splendidly
posted with the legend:
Wesblock’s Theatre.
This sign was a real work of art. In the coach-house we found a
barrel of bright-coloured labels for beer that never was made,
because the company which intended to make beer, for some
business reason, never got much further than labels. We laboriously
pasted these labels on the coach-house doors, to form the large
letters, which informed the few who passed down the lane that
“Wesblock’s Theatre” was within.
My theatrical company embraced the “high brows” of the
neighbourhood. Of course we were laughed at, and scoffed at, and
sometimes one of us was walloped by some envious and strong boy,
but many of the lacrosse playing crowd would have given their eyes
to be of us.
These things happened in the East End—the French end of
Montreal—and fights between French school boys and English
school boys were of nearly daily occurrence; but we gentlemen of
the stage never took part in these brawls, unless we were forced to,
or were specially called upon as reserves in a crisis by the boys of
our neighbourhood. The English were the better fighters at close
quarters, but at long range, with stones, the French had the best of
us, being expert throwers.
A small but sympathetic crowd witnessed my first theatrical
venture. The coach-house was decorated with flags and for a coach-
house looked very fine. Of course it still smelled like a coach-house,
except in so far as that smell was diluted by the odour of coal-oil
lamps, which lighted the place. The programme was short. It
consisted of the one-act play “Bumps,” a flute solo by a talented sot,
a clog dance by a stable-boy, and a comic song warbled by myself to
banjo accompaniment. Our listeners said what a friendly audience
always says. We spent the proceeds of our show in giving a
complimentary supper to a young actor whom we admired and who
was playing at the Theatre Royal.
CHAPTER V
Before I had the fever described in the earlier pages, while still a
mere baby, I was sent to a ladies’ school among little girls. There
was only one other boy in the school besides myself, and for him I
formed an attachment. He was a French child, a delicate little chap
with large dreamy eyes and a huge nose, which looked as if it did not
belong to him. He enjoyed the possession of a very beautiful and
euphonious name—Paul de la Croix. Paul and I knew each other as
children only during a few months but we liked each other and
played together. We were the only boys who enjoyed the very
special privilege of attending the ladies’ seminary. We nearly always
spent our lunch hours among the big girls, who were very fond of us,
because we were small enough to mother and protect.
My illness separated me from my little French friend and I did not
see him again until we were nearly men. I met him once more when I
was eighteen and was studying under a tutor for my matriculation at
M’Gill University. My father had decided that I should be a civil
engineer. The reasons for this decision are not very plain to me.
Certainly I had very little inclination towards engineering, but as I
showed little talent in any particular direction, and many spasmodic
tendencies in all directions, his decision was perhaps as wise as any.
Possibly he was influenced by the thought that the life of a civil
engineer would give me an outdoor existence.
I worked with my tutor daily, learning things which I have long
since forgotten, with the exception of Euclid. Euclid always had a
particular charm for me, not so much for the value of the information
I received but for its keen and irresistible reasoning, so clear, plain
and irrefragable.
The mere fact that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle
are equal, and if the sides are produced the angles on the other side
of the base will be equal, is nothing to me, but the being able to
prove the fact is a great pleasure.
I am a born unbeliever, and facts are not facts to me because they
are recorded as facts by some one else, or everybody else for that
matter. Like the unbelieving Thomas I want to examine the evidence.
So Euclid appealed to me.
I had, and still have, a great sympathy with many of the Bible
characters who have been held up to opprobrium like Thomas,
Baalam, Ananias and the Pharisee who thanked the Lord he was
different from other people. If there is anything for which a man
ought to be thankful it is that he is different from other people. The
story of Ananias I always found a very thin tale for a greedy money-
grabbing church to tell; it is so transparent.
I liked my tutor very much. He was a very human young man and
handled me with great wisdom. In the winter we skated daily. It was
during the winter of the year Eighteen that I met once more the friend
of my childhood, Paul de la Croix. It was at the skating rink, and I
knew him at once by his nose, which was a more pronounced,
protuberant horn than ever. He had the looks of a hawk and the
character of a goose. I was anything but a manly youth, but Paul was
actually effeminate. I saw him often now for several years, after
which he dropped out of my life entirely. He left an indelible mark
upon my character, both musically and otherwise. It was through
him, in fact, that I met the woman who became my wife, and for this
and other things he has my gratitude.
Paul was before all a musician. He sang beautifully, easily and
naturally in a great baritone voice, playing his own accompaniments
with ease, a certain dash, and unerring taste. Such talents as his are
rare and are generally given, I have observed, to effeminate
creatures like Paul. He loved the women, loved particular ones in a
particular way for a short time; but generally he loved them all. He
was a wholesale lover and his affairs were numerous, sometimes
interesting and exciting, and always amusing as told by himself to
me, his confidant. I enjoyed his confidences not so much for
themselves as for the music they led up to. When he was loved by a
married woman much older than himself he always sang particularly
well and gave me oceans of pleasure listening to his prattle and his
songs. I would spend night after night with him, and allow him to
babble till he was tired.
“Oh, my dear Jack,” he would say, “it was tragic, I assure you. ‘I
could weep. When will I see you again?’ she asked me. I did not
reply; but went to the piano and sang this.”
Then suiting the action to the word he would go to the piano and
sing Tosti’s “Good-bye” so beautifully that I would nearly weep,
although much inclined to laugh at his mannerisms and his vanity.
Many of his love affairs ended as I have described in a song, after
which he would walk sadly away to flutter about some other flame.
The Toreador song from Carmen always reminds me of Paul. I
have heard it often, but never I think with such soul-stirring vim and
gusto behind it as when he sang it.
In the year Nineteen of my era I matriculated in a kind of way; I
passed, and that is all.
In the same year the religious incubus was lifted from my home.
This had been coming for some time, and at last our house was free.
It was no sudden happening, like the conversion some people seem
to experience; but came about quite logically. Some people take
religion like a disease, and it runs a similar course. They get sick,
sicker, sickest; and then die or recover. With religion they get
religious, more religious, most religious or fanatic, and then they go
mad or suddenly become free-thinkers. People whose emotions are
well-balanced and thoroughly under the control of intellect never go
mad over a religious idea.
About three years prior to the year Nineteen my father had
undertaken, in a burst of religious zeal, to teach a Bible-class in a
church which is to-day a theatre of varieties. He was very successful
in this. His teaching was both attractive and convincing and readily
drew young men and women. For years he had an average
attendance at this class of from fifty to sixty young people. He
became so enthusiastic in this enterprise that it became his one
hobby, and the only social life our family knew was bounded on the
North, South, East and West by the Bible-class. As the Bible-class
was made up of plumbers, gasfitters, counter-jumpers and the like,
this did not elevate our social standing as social standing is gauged
by the world. Father devoted all his leisure time to reading and study
for the discourses he delivered to his young Band of Hope. As a rule
he was not a man to do things very thoroughly; but this work
possessed a great fascination for him, and he pursued it tirelessly
and faithfully, with perfect confidence in himself.
As he read he widened in view, and as he widened, his interest in
the search for truth increased; but truth seemed to elude him. In his
final struggle he floundered about in a bog of statement and authority
that bewildered him. His fall from grace came suddenly when he
began the study of religions in general and other than Christianity.
He was a quick, alert, understanding reader, and he had enormous
energy. He consumed in a comparatively short time a veritable
library of literature on every religion known, both ancient and
modern. He delved into everything—philosophy, metaphysics and
natural science. I only sketch a process which took several years to
complete, years of the hardest work my father ever did.
As his views widened, his discourses to his flock were, of course,
coloured by the change of idea. I do not believe that he realised the
road he was travelling until the parson and the pillars of the church
called upon him for an explanation of certain of his teachings. He
explained, but his elucidation of his position on matters that were
considered vital was not found satisfactory to the narrow-minded jury
which sat upon him. A few weeks later he was driven from the
church, branded with the brand of the infidel—an epithet which all
churches have delighted to use towards those who dare to be faithful
to themselves.
Father’s class followed him in a body, and for some months he
lectured every Sunday afternoon at our home. Through this incident
some of his young men were made uncomfortable in their families,
others even in their business. For this reason father discontinued
spreading what he considered to be the true light.
Whether his faith was founded on fact or fiction, he was true to
what his reason dictated; but he felt that he could not allow himself to
be an injury in any way to young people who had life’s fight to make
in a world that was ready to persecute those who did not toe a line
laid down by some church.
I have always noticed that it has ever been the system of
organised religion to persecute in mean and small ways all those
who disagree with it. All the willingness to go even farther and use
the faggot, the stake and the rack still remains in our midst, among a
very large class who are enthusiastic and ignorant, but full of faith in
some fetish. They only lack the power. I have yet to learn that any
man branded as an unbeliever has ever in the smallest way
persecuted anybody. Nearly all religions foster fear in man’s heart,
and fear always fights, which explains the bloody history of Christian
peoples.
CHAPTER VI
My life was now a double struggle; a struggle for health and a
struggle for knowledge. I was always miserable and very often ill.
The joy of being alive was a thing I never knew for many years.
Naturally my progress in education was not great. Probably, on the
whole, I put as much energy into my work as most boys; for I was
not strong enough to take part in the athletic college life, and had no
inclination toward the pleasures of the fast crowd.
My days passed in fits of tremendous energy lasting a very little
while, followed by long periods of listlessness, when everything was
an effort. I worked nearly to the limit of my strength, and fully
expected to pass my first year examinations. I was still quite
confident after having written my examination papers. The beautiful
spring days between the last examination day and convocation,
when the reading out of the results was given, I passed complacently
wandering on country roads, afoot or on horseback. I was still
satisfied that I had passed when I sat in the big hall among relations,
friends and college companions. This egregious confidence made
the blow all the harder. I was plucked; ignominiously plucked. I had
failed in three subjects. It was too much; I could not bear it, and
could not bear either to look any of my friends in the face. I felt
disgraced; and ran away accordingly.
I decided to be a tramp, a free vagabond, wandering “hither and
thither,” living as best I might. Perhaps my health would benefit by
the outdoor life? If not, I would die far away somewhere in a strange
land, alone and unwept, and it would perhaps be better so, for I had
unfortunate elements in me which could lead to no real good.
It was early in spring, but warm; and the roads were not bad. I
walked till sundown. The direction did not matter; but I liked the river,
so followed it. I could not have wandered very far in the few hours
between three o’clock and seven; but by that time I was tired, so
stepped into a little country hotel which I found near by. I ate a little
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