Usury and Restitution in Late Medieval Episcopal Statutes: A Case Study in the Local Reception of Conciliar Decrees

Sometime before 1282, the archbishop of Cologne Siegfried II von Westerburg promulgated a set of synodal statutes for his diocese.¹ Among the eighteen articles was one 'On Manifest Usurers', which began by spelling out the canonical sanctions against manifest usurers as set forth at the Third Lateran Council in 1179, accompanied by a succinct definition of what made a usurer 'manifest'. The article then turned to the matter of usurious restitution, insisting that the decree (constitutio) issued by Pope Gregory X at the Second Council of Lyon be observed.² Rather than paraphrase its provisions, the article quoted verbatim nearly the entire decree, from its opening words (Quamquam usurarii…) to its penultimate phrase. Manifest usurers were thus to be denied church burial unless they had made full restitution of their usurious gains, or else provided an appropriate security (cautio). Clerics who violated this prohibition were to be suspended from office, and they were likewise barred from hearing confession or granting absolution to usurers who had failed to make appropriate satisfaction for their wrongdoing. Absent from Siegfried's statutes, however, was any mention of the Lyonese decree's dramatic concluding sanction, which nullified ipso iure the testament of any manifest usurer who failed to adhere to its specified restitution procedures. Whatever the reason for this omission, it meant that Quamquam usurarii as it was enshrined in the synodal statutes of Cologne differed in an important respect from the decree's text as codified and commented in learned contexts.³

In itself, this discrepancy might not seem especially noteworthy. After all, bishops who sought to integrate the church's general law into their local legislation faced the dual challenge of streamlining it to align with local priorities and simplifying it to make it accessible to local audiences.⁴ The Cologne case was somewhat unusual, however, inasmuch as its drafters did not merely simplify the text of the conciliar decree. Instead, they selectively excised a passage from what was otherwise a faithful recopying of its text. Moreover, this excision reflected a broader pattern in the local reception of Quamquam usurarii during the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. While roughly one hundred surviving diocesan statutes and provincial canons issued in this period betray the influence of the Lyonese decree, only thirty of these explicitly transmit its testamentary nullification clause.⁵ Other elements of Quamquam usurarii fared even worse in terms of their local dissemination: the Cologne statute was among a mere handful to reference the decree's provision concerning the liability of those tasked with estimating the amount to be restituted.⁶ Even more striking is the fact that most late medieval prelates ignored Quamquam usurarii entirely when drawing up anti-usury statutes for their dioceses and provinces. Although the conciliar fathers who had gathered at Lyon in 1274 had furnished clerics with new weapons to fight the scourge of Christian moneylending, few bishops chose to brandish them within their local legislative traditions.

While much has been written concerning the church's teachings on usury and their impact on medieval economic practices, the enforcement of the canonical sanctions against usurers has proven a more elusive target.⁷ Only rarely do the surviving records of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries reveal bishops and local clergy across Latin Christendom taking direct measures against accused Christian usurers, whether by imposing excommunication, ordering exhumation, or distributing restituted sums.⁸ In part, this reflects the widespread loss of medieval ecclesiastical court records, and likewise of the sorts of fiscal accounts that might show restitution efforts at work. There are certainly exceptions: narrative accounts of bishops and preachers rousing townsfolk against local moneylenders; lists of notorious usurers whose names were posted on the doors of their parish churches; disputes over the boundaries of secular and ecclesiastical jurisdiction concerning usurers and their activities; and other scattered sources. But it is hard to determine to what extent these signal unusual bursts of ecclesiastical zeal (as the laments of rigorist observers might suggest), and to what extent they instead...