Lesyng of Tyme’

Then came Sloth, all be-slobbered, with two slimy eyes. ‘I must sit down to be shriven,’ quoth he, ‘or else I shall fall asleep. I can’t stand or prop myself up, or kneel without a hassock. If I were put to bed, no amount of bell-ringing would get me up until I was ready for dinner – well, not unless I had to relieve myself This is Langland’s description of Sloth in Piers Plowman . Originally a monastic vice, meaning boredom with the cell, sloth, or accidia , came to be applied to spiritual duties generally. By the time Langland wrote, it had also come to mean physical laziness or idleness, that is ‘lesyng’ or misspending of time. This paper investigates some ideas about idleness and its consequences as they emerge from the spiritual and didactic literature of late medieval England. They are linked with ideas about the most detested idlers, the usurers, the money-lenders. Usurers violated time in a double sense, for not only did they misspend it, but they also made a profit from selling it. Equally vilified as idle were the clergy. The poet John Gower sourly observed that ‘Slouthe kepeth the librarie’ of the corrupt English clergy. They will feature here only incidentally, although it is perhaps worth pointing out that some ecclesiastics profited from lending money. In the late thirteenth century a council held at Exeter had to decree the suspension from both office and benefice of usurious clergy. In the mid-fourteenth century no less a person than Archbishop Melton of York profited from lending money

Political science · Theology · Usury · Classics · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy

• The English Church in the Fourteenth Century

  Open Access•William Abel Pantin•English Church in the Fourteenth…•2010

  Add to list

• Sin and Society in Fourteenth-Century England

  Michael Haren•Sin and Society in Fourteenth-Centu…•2000

  Add to list

• Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages

  Richard W Unger, Jacques Le Goff et al.•Technology and Culture•1983

  Add to list