About the Author

Stephen of Bourbon (1180 – 1261) was a Dominican friar living and working in modern France. The Dominicans were known as the order of preachers, and Stephen moved around modern France preaching to the people. He also worked as an inquisitor. As he went, he gathered stories, weaving them into his sermons. When he became more senior, Stephen wrote a book of sermon illustrations he thought might be helpful to other preachers. His collection of sermon illustrations, exempla as we call them, offers a valuable insight into the customs of Christians in the Middle Ages. Here’s one about a remarkable piece of bad luck that happened to a usurer – perhaps a banker, money lender, or some other profiteer from interest – just as he was about to get married.

The Usurer’s Marriage

It happened at Dijon, about the year 1240, that a certain usurer planned to celebrate his wedding with much rejoicing; and, having been led with instruments of music to the parish church of the Blessed Virgin, and standing now under the church portal so that his bride might give her consent and the marriage be ratified according to custom by the promise “ I do,” and so the wedding might be solemnized in the church by the singing of mass and other ceremonies—while this was happening, I say, and the bride and bridegroom should have been led with joy into the church, a certain usurer carved in stone upon the portal above, whom a carven devil was bearing to hell, fell with his money-bag upon the head of this living usurer who should have been married, and crushed and killed him; so that the wedding was turned to mourning, and their joy to lamentation, and the living man was thus shut out by the stone image from that entrance into church, and those sacraments, from which the priests not only did not exclude him but would have led him in. Then the usurers, or other citizens, by dint of bribes, procured the destruction of the other graven images which stood without, on the forefront of the said portal, which I myself have seen there broken away, lest a like fate might befall them or others under like circumstances.

(Adapted from G. G. Coulton translation)