Parish Priests and Their People in the Middle Ages in England

by Edward Lewes Cutts

The seventh bough of Pride is Wicked Fear and Shame.

And so with the rest of the deadly sins.

Envy poisons the heart, mouth, and head.

Hatred has seven twigs: Chiding, Wrath, Hate, Strife, Vengeance, Murder, War.

Sloth means yielding to our natural disinclination to good and proneness to evil, and has six divisions: Disobedience, Impatience, Murmuring, Sorrow, Desire of Death, Despair.

Avarice has ten divisions: Usury, Theft, Robbery, False Claim, Sacrilege, Simony, Fraud, Chaffer, Craft, Wicked Gains.

Gluttony has five kinds; Lechery fourteen. It is very pedantic in form; but there is a keen insight into human frailty, and there are many shrewd hits and pithy sayings, and it is lightened by anecdotes and illustrations. Men nowadays would not have the patience to read it; but if they did read and digest it, they might gain a great amount of self-knowledge.

Some similar treatises at the end of every deadly sin give its remedy, also minutely analyzed.[217] Other subjects are treated by the same method—the Seven Virtues, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, etc. It is all dry reading, but it gives the patient reader valuable knowledge of the attitude of men’s minds in those days towards Christian faith and practice. An evidence of the popularity of these treatises is given by the fact that “The Parson’s Tale” in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” is nothing more or less than such a treatise on penitence, divided into three parts, viz. Contrition, Confession, and Satisfaction; in the course of which the Seven Deadly Sins, with their remedies, are dealt with in the usual manner.

People bestowed a great deal of ingenuity in representing these systems of teaching by diagrams. A MS. Psalter of the thirteenth century (Arundel, 83) gives a number of them;[218] at f. 129 verso is the Arbor Vitiorum, a tree with seven principal branches, viz. the Seven Deadly Sins, and their subordinate boughs and twigs as above. At f. 120 is the Arbor Virtutum, treated in a similar way. At f. 130 the Seven Petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, the Seven Sacraments, the Seven Vices, and the Seven Virtues, are arranged in a device so as to give their relations to one another; and there are similar devices on f. 2 verso, and the two following pages. Such devices were sometimes painted on the walls of churches.