The medieval opposition to usury is well-known. Medieval theologians condemned usury on several grounds. One line of argument, grounded in Roman property law, related to the nature of consumable goods whose use was inseparable from their ownership. This view held that loans of consumable goods (such as grain, wine, and coin) necessarily transfer ownership along with use, so that charging separately for the “use” of money on top of the return of the principal amounted to selling the same thing twice. A second argument, inherited from Aristotle (cf. Politics, Lib. I, Cap. X), held that money was by nature sterile: unlike livestock or land, it could not truly generate more of itself, so the demand for interest was a demand that money “breed” against its own nature. Medieval theologians made generous use of these arguments; both can be found in Aquinas’ article on usury in the Summa (cf. II-II, Q. 78)
There is, however, a third argument, less commonly discussed but no less pervasive in the pastoral and canonical literature of the high Middle Ages: that the usurer’s true offense was theft from God—specifically, theft of time.
Thomas of Chobham’s Summa confessorum
Thomas of Chobham (c. 1160–1236) was an English theologian, subdean of Salisbury, and a prominent writer on canon law and pastoral care during the early 13th century. His notable work is the Summa confessorum, a handbook for confessors composed around 1215–1216 in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council’s mandate of annual confession. It was widely circulated in the 13th century, surviving in over a hundred manuscripts. The Summa confessorum catalogues the sins and trades a parish priest was likely to encounter, offering practical guidance for pastoral considerations and penances.
Chobham’s introduction to usury treats the sins of the usurer as a form of theft—not from the borrower who pays the interest, but from God Himself. Here is the translation of the passage as rendered by renowned medievalist Jacques Le Goff:
The usurer commits a theft [futurum], or usury [usuram], or pillage [rapinam], for he receives foreign goods [rem alienam] against the owner’s wishes [invito domino], that is to say, against God’s wishes. (1)
From a strictly economic perspective, the usurer is, of course, loaning out money. Ultimately, however, this amounts to a loan of time. In effect, the borrower tells the usurer, “I do not have the money I require right now, but give me time and I will,” to which the usurer replies, “The time is granted, but you will have to pay for it.” Interest accrues on the balance of the loan throughout the duration of its repayment, making it essentially a payment for time.
If the borrower is buying time, then it follows that the usurer is selling it. Yet who has the right to sell time? Jacques Le Goff, commenting on Chobham, says:
What indeed does he sell, if not the time that elapses between the moment he lends the money and the moment he is repaid, with interest? Time, of course, belongs solely to God. As a thief of time, the usurer steals God’s patrimony. All Chobham’s contemporaries made similar statements.(2)
From Thomas of Chobham’s perspective, the usurer is not fundamentally different from a man who steals another’s goods and sells them, making an illicit profit. Again, the Summa confessorum:
The usurer sells nothing to the borrower that belongs to him. He sells only time, which belongs to God. He cannot, therefore, make a profit from selling someone else’s property. (3)
The Tabula Exemplorum
Another example of the usurer as a time thief can be found in the Tabula exemplorum. The Tabula exemplorum (also known as Liber de similitudinibus et exemplis, “Book of Similitudes and Examples”) was a preacher’s reference collection compiled in France toward the end of the thirteenth century, likely by a Franciscan. The Tabula exemplorum was an alphabetically organized stock of moralizing tales and similitudes that a preacher could consult under a given topic for vivid material to use in sermons. Under the entry for usury, we find the following:
Usurers are thieves, for they sell time that does not belong to them and sell someone else’s property, against the owner’s wishes, and that is theft. (4)
The Tabula exemplorum develops the idea further, decrying the usurer’s sale of “days and nights” and connecting this with the eternal punishments due to this detestable sin:
Usurers sin against nature by making money want to give birth to money, as a horse gives birth to a horse, or a mule to a mule. Usurers are in addition robbers [latrones], for they sell time that does not belong to them, and selling someone else’s property, despite the owner, is theft. In addition, since they sell nothing other than the expectation of money, that is to say, time, they sell days and nights. But the day is the time of clarity, and the night is the time for repose. Consequently, they sell light and repose. It is, therefore, not just for them to receive eternal light and eternal rest. (5)
This is why it was considered so difficult for a usurer to be forgiven his sins. According to Catholic moral theology, the sin of theft cannot be forgiven unless the stolen property has been returned. It is one thing to return a stolen horse or a tool, but how does one return stolen time? Since time is equivalent to money for the usurer, forgiveness for usury required a total restitution of the usurer’s ill-gotten gains. But what if the usurer has already spent this money? Or if it is being used to support a wife and children? Or if it has been loaned out again or serves as collateral for other loans? The complications are legion, which is why Caesarius of Heisterbach noted the sin of usury “is difficult to heal, for God does not forgive the sin of theft unless the thing stolen be restored.” (6)
The 13th Century and the Secularization of Time
The 13th century was a time of transition for the medieval world. The robust economic growth of the period and the rise of the towns made the 13th century a time of great urbanization. The keeping of time, too, was affected by this development. The simultaneous emergence of the mechanical clock allowed a much more accurate division of time than was hitherto possible. Though originally developed for the tolling of the monastic hours, mechanical clocks would soon be separated from their ecclesiastical origins, increasingly becoming civic ornamentations of town halls and market belfries. From the religious perspective, there was a sense that time was being secularized—that something which had once been the exclusive domain of the Church was slipping into secular hands. The flourishing economy of the 13th century also saw a corresponding rise in usury. It is, therefore, no coincidence that the usury-as-time-theft argument emerged in the 13th century (Jacques Le Goff believes there are precedents in the 11th century, but this seems tenuous—see footnote 2 below). The arguments we see in Thomas of Chobham and the Tabula exemplorum thus reflect a concern with the increasing fungibility of time and money, as epitomized in the practice of usury, which commodified both.
The argument that usury constituted a theft of time identified the usurer’s crime as an offense against God rather than simply to the borrower. This is what set the usurer apart from an ordinary thief and made his sin so uniquely resistant to forgiveness. Where the consumable-goods and barren-money arguments explained why usury was unjust, the theft-of-time argument explained why it was, in the medieval imagination, nearly unforgivable. For more on the fate of usurers at the hour of death, see our companion article “On the Deaths of Usurers.”
(1) Thomas of Chobham, Summa confessorum, ed. F. Broomfield, Analecta Mediaevalia Namurcensia 25 (Louvain: Éditions Nauwelaerts), 509
(2) Jacques Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages, trans. Patricia Ranum (Zone Books: New York, 1990), 39. Le Goff argues that a similar idea can be found as early as the 11th century in the writings of Anselm and Peter Lombard, but he leaves his assertion frustratingly unsourced. I have been unable to find any references to such comments in either author; all online citations circle back to Le Goff. For the time being, Le Goff’s specific assertion should be considered suspect.
(3) Chobam, 505
(4) J. Th. Welter, ed. “Tabula exemplorum secundum ordinem alphabeti” (Paris and Toulouse: Guitard, 1926), p 139, no. 304
(5) Bibliototheque national, MS. Latin 13472, fol. 3vb; Welter, 139, n. 304
(6) Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, 1:73, 1:80.
Phillip Campbell, “Usury as Theft of Time,” Unam Sanctam Catholicam, August 9, 2026. Available online at https://unamsanctamcatholicam.com/2026/08/usury-as-theft-of-time