"Scandle is Heaued Sunne"

Thus the author of the early thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse describes scandal — anything done or said so as to incite others to sin — as a capital fault. His contemporary, Thomas of Chobham, concludes his Summa Confessorum with a section on the sin of scandal — a great sin, he says, which few confess. As an example of the gravity of scandal, Thomas cites a hypothetical fornicating priest, who sins twice: once in the act and again in scandalizing his parishioners, who might be tempted to follow his example. Thomas’s work was intended for the use of priests hearing confession; clearly, clergy of all ranks would have been expected to be familiar with the church’s doctrine on all important points of theology, including scandal. How was this particular teaching interpreted on the practical level, and what were its implications for the relationships of ordinary men and women? This paper will look at both the theory and the practice of scandal as sin, in an effort to see how it functioned in medieval England. It will draw upon some cases of wife abuse in bishops’ registers from around 1300 to see the way in which this important form of scandal, real or threatened, worked to control behaviour — in this case particularly within marriage.