Sins of the Father: Inherited Debt in Medieval Penitential Writing

In a medieval debt bond—a contractual document which legally records a loan—the debtor will typically “bind (obligari)” themselves and their “heirs (heredes)” to the creditor. This “binding” was not just figurative. In the late Middle Ages, incarceration for debt rose at an exponential rate, transforming the debtor’s body, along with that of his heirs, into the creditor’s property upon default. While scholars of pre-modern debt have become increasingly interested in these consequences of forfeiture for the principal debtor, few have discussed their effects for the debtor’s heirs. Yet representations of bound heirs appear across varying genres of medieval literature, from the “spendthrift knight” in Sir Amadace who placed his wife and child in thralldom to his creditor, to the son in the mercantile lyric The Childe of Bristow who sold “[his] own body” to repay his father’s debts, to the penitential handbooks that define the Fall as a usurious debt bond between Eve and Satan which bound Adam’s entire progeny as collateral. In this paper, I highlight these bound bodies in hereditary debt as sites for writers to examine the fluidity of personhood and property for individuals bound within lineal responsibilities. What is more, I argue that this fluidity not only critiques the injustices of debt exploitation in this period of rapid consumerism but also advances the necessity of communal debt-bearing, offering readers an ethic of paying what others cannot.