In the year AD 431 the Council of Ephesus anathematized the ‘Messalians’ (Syriac) or ‘Euchites’ (Greek) – both terms meaning ‘those who pray’ – referring to them as ‘impious’ and ‘contaminating’. A defining characteristic of this group was their emphasis on constant prayer. The Messalian phenomenon, which originated in Syria and Mesopotamia, spread to Armenia and Asia Minor during the late fourth century, causing concern amongst the ecclesiastical hierarchy of many areas. In condemning the movement in AD 431 the Council of Ephesus confirmed the judgement of the synods of Antioch (c. 380) and Side (c. 390) that the Messalians, who were also known as ‘enthusiasts’, were a dangerous and divisive group who rejected work and discipline for the sake of prayer and individual advancement. The Messalians could be considered negligent and wasteful in their use of time.

Any description of man’s ideal state tells us a lot about the culture, society, and character of its author. Early Christian writers, as one might expect, tended to turn to Scripture, to the authoritative account in the book of Genesis of God’s creation of man and woman and of their life in the garden of Eden, in order to define their conception of the ideal life. There they discovered what to us, and perhaps to them, seems a rather strange, alien portrait of the life of two celibate naturists, at ease in a luxuriant garden which provided for all their needs. By some obscure and generally unspecified means, the Church fathers thought Adam and Eve were to be the founder members and originators of a society which, on condition it obeyed one simple rule, would become an immortal society.

My title poses what may seem an unpromising question. Even to consider the possibility of such fundamental change in ecclesiastical perceptions in the very midst of the Dark Ages may seem anachronistic. After all, were not Christian attitudes to work already well and truly fixed? There is, for instance, the story of Adam and Eve from Genesis 3.16-19, as displayed in words and pictures in the mid-ninth-century Moutier-Grandval Bible:

Church history has tended to trace the development of doctrine, either orthodox or heretical, canonical or anti-canonical. This paper, however, examines ‘para-canonical’ ideas, those which develop alongside the canonical – not quite heretical, but not fully orthodox either. Canonical norms, while constant in principle, have always been subject in practice to multiple understandings. Most of these shifting understandings, among groups or individuals, are fleeting and can never be recovered; this is why the history of the reception of canonical norms is so elusive. But for the social historian of religion, reception is often more interesting than the norms themselves.

What actually ‘trickles down’ from what the bishops teach? This paper will maintain that some record of how things ‘trickled down’ is preserved in para-canonical religious texts, commonly known as ‘apocryphal’ literature. It considers various ways in which the canonical norms of the Greek Orthodox Church concerning the Lord’s Day were understood in a specific time and place: medieval Byzantium, between the ninth and the twelfth centuries. This was a crucial formative period for Orthodox Church culture, both Greek and Slav, during which ritual and moral attitudes that still obtain today were being worked out.

In the central and high Middle Ages, liturgical singing was a form of work, even if it is absent from the typology of ‘work’ as understood by modern historians. The notion of the ‘three orders’, dividing society into those who work, those who pray, and those who fight, does not acknowledge the laborious character of the medieval monastic horarium. On occasion, however, singers could also experience the liturgy in a lighter vein. Clerical celebrations during the Octave of Christmas transformed musical work into its mirror image, resulting in musical play that was structured in the image of work, as illustrated by cathedral ordinals and liturgical dramas. Indeed, the opposition between the strictly maintained daily liturgical structure and the release from routine was the central ludic element of the annual festivities – the crossing of the boundary between the use and the abuse of liturgical time. To demonstrate the significance of that boundary, this paper will analyse texts that show the perception of singing as work, and then turn to sources demonstrating the process by which liturgical material was subverted into play.

In his Historia occidentalis, written in the 1220s after wide travels and varied experience, the Augustinian canon, bishop, and finally cardinal, Jacques de Vitry, described the recent and contemporary history of the West and in particular the many orders of both regular and secular persons in the Church, some of whom he had encountered in his journeying. He covered monks, canons, and secular religious, and it is an extensive list, including the Cistercians (male and female), the Carthusians, the Grandmontines, various hospital Orders, and new Orders such as the Valiscaulians, Trinitarians, Friars minor, Friars preacher, and the Humiliati of northern Italy. His text outlines the activities of the religious in these communities, giving us some sense of how such religious used their time. Manual labour was a long-established part of the regular life, and he naturally and frequently refers to it, the ‘labour of their hands’ of my title. Thus, according to Vitry, after daily chapter the Cistercians spent the rest of the day in manual labour, reading, and prayer; while the Valiscaulians had gardens, herbs, and orchards within their enclosure to which they went at set times ‘so that they might eat by the labour of their hands’, a direct allusion to Psalm 127.2: Thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands: happy shalt thou be and it shall be well with thee.’ Premonstratensian canons likewise went out at fixed times ‘ad labores manuum’, and he describes the Humiliati as keeping sluggishness at bay by assiduous reading, prayer, and manual labour, by which they lived for the most part (‘ex magna parte’). By contrast, the canons of Bologna (as he calls the early Friars preacher or Dominicans) spent their days listening to Scripture, preaching, and working to save the souls of sinners from the jaws of the Leviathan (Job 40.20) through learning, so that they might ‘shine like perpetual stars in eternity’.

Following their foundation in the thirteenth century, the mendicant Orders came to occupy an increasingly important role in the religious life of the medieval city. The mendicant spiritual mission and way of life was arduous, and the prayer and preaching which filled (or ought to have filled) a friar’s working and waking hours demanded both strength and stamina. As a result of these demands, the leaders of the Orders had to ensure that those men whom they admitted as their brothers were physically capable of undertaking their intended duties. This paper accordingly considers the idea of the ‘use and abuse of time’ by approaching some of the questions concerning health and fitness as requirements for the friars of the Franciscan and Dominican Orders.

Then came Sloth, all be-slobbered, with two slimy eyes.
‘I must sit down to be shriven,’ quoth he, ‘or else I shall fall asleep.
I can’t stand or prop myself up, or kneel without a hassock.
If I were put to bed, no amount of bell-ringing would get me up
until I was ready for dinner – well, not unless I had to relieve myself

This is Langland’s description of Sloth in Piers Plowman. Originally a monastic vice, meaning boredom with the cell, sloth, or accidia, came to be applied to spiritual duties generally. By the time Langland wrote, it had also come to mean physical laziness or idleness, that is ‘lesyng’ or misspending of time. This paper investigates some ideas about idleness and its consequences as they emerge from the spiritual and didactic literature of late medieval England. They are linked with ideas about the most detested idlers, the usurers, the money-lenders. Usurers violated time in a double sense, for not only did they misspend it, but they also made a profit from selling it. Equally vilified as idle were the clergy. The poet John Gower sourly observed that ‘Slouthe kepeth the librarie’ of the corrupt English clergy. They will feature here only incidentally, although it is perhaps worth pointing out that some ecclesiastics profited from lending money. In the late thirteenth century a council held at Exeter had to decree the suspension from both office and benefice of usurious clergy. In the mid-fourteenth century no less a person than Archbishop Melton of York profited from lending money.

Time, according to medieval theologians and philosophers, was experienced in radically different ways by God and by his creation. Indeed, the obligation to dwell in time, and therefore to have no sure knowledge of what was to come, was seen as one of the primary qualities which marked the post-lapsarian state. When Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden of delights, they entered a world afflicted with the changing of the seasons, in which they were obliged to work and consume themselves with the needs of the present day and the still unknown dangers of the next. Medieval concerns about the use and abuse of time were not merely confined to anxiety about the present, or awareness of seized or missed opportunities in the past. The future was equally worrying, in particular the extent to which this part of time was set aside for God alone, or whether it was permissible to seek to know the future, either through revelation and prophecy, or through science. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the scientific claims of astrology to provide a means to explain the outcome of past and future events, circumventing God’s distant authority, became more and more insistent. This paper begins by examining one skirmish in this larger battle over the control of the future.

There were many ways in which the late medieval testator could acknowledge time. Behind each testator lay a lifetime of memories and experiences on which he or she drew, recalling the names of those ‘they had fared the better for’, those they wished to remember and by whom they wished to be remembered. Their present time was of limited duration, for at will making they had to assemble their thoughts and their intentions, make decisions and appoint stewards, as they prepared for their time ahead; but as they spent present time arranging the past, so they spent present time laying plans for the future. Some testators had more to bequeath, more time to spare: others had less to leave, less time to plan. Were they aware of time? How did they control the future? In an intriguing essay, A. G. Rigg asserts that ‘one of the greatest revolutions in man’s perception of the world around him was caused by the invention, sometime in the late thirteenth century, of the mechanical weight-driven clock.’ It is the intention of this paper to see how men’s (and women’s) perception of time in the late Middle Ages was reflected in their wills, the most personal papers left by ordinary men and women of the period.

The career of Bishop Richard Fox was marked by his dedication to hard work and his obsession with the organized management of time. Fox was born about 1448 into a Lincolnshire yeoman family, was educated at local grammar schools and Oxford, was subsequently ordained, and later became a doctoral student at the University of Paris. In 1484 he joined the entourage of the exiled Henry Tudor, who recognized his ability and gave him considerable responsibility in negotiating with the French government and planning the 1485 invasion of England. After Bosworth, Fox became Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and a member of the royal council with particular responsibility for foreign affairs. He was appointed bishop successively of Exeter, Bath and Wells, Durham, and Winchester. In 1516, he founded Corpus Christi College, Oxford, retired from politics, and returned to Winchester, where he died in 1528.

This is how the Rule of a community of seventeenth-century Dutch Catholic lay-sisters started. Theirs was a very flexible rule, designed to accommodate both wealthy sisters, who could spend much of their time in their devotions, and poorer ones, who had to work for their living. Their Rule provides a good illustration of attitudes towards the use of time among pious Christians in the seventeenth century.

Godly women from noble, gentry, mercantile, and clerical families were much commemorated at their deaths in funeral sermons. Apart from preaching on a suitable text, ministers commonly gave an account of the life of the deceased, describing, amongst other things, how she passed her time. Godly lives from sermons for men outlined the course of their careers, stressing their public activities, the manner in which they took religion out into the world and engaged with worldly matters; those for women followed a formula describing the deceased’s childhood, virtuous education, marriage, performance as wife, mother, mistress of servants, hospitality (especially if the woman was the wife of a minister), and charitable work, and enumerated her merits in these roles. Instead of recounting the events of their whole lives, ministers dwelt upon the women’s daily routine of pious practices, with variations for the Sabbath or days on which they took communion. The convention of de mortuis nil nisi bonum was strictly observed, but the edificatory nature of the life was also an important element in the telling of it. Sometimes sermon titles acknowledged this, otherwise they referred to the good death of the deceased or, if they were published to improve the career prospects of the preacher, they referred to the text upon which he had preached.

Women were praised for following Daniel’s practice, the practice for which he was thrown into the lions’ den. This was to kneel upon his knees, three times a day, and pray and give thanks before his God. In the early years of the seventeenth century, Mrs Mary Gunter, companion to Lettice, Countess of Leicester, ‘resolved upon Daniels Practice’. ‘Besides Family duties, which were performed twice every day, by the Chaplain …. And besides the private Prayers which she daily read in her Ladies Bed-Chamber, she was thrice on her Knees every day before God in secret.’ Lady Elizabeth Langham’s ‘constant retirements’ for her devotions in the 1660s ‘were answerable to Daniels thrice a day’.

Since its publication in 1904–5, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has provided a paradigm for assessments of the attitudes to the profitable use of time among different branches of Christianity, emphasising the sanctification of work and thrifty care for time allegedly found in pronouncedly Protestant religious groups. This paper tests further assumptions made by Weber and his school by considering attitudes espoused within the two religious groups in early modern England which are often taken to epitomize the stereotypical extremes of Weberian hypotheses: on the one hand the Catholics, on the other the Quakers.

Historians have long been aware that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the intensely religious were especially strict in their observance of the Sabbath, in their rejection of amusements and diversions, and their dedication of the day to public duties and religious exercises. The godly did not restrict their religion to the Sabbath nor indeed to public exercises, for they attempted to maintain a daily regime of family worship and private study or devotion. Yet the godly were distinguished not only by the seriousness of their religious observance, but also, out of fear of neglecting their religious duties, by their attempts to discipline their day and regulate their time.

“Work while it is day; the night cometh wherein no man can work’: John Wesley’s liking for John 9.4 will not surprise a modern student of evangelical history. That there was a Weberian elective affinity between Methodism and diligence has become something of a truism among sociologists examining the cluster of values comprising the Protestant ethic and social historians probing the psychological roots of industrialization in England. Thanks to a famous chapter in E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, countless students perceive Methodism primarily as an agency of time-work discipline, internalizing a gospel of work in the pre-industrial labourer and recasting him, by way of the fiery mould of a conversion experience, into the submissive factory worker.