To my most dear lord Aethelbald, King of the English, beloved in Christ above all other kings, Boniface, the archbishop, Legate in Germany of the Roman Church, with Wera, Burchard, Werberht, Abel, Willibald, Hwita and Leofwine, his fellow-bishops,[] lasting and loving greetings in Christ.
These seven bishops, all Anglo-Saxons, were Boniface's coadjutors. There are good reasons for thinking that Wera was Bishop of Utrecht between 741 and 753. Burchard was Bishop of Wurzburg, Willibald was Bishop of Eichstatft (whose travels are described later in this volume), Abel was Archbishop of Rheims and Hwita is usually supposed to be the Bishop of Buraburg; to the others, Werberht, Leofwine, it is not possible to ascribe sees, but it is unlikely that Leofwine is to be identified with Lebuin, whose biography occurs later in this book.
We confess before God and His holy angels that whenever reliable messengers have brought us news of your prosperity, your faith and good deeds in the sight of God and men, we have been glad and given thanks to God in our prayers. We have also prayed and entreated the Saviour of the world to keep you for many years to come firm in faith, constant in good works and just in your government of a Christian people. But whenever it has come to our ears that you have suffered a setback either in the state of your realm, the outcome of war or, what is more dangerous, in the salvation of your soul, then we have been cast down with grief and sadness, because we share in your joys and suffer with you in your troubles.
We have heard that you are generous in the giving of alms. On this we congratulate you, because they who give alms to the least of their needy brethren will hear on the day of judgment, as the Gospel says, a favourable sentence from the Lord: "As long as ye did it to one of these, my least brethren, ye. did it to me. Come, ye blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom which has been prepared for you from the beginning of the world."
We have heard, also, that you vigorously suppress robbery and crime, perjury and plundering, and that you are known to be a protector of the widows and the poor: hence peace is established in your kingdom. For this we rejoice and praise God, because Christ, who is our peace and truth, has said: " Blessed are the peaceable, for they shall be called the children of God."
But with these good tidings one grave accusation against your otherwise good conduct, and one which we would prefer to think was false, has reached our hearing and caused us sorrow. We have learned from several sources that you have never taken a lawful wife. Marriage was instituted by the Lord our God from the beginning of the world and has been ordained and reaTumed in his preaching by the Apostle Paul, saying: "Beware of fornication. Let each man have his own wife and let each woman have her own husband." For if you wished to act in this manner for the sake of practising chastity and continence and had refrained from taking a wife out of fear and love of God, and then had truly fulfilled your purpose, we should have been glad, because it is a laudable and not a reprehensible course to take. But if, as many say (which God forbid), you have not taken a lawful wife nor professed chastity for God's sake but have been driven by lust into the sins of fornication and adultery and have lost your good name before God and men, then we are deeply grieved.
And what is much worse, those who told us add that you have committed these sins, to your greater shame, in various monasteries with holy nuns and virgins vowed to God. Let us put the matter this way. If a slave is guilty of a heinous crime against his master, if he commits adultery with his lord's wife, how much greater is the crime of the man who besmirches with his lust the spouse of Christ, Creator of heaven and earth? Saint Paul says: "Do you not know that your bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost?" And in another place: "Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the spirit of God dwells in you? If any man defiles the temple of God, him shall God destroy: for the temple of God is holy, which you are." And again, he counts fornicators and adulterers, together with idolators, among the number of sinners, saying: "Know ye not that sinners will not inherit the kingdom of God. Be not deceived: neither fornicators nor idolators nor adulterers nor the effeminate, nor thieves nor drunkards nor revilers, nor extortioners shall possess the kingdom of God."
Among the Greeks and Romans a candidate for Holy Orders is closely questioned before his ordination about this sin, implying that anyone found guilty of it has committed a blasphemy against God, and if found guilty of having had intercourse with a nun veiled and consecrated to God he is debarred from entering the ranks of the clergy. For this reason one should carefully consider how grievous a sin this is in the eyes of the Eternal Judge. He who is guilty of it is classed as an idolator, and even though he has been reconciled to God by penance he is banished from the service of the altar. Our bodies, consecrated to God through the offering of our vows and the words of the priest, are said by the Holy Ghost to be the temple of God. Those, then, who violate them are to be regarded, according to the Apostle, as the sons of perdition. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, warned the lustful against the sin of fornication, saying: "The time past suffices,"[Pet iv.3-5] etc. And then: "A harlot's pay is but the price of a meal; the adulteress costs dearer, her price is a man's whole life." [Prov. Vi.26] Small blame to the thief when he steals to fill his hungry belly, and if he be caught, why, he can pay sevenfold or yield up all that he has; the adulterer, in the hunger of his heart, must risk losing life itself. [Prov vi.30-31]
It would be tedious to enumerate how many teachers have denounced the dread poison of this sin and forbidden it with terrible threats. Fornication is more grave and repellent than almost any other sin and may truly be called the snare of death, an abyss of hell and a whirlpool of perdition.
For this reason, if you are still living in a state of sin, we beg and entreat Your Grace through Christ, the Son of God, and through His coming, to amend your life by penance and cleanse it by purification. Bear in mind how vile a thing it is to change the image of God which has been created in you into the likeness of the devil through lust. Remember that you have been set as a king and ruler over many, not for your own deserts but through the overwhelming goodness of God, and that now by your lust you are making yourself the slave of the devil. The Apostle says: "Whatsoever sin a man commits, of that he becomes a slave." Not only by Christians, but even by pagans is this sin reckoned a shame and a disgrace. For even pagans, who know not the true God, observe in this matter, as if by instinct, the essence of the law and the ordinance of God, since as they respect the bonds of matrimony and punish fornicators and adulterers. In Old Saxony, if a virgin defiles her father's house by adultery or if a married woman breaks the marriage tie and commits adultery, they sometimes compel her to hang herself by her own hand, and then over the pyre on which she has been burned and cremated they hang the seducer. Sometimes a band of women get together and flog her through the villages, beating her with rods, and, stripping her to the waist, they cut and pierce her whole body with knives and send her from house to house bloody and torn. Always new scourgers, zealous for the purity of marriage, are found to join in until they leave her dead, or half dead, that others may fear adultery and wantonness. The Wends, who are a most degraded and depraved race, have such a high regard for the bonds of matrimony that when the husband is dead the wife refuses to live. A wife is considered deserving of praise if she dies by her own hand and is burned with her husband on the same funeral pyre.
If, then, the heathen who, as the Apostle says, know not God and have not the law carry out by instinct the injunctions of the law and show the works of the law written on their hearts, it is time now that you who are called a Christian and a worshipper of the true God should, if you have been defiled with lust in your youth, wallowed in the mire of adultery or drowned in the sea of lust as in the abyss of hell, call to mind your Lord, should escape from the snares of the devil and cleanse your soul from its foul iniquities. Now is the time for you to fear your Creator and to desist from defiling yourself by committing such crimes. Now is the time to spare the many people who, through following the example of a vicious prince, perish and fall into the pit of death. For it is certain that we shall be rewarded or punished by the eternal judge according to the number of people we have led to heaven by our good example or swept into hell by our evil courses.
If the English race, as people in the provinces say and as the French, Italians and even the heathens insultingly proclaim, are despising lawful marriage and living in open adultery like the people of Sodom, then we must expect that from such intercourse with harlots, a people degenerate, degraded and mad with lust will be begotten. In the end the whole race, turning to base and ignoble ways, will cease to be strong in war, steadfast in faith, honoured by men or pleasing in the sight of God. So has it befallen other peoples of Spain, Provence and Burgundy. They turned away from God and yielded to lust until Almighty God allowed the penalties of such crimes to destroy them, first by letting them lose the knowledge of God and then by loosing the attacks of the Saracens upon them.
It should be noted that in this crime another and much greater crime is involved, because when these harlots, whether nuns or not, bring forth their children conceived in sin they generally kill them and so, instead of enlarging the Church by bringing in adoptive sons of Christ, they fill graves with corpses and hell with unhappy souls.
We have also been informed that you have violated the privileges of churches and monasteries and filched away their revenues. If this is true, it must be regarded as a grievous sin on the testimony of the Holy Ghost, which says: "Shall he who robs father or mother make light of it? He is next door to a murderer."It cannot be doubted that God, who created us, is our Father and the Church who regenerated us spiritually is our Mother. Therefore he who robs or plunders the money of Christ and the Church will be regarded as a murderer in the sight of the just Judge. Of him a certain wise man said: " He who steals from his neighbour is a robber; he who robs the Church of her possessions is guilty of sacrilege."
It is said that your governors and earls use greater violence and oppression towards monks and priests than any other Christian kings have ever done before. Ever since St. Gregory sent missionaries to convert the English people to the Catholic faith the privileges of the Church remained inviolate and sacrosanct until the days of Ceolred, King of Mercia and Osred, King of Deira and Bernicia. At the evil suggestion of the devil these two kings showed, by their accursed example, how these two deadly sins could be committed publicly against the commands of the Gospel and the teachings of our Saviour. They persisted in their crimes, namely, in the violation and seduction of nuns and the destruction of monasteries, until they were condemned by the just judgment of God and cast down from their royal state, overtaken by sudden and terrible death, deprived of eternal light and plunged into the depths of hell. For while Ceolred, Your Highness's predecessor, as those who were present testify, sat feasting amidst his nobles, an evil spirit which had seduced him into defying the law of God suddenly struck him with madness, so that still in his sins, without repentance or confession, raving mad, gibbering with demons and cursing the priests of God, he departed from this life and went certainly to the torments of hell. Osred, also, maddened and spurred on by his lust, outraged consecrated virgins in their convents until a shameful and ignominious death deprived him of his glorious kingdom, his young wife and his impure soul.
For this reason, beloved son, beware of the pit into winch you have seen others fall before you. Beware the darts of the old foe with which you have seen your relatives fail wounded. Be on your guard against him who lays the snares that have entrapped your friends and companions, and by which you have seen them lose this life and the life to come. Follow not the example of such to your ruin. Such are they who, according to Holy Writ, have oppressed the good and taken away their works. On the day of judgment they will say: "Far, it seems, did our thoughts wander from the true path; never did any ray of justice enlighten them, never the true sun shone."
The riches of this world are of no avail on the day of judgment if a man comes to the end of his life stiff making evil use of them, for after the death of the body he shall fail into eternal punishment of the soul. Take these warnings to heart, my dear son; I pray you yield to the prudent Words of God's law and reform your life. Turn away from your vices, make an effort to acquire holy virtues. So shall you prosper in this world and receive eternal reward in the world to come.
May Almighty God so turn your life to better things that you may be worthy of the grace of our Lord Himself for evermore.
To my most dear lord Aethelbald, King of the English, beloved in Christ above all other kings, Boniface, the archbishop, Legate in Germany of the Roman Church, with Wera, Burchard, Werberht, Abel, Willibald, Hwita and Leofwine, his fellow-bishops,[] lasting and loving greetings in Christ.
These seven bishops, all Anglo-Saxons, were Boniface's coadjutors. There are good reasons for thinking that Wera was Bishop of Utrecht between 741 and 753. Burchard was Bishop of Wurzburg, Willibald was Bishop of Eichstatft (whose travels are described later in this volume), Abel was Archbishop of Rheims and Hwita is usually supposed to be the Bishop of Buraburg; to the others, Werberht, Leofwine, it is not possible to ascribe sees, but it is unlikely that Leofwine is to be identified with Lebuin, whose biography occurs later in this book.
We confess before God and His holy angels that whenever reliable messengers have brought us news of your prosperity, your faith and good deeds in the sight of God and men, we have been glad and given thanks to God in our prayers. We have also prayed and entreated the Saviour of the world to keep you for many years to come firm in faith, constant in good works and just in your government of a Christian people. But whenever it has come to our ears that you have suffered a setback either in the state of your realm, the outcome of war or, what is more dangerous, in the salvation of your soul, then we have been cast down with grief and sadness, because we share in your joys and suffer with you in your troubles.
We have heard that you are generous in the giving of alms. On this we congratulate you, because they who give alms to the least of their needy brethren will hear on the day of judgment, as the Gospel says, a favourable sentence from the Lord: "As long as ye did it to one of these, my least brethren, ye. did it to me. Come, ye blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom which has been prepared for you from the beginning of the world."
We have heard, also, that you vigorously suppress robbery and crime, perjury and plundering, and that you are known to be a protector of the widows and the poor: hence peace is established in your kingdom. For this we rejoice and praise God, because Christ, who is our peace and truth, has said: " Blessed are the peaceable, for they shall be called the children of God."
But with these good tidings one grave accusation against your otherwise good conduct, and one which we would prefer to think was false, has reached our hearing and caused us sorrow. We have learned from several sources that you have never taken a lawful wife. Marriage was instituted by the Lord our God from the beginning of the world and has been ordained and reaTumed in his preaching by the Apostle Paul, saying: "Beware of fornication. Let each man have his own wife and let each woman have her own husband." For if you wished to act in this manner for the sake of practising chastity and continence and had refrained from taking a wife out of fear and love of God, and then had truly fulfilled your purpose, we should have been glad, because it is a laudable and not a reprehensible course to take. But if, as many say (which God forbid), you have not taken a lawful wife nor professed chastity for God's sake but have been driven by lust into the sins of fornication and adultery and have lost your good name before God and men, then we are deeply grieved.
And what is much worse, those who told us add that you have committed these sins, to your greater shame, in various monasteries with holy nuns and virgins vowed to God. Let us put the matter this way. If a slave is guilty of a heinous crime against his master, if he commits adultery with his lord's wife, how much greater is the crime of the man who besmirches with his lust the spouse of Christ, Creator of heaven and earth? Saint Paul says: "Do you not know that your bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost?" And in another place: "Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the spirit of God dwells in you? If any man defiles the temple of God, him shall God destroy: for the temple of God is holy, which you are." And again, he counts fornicators and adulterers, together with idolators, among the number of sinners, saying: "Know ye not that sinners will not inherit the kingdom of God. Be not deceived: neither fornicators nor idolators nor adulterers nor the effeminate, nor thieves nor drunkards nor revilers, nor extortioners shall possess the kingdom of God."
Among the Greeks and Romans a candidate for Holy Orders is closely questioned before his ordination about this sin, implying that anyone found guilty of it has committed a blasphemy against God, and if found guilty of having had intercourse with a nun veiled and consecrated to God he is debarred from entering the ranks of the clergy. For this reason one should carefully consider how grievous a sin this is in the eyes of the Eternal Judge. He who is guilty of it is classed as an idolator, and even though he has been reconciled to God by penance he is banished from the service of the altar. Our bodies, consecrated to God through the offering of our vows and the words of the priest, are said by the Holy Ghost to be the temple of God. Those, then, who violate them are to be regarded, according to the Apostle, as the sons of perdition. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, warned the lustful against the sin of fornication, saying: "The time past suffices,"[Pet iv.3-5] etc. And then: "A harlot's pay is but the price of a meal; the adulteress costs dearer, her price is a man's whole life." [Prov. Vi.26] Small blame to the thief when he steals to fill his hungry belly, and if he be caught, why, he can pay sevenfold or yield up all that he has; the adulterer, in the hunger of his heart, must risk losing life itself. [Prov vi.30-31]
It would be tedious to enumerate how many teachers have denounced the dread poison of this sin and forbidden it with terrible threats. Fornication is more grave and repellent than almost any other sin and may truly be called the snare of death, an abyss of hell and a whirlpool of perdition.
Wherefore, if you are still living in a state of sin, we beseech and entreat Your Grace through Christ, the Son of God, and through His coming, to amend your life by penance and cleanse it by purification. Bear in mind how vile a thing it is to change the image of God which has been created in you into the likeness of the devil through lust. Remember that you have been set as a king and ruler over many, not for your own deserts but through the overwhelming goodness of God, and that now by your lust you are making yourself the slave of the devil. The Apostle says: "Whatsoever sin a man commits, of that he becomes a slave." Not only by Christians, but even by pagans is this sin reckoned a shame and a disgrace. For even pagans, who know not the true God, observe in this matter, as if by instinct, the essence of the law and the ordinance of God, inasmuch as they respect the bonds of matrimony and punish fornicators and adulterers. In Old Saxony, if a virgin defiles her father's house by adultery or if a married woman breaks the marriage tie and commits adultery, they sometimes compel her to hang herself by her own hand, and then over the pyre on which she has been burned and cremated they hang the seducer. Sometimes a band of women get together and flog her through the villages, beating her with rods, and, stripping her to the waist, they cut and pierce her whole body with knives and send her from house to house bloody and torn. Always new scourgers, zealous for the purity of marriage, are found to join in until they leave her dead, or half dead, that others may fear adultery and wantonness. The Wends, who are a most degraded and depraved race, have such a high regard for the bonds of matrimony that when the husband is dead the wife refuses to live. A wife is considered deserving of praise if she dies by her own hand and is burned with her husband on the same funeral pyre.
If, then, the heathen who, as the Apostle says, know not God and have not the law carry out by instinct the injunctions of the law and show the works of the law written on their hearts, it is time now that you who are called a Christian and a worshipper of the true God should, if you have been defiled with lust in your youth, wallowed in the mire of adultery or drowned in the sea of lust as in the abyss of hell, call to mind your Lord, should escape from the snares of the devil and cleanse your soul from its foul iniquities. Now is the time for you to fear your Creator and to desist from defiling yourself by committing such crimes. Now is the time to spare the many people who, through following the example of a vicious prince, perish and fall into the pit of death. For it is certain that we shall be rewarded or punished by the eternal judge according to the number of people we have led to heaven by our good example or swept into hell by our evil courses.
If the English race, as people in the provinces say and as the French, Italians and even the heathens insultingly proclaim, are despising lawful marriage and living in open adultery like the people of Sodom, then we must expect that from such intercourse with harlots, a people degenerate, degraded and mad with lust will be begotten. In the end the whole race, turning to base and ignoble ways, will cease to be strong in war, steadfast in faith, honoured by men or pleasing in the sight of God. So has it befallen other peoples of Spain, Provence and Burgundy. They turned away from God and yielded to lust until Almighty God allowed the penalties of such crimes to destroy them, first by letting them lose the knowledge of God and then by loosing the attacks of the Saracens upon them.
It should be noted that in this crime another and much greater crime is involved, because when these harlots, whether nuns or not, bring forth their children conceived in sin they generally kill them and so, instead of enlarging the Church by bringing in adoptive sons of Christ, they fill graves with corpses and hell with unhappy souls.
We have also been informed that you have violated the privileges of churches and monasteries and filched away their revenues. If this is true, it must be regarded as a grievous sin on the testimony of the Holy Ghost, which says: "Shall he who robs father or mother make light of it? He is next door to a murderer."It cannot be doubted that God, who created us, is our Father and the Church who regenerated us spiritually is our Mother. Therefore he who robs or plunders the money of Christ and the Church will be regarded as a murderer in the sight of the just Judge. Of him a certain wise man said: " He who steals from his neighbour is a robber; he who robs the Church of her possessions is guilty of sacrilege."
It is said that your governors and earls use greater violence and oppression towards monks and priests than any other Christian kings have ever done before. Ever since St. Gregory sent missionaries to convert the English people to the Catholic faith the privileges of the Church remained inviolate and sacrosanct until the days of Ceolred, King of Mercia and Osred, King of Deira and Bernicia. At the evil suggestion of the devil these two kings showed, by their accursed example, how these two deadly sins could be committed publicly against the commands of the Gospel and the teachings of our Saviour. They persisted in their crimes, namely, in the violation and seduction of nuns and the destruction of monasteries, until they were condemned by the just judgment of God and cast down from their royal state, overtaken by sudden and terrible death, deprived of eternal light and plunged into the depths of hell. For while Ceolred, Your Highness's predecessor, as those who were present testify, sat feasting amidst his nobles, an evil spirit which had seduced him into defying the law of God suddenly struck him with madness, so that still in his sins, without repentance or confession, raving mad, gibbering with demons and cursing the priests of God, he departed from this life and went certainly to the torments of hell. Osred, also, maddened and spurred on by his lust, outraged consecrated virgins in their convents until a shameful and ignominious death deprived him of his glorious kingdom, his young wife and his impure soul.
Wherefore, beloved son, beware of the pit into winch you have seen others fall before you. Beware the darts of the old foe with which you have seen your relatives fail wounded. Be on your guard against him who lays the snares that have entrapped your friends and companions, and by which you have seen them lose this life and the life to come. Follow not the example of such to your ruin. Such are they who, according to Holy Writ, have oppressed the good and taken away their works. On the day of judgment they will say: "Far, it seems, did our thoughts wander from the true path; never did any ray of justice enlighten them, never the true sun shone."
The riches of this world are of no avail on the day of judgment if a man comes to the end of his life stiff making evil use of them, for after the death of the body he shall fail into eternal punishment of the soul. Take these warnings to heart, my dear son; I pray you yield to the prudent Words of God's law and reform your life. Turn away from your vices, make an effort to acquire holy virtues. So shall you prosper in this world and receive eternal reward in the world to come.
May Almighty God so turn your life to better things that you may be worthy of the grace of our Lord Himself for evermore.
◆
To my most dear lord Aethelbald, King of the English, beloved in Christ above all other kings, Boniface, the archbishop, Legate in Germany of the Roman Church, with Wera, Burchard, Werberht, Abel, Willibald, Hwita and Leofwine, his fellow-bishops,[] lasting and loving greetings in Christ.
These seven bishops, all Anglo-Saxons, were Boniface's coadjutors. There are good reasons for thinking that Wera was Bishop of Utrecht between 741 and 753. Burchard was Bishop of Wurzburg, Willibald was Bishop of Eichstatft (whose travels are described later in this volume), Abel was Archbishop of Rheims and Hwita is usually supposed to be the Bishop of Buraburg; to the others, Werberht, Leofwine, it is not possible to ascribe sees, but it is unlikely that Leofwine is to be identified with Lebuin, whose biography occurs later in this book.
We confess before God and His holy angels that whenever reliable messengers have brought us news of your prosperity, your faith and good deeds in the sight of God and men, we have been glad and given thanks to God in our prayers. We have also prayed and entreated the Saviour of the world to keep you for many years to come firm in faith, constant in good works and just in your government of a Christian people. But whenever it has come to our ears that you have suffered a setback either in the state of your realm, the outcome of war or, what is more dangerous, in the salvation of your soul, then we have been cast down with grief and sadness, because we share in your joys and suffer with you in your troubles.
We have heard that you are generous in the giving of alms. On this we congratulate you, because they who give alms to the least of their needy brethren will hear on the day of judgment, as the Gospel says, a favourable sentence from the Lord: "As long as ye did it to one of these, my least brethren, ye. did it to me. Come, ye blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom which has been prepared for you from the beginning of the world."
We have heard, also, that you vigorously suppress robbery and crime, perjury and plundering, and that you are known to be a protector of the widows and the poor: hence peace is established in your kingdom. For this we rejoice and praise God, because Christ, who is our peace and truth, has said: " Blessed are the peaceable, for they shall be called the children of God."
But with these good tidings one grave accusation against your otherwise good conduct, and one which we would prefer to think was false, has reached our hearing and caused us sorrow. We have learned from several sources that you have never taken a lawful wife. Marriage was instituted by the Lord our God from the beginning of the world and has been ordained and reaTumed in his preaching by the Apostle Paul, saying: "Beware of fornication. Let each man have his own wife and let each woman have her own husband." For if you wished to act in this manner for the sake of practising chastity and continence and had refrained from taking a wife out of fear and love of God, and then had truly fulfilled your purpose, we should have been glad, because it is a laudable and not a reprehensible course to take. But if, as many say (which God forbid), you have not taken a lawful wife nor professed chastity for God's sake but have been driven by lust into the sins of fornication and adultery and have lost your good name before God and men, then we are deeply grieved.
And what is much worse, those who told us add that you have committed these sins, to your greater shame, in various monasteries with holy nuns and virgins vowed to God. Let us put the matter this way. If a slave is guilty of a heinous crime against his master, if he commits adultery with his lord's wife, how much greater is the crime of the man who besmirches with his lust the spouse of Christ, Creator of heaven and earth? Saint Paul says: "Do you not know that your bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost?" And in another place: "Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the spirit of God dwells in you? If any man defiles the temple of God, him shall God destroy: for the temple of God is holy, which you are." And again, he counts fornicators and adulterers, together with idolators, among the number of sinners, saying: "Know ye not that sinners will not inherit the kingdom of God. Be not deceived: neither fornicators nor idolators nor adulterers nor the effeminate, nor thieves nor drunkards nor revilers, nor extortioners shall possess the kingdom of God."
Among the Greeks and Romans a candidate for Holy Orders is closely questioned before his ordination about this sin, implying that anyone found guilty of it has committed a blasphemy against God, and if found guilty of having had intercourse with a nun veiled and consecrated to God he is debarred from entering the ranks of the clergy. For this reason one should carefully consider how grievous a sin this is in the eyes of the Eternal Judge. He who is guilty of it is classed as an idolator, and even though he has been reconciled to God by penance he is banished from the service of the altar. Our bodies, consecrated to God through the offering of our vows and the words of the priest, are said by the Holy Ghost to be the temple of God. Those, then, who violate them are to be regarded, according to the Apostle, as the sons of perdition. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, warned the lustful against the sin of fornication, saying: "The time past suffices,"[Pet iv.3-5] etc. And then: "A harlot's pay is but the price of a meal; the adulteress costs dearer, her price is a man's whole life." [Prov. Vi.26] Small blame to the thief when he steals to fill his hungry belly, and if he be caught, why, he can pay sevenfold or yield up all that he has; the adulterer, in the hunger of his heart, must risk losing life itself. [Prov vi.30-31]
It would be tedious to enumerate how many teachers have denounced the dread poison of this sin and forbidden it with terrible threats. Fornication is more grave and repellent than almost any other sin and may truly be called the snare of death, an abyss of hell and a whirlpool of perdition.
For this reason, if you are still living in a state of sin, we beg and entreat Your Grace through Christ, the Son of God, and through His coming, to amend your life by penance and cleanse it by purification. Bear in mind how vile a thing it is to change the image of God which has been created in you into the likeness of the devil through lust. Remember that you have been set as a king and ruler over many, not for your own deserts but through the overwhelming goodness of God, and that now by your lust you are making yourself the slave of the devil. The Apostle says: "Whatsoever sin a man commits, of that he becomes a slave." Not only by Christians, but even by pagans is this sin reckoned a shame and a disgrace. For even pagans, who know not the true God, observe in this matter, as if by instinct, the essence of the law and the ordinance of God, since as they respect the bonds of matrimony and punish fornicators and adulterers. In Old Saxony, if a virgin defiles her father's house by adultery or if a married woman breaks the marriage tie and commits adultery, they sometimes compel her to hang herself by her own hand, and then over the pyre on which she has been burned and cremated they hang the seducer. Sometimes a band of women get together and flog her through the villages, beating her with rods, and, stripping her to the waist, they cut and pierce her whole body with knives and send her from house to house bloody and torn. Always new scourgers, zealous for the purity of marriage, are found to join in until they leave her dead, or half dead, that others may fear adultery and wantonness. The Wends, who are a most degraded and depraved race, have such a high regard for the bonds of matrimony that when the husband is dead the wife refuses to live. A wife is considered deserving of praise if she dies by her own hand and is burned with her husband on the same funeral pyre.
If, then, the heathen who, as the Apostle says, know not God and have not the law carry out by instinct the injunctions of the law and show the works of the law written on their hearts, it is time now that you who are called a Christian and a worshipper of the true God should, if you have been defiled with lust in your youth, wallowed in the mire of adultery or drowned in the sea of lust as in the abyss of hell, call to mind your Lord, should escape from the snares of the devil and cleanse your soul from its foul iniquities. Now is the time for you to fear your Creator and to desist from defiling yourself by committing such crimes. Now is the time to spare the many people who, through following the example of a vicious prince, perish and fall into the pit of death. For it is certain that we shall be rewarded or punished by the eternal judge according to the number of people we have led to heaven by our good example or swept into hell by our evil courses.
If the English race, as people in the provinces say and as the French, Italians and even the heathens insultingly proclaim, are despising lawful marriage and living in open adultery like the people of Sodom, then we must expect that from such intercourse with harlots, a people degenerate, degraded and mad with lust will be begotten. In the end the whole race, turning to base and ignoble ways, will cease to be strong in war, steadfast in faith, honoured by men or pleasing in the sight of God. So has it befallen other peoples of Spain, Provence and Burgundy. They turned away from God and yielded to lust until Almighty God allowed the penalties of such crimes to destroy them, first by letting them lose the knowledge of God and then by loosing the attacks of the Saracens upon them.
It should be noted that in this crime another and much greater crime is involved, because when these harlots, whether nuns or not, bring forth their children conceived in sin they generally kill them and so, instead of enlarging the Church by bringing in adoptive sons of Christ, they fill graves with corpses and hell with unhappy souls.
We have also been informed that you have violated the privileges of churches and monasteries and filched away their revenues. If this is true, it must be regarded as a grievous sin on the testimony of the Holy Ghost, which says: "Shall he who robs father or mother make light of it? He is next door to a murderer."It cannot be doubted that God, who created us, is our Father and the Church who regenerated us spiritually is our Mother. Therefore he who robs or plunders the money of Christ and the Church will be regarded as a murderer in the sight of the just Judge. Of him a certain wise man said: " He who steals from his neighbour is a robber; he who robs the Church of her possessions is guilty of sacrilege."
It is said that your governors and earls use greater violence and oppression towards monks and priests than any other Christian kings have ever done before. Ever since St. Gregory sent missionaries to convert the English people to the Catholic faith the privileges of the Church remained inviolate and sacrosanct until the days of Ceolred, King of Mercia and Osred, King of Deira and Bernicia. At the evil suggestion of the devil these two kings showed, by their accursed example, how these two deadly sins could be committed publicly against the commands of the Gospel and the teachings of our Saviour. They persisted in their crimes, namely, in the violation and seduction of nuns and the destruction of monasteries, until they were condemned by the just judgment of God and cast down from their royal state, overtaken by sudden and terrible death, deprived of eternal light and plunged into the depths of hell. For while Ceolred, Your Highness's predecessor, as those who were present testify, sat feasting amidst his nobles, an evil spirit which had seduced him into defying the law of God suddenly struck him with madness, so that still in his sins, without repentance or confession, raving mad, gibbering with demons and cursing the priests of God, he departed from this life and went certainly to the torments of hell. Osred, also, maddened and spurred on by his lust, outraged consecrated virgins in their convents until a shameful and ignominious death deprived him of his glorious kingdom, his young wife and his impure soul.
For this reason, beloved son, beware of the pit into winch you have seen others fall before you. Beware the darts of the old foe with which you have seen your relatives fail wounded. Be on your guard against him who lays the snares that have entrapped your friends and companions, and by which you have seen them lose this life and the life to come. Follow not the example of such to your ruin. Such are they who, according to Holy Writ, have oppressed the good and taken away their works. On the day of judgment they will say: "Far, it seems, did our thoughts wander from the true path; never did any ray of justice enlighten them, never the true sun shone."
The riches of this world are of no avail on the day of judgment if a man comes to the end of his life stiff making evil use of them, for after the death of the body he shall fail into eternal punishment of the soul. Take these warnings to heart, my dear son; I pray you yield to the prudent Words of God's law and reform your life. Turn away from your vices, make an effort to acquire holy virtues. So shall you prosper in this world and receive eternal reward in the world to come.
May Almighty God so turn your life to better things that you may be worthy of the grace of our Lord Himself for evermore.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.