Etienne de Bourbon is one of the many distinguished mission-preachers who arose among the early Friars. Born about 1195, he was studying at Paris when the Dominicans first arrived there. He joined the Order about 1223, preached in many places and with great effect for the crusades and against the heretics, and was appointed Inquisitor shortly after 1235. His active career seems to have ended in 1249; he died about 1261, leaving still incomplete his Preachers' Manual, of which its modern editor justly says: "Whoever wishes to grasp the moral and mental state of St Louis's time, and all that intimate side of medieval society towards which modern learning seems most willingly to turn, must henceforth study this collection of anecdotes" (Anecdotes Historiques, etc., d'Etienne de Bourbon, ed. by A. Lecoy de la Marche for the Société de L'Histoire de France, 1877, p. iii). Very many of the tales are taken from Etienne's personal experiences; but even those which are patently legendary throw much light on the ideas of the age.

ICONOCLASTIC USURERS
(Bourb. p. 365.)

It befel at Dijon, about the year 1240, that a certain usurer would have celebrated his wedding with much rejoicing; and, having been led with instruments of music to the parish church of the blessed Virgin, and standing now under the church portal that his bride might give her consent and the marriage be ratified according to custom by the promise "I do," and so the wedding might be solemnized in the church by the singing of mass and other ceremonies - while this was there being done, I say, and the bride and bridegroom should have been led with joy into the church, a certain usurer carved in stone upon the portal above, whom a carven devil was bearing to hell, fell with his money-bag upon the head of this living usurer who should have been married, and crushed and slew him; so that the wedding was turned to mourning, and their joy to lamentation, and the living man was thus shut out by the stone image from that entrance into church, and those sacraments, from which the priests not only did not exclude him but would have led him in (1). Then the usurers, or other citizens, by dint of bribes, procured the destruction of the other graven images which stood without, on the forefront of the said portal, which I myself have seen there broken away, lest a like fate might befal them or others under like circumstances (2).

(1) By strict church law, the sacraments should have been refused to an impenitent usurer; but Etienne agrees with all others in complaining that the golden key opened this door also.

(2) Etienne tells the same story more briefly on p. 60, where he adds that this destruction was still fresh when he saw it, and that the Bishop of Cambrai held forth about it on the spot itself.

(Coulton I, p.86-87)