EXEMPLA 141 (c.1215)
 

I recall speaking one day with a certain knight who frequented tournaments with great enthusiasm and encouraged others to take part in them too, by sending criers and heralds out to proclaim the tournaments; and he would not believe or assent to the proposition that games or exercises of this sort were a sin, though in other respects he was really quite religious. So I undertook to prove to him that in tournaments, the seven deadly sins take the field as a company.
 

When the irreligious pace the tournament course in search of men's praise and a hollow glory, they do not want for pride; and the vain do not want for envy: they envy one another because the one is though; to be more accomplished in arms and is alotted greater praise than the others.
 

They do not want for hatred and wrath, when one strikes another and mishandles him, and oftentimes wounds him to the death and kills him; but thus they incur the fourth mortal sin too: spiritual sloth or despair.
 

They are taken by vanity as well, for all their spiritual property is rendered useless to them and they are saddened greatly when they cannot prevail over the other side in the tournament and are forced to quit the field in disgrace.
 

They do not want for the fifth deadly sin -- greed or rapaciousness --, with one capturing another and then ransoming him, and bearing off by force from the one whom he has beaten in a fight the horse he had wanted to win; knights exact a burdensome and intolerable cost in the name of their tournaments: they mercilessly steal the property of men's good morals, and at the same time have no compunction about treading down and scattering crops standing in fields: they bankrupt and abuse poor peasants too.
 

Tournaments do not want for the sixth mortal sin -- gluttony , with the knights in turn inviting and being invited to great feasts, in the name of the world's glory; spending not only their own property but also the property of poor people on useless banqueting; and proclaiming lavish festivities at others' expense. 'Whatever errors their kings commit, the Greeks must suffer for them.'
 

They do not want for the seventh deadly sin, known to be lechery, while so striving to ingratiate themselves with shameless women, if they can prove their prowess in arms; some are even in the habit of bearing women's love tokens in place of martial banners.
 

So on account of the wrongs and cruelties practiced there, the murders and the blood-letting, the church has established that those killed in tournaments be denied Christian burial. In the tournament course the irreligious do indeed pace, whence with a millstone and with life's course they are painfully drowned in the depth of the sea - in the depths of bitterness and pain.
 

When the knight with whom I was speaking heard these words and so came to acknowledge openly the truth in them, which he had never heard before, he undertook to regard as hateful thenceforth those tournaments which previously he had loved so much.
 

[reading redimit instead of non redimit.
 

{2} i.e., 'whatever the great do wrong, the poor must suffer;' proverbial: cf.
 

Cic. Div. 1.14, Hor. Ep. 1.2.14. 3Cf. Matt. 18:6.