CAMBRIDGE STUDIES
IN MEDIEVAL LIFE AND THOUGHT

Edited by G. G. Coulton, M.A.
Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge
and University Lecturer in English

MEDIEVAL ENGLISH NUNNERIES

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PLATE I

[Larger Image]

PAGE FROM LA SAINTE ABBAYE

(At the top of the picture a priest with two acolytes prepares the sacrament; behind them stand the abbess, holding her staff, her chaplain and the sacristan, who rings the bell; behind them a group of four nuns, including the cellaress with her keys. At the bottom is a procession of priest, acolytes and nuns in the quire.)

MEDIEVAL
ENGLISH NUNNERIES

c. 1275 to 1535

BY
EILEEN POWER
SOMETIME FELLOW AND LECTURER
OF GIRTON COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE

MADAME EGLENTYNE
(From the Ellesmere MS.)

CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1922

TO
M. G. J.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

GENERAL PREFACE

There is only too much truth in the frequent complaint that history, as compared with the physical sciences, is neglected by the modern public. But historians have the remedy in their own hands; choosing problems of equal importance to those of the scientist, and treating them with equal accuracy, they will command equal attention. Those who insist that the proportion of accurately ascertainable facts is smaller in history, and therefore the room for speculation wider, do not thereby establish any essential distinction between truth-seeking in history and truth-seeking in chemistry. The historian, whatever be his subject, is as definitely bound as the chemist “to proclaim certainties as certain, falsehoods as false, and uncertainties as dubious.” Those are the words, not of a modern scientist, but of the seventeenth century monk, Jean Mabillon; they sum up his literary profession of faith. Men will follow us in history as implicitly as they follow the chemist, if only we will form the chemist’s habit of marking clearly where our facts end and our inferences begin. Then the public, so far from discouraging our speculations, will most heartily encourage them; for the most positive man of science is always grateful to anyone who, by putting forward a working theory, stimulates further discussion.

The present series, therefore, appeals directly to that craving for clearer facts which has been bred in these times of storm and stress. No care can save us altogether from error; but, for our own sake and the public’s, we have elected to adopt a safeguard dictated by ordinary business commonsense. Whatever errors of fact are pointed out by reviewers or correspondents shall be publicly corrected with the least possible delay. After a year of publication, all copies shall be provided with such an erratum-slip without waiting for the chance of a second edition; and each fresh volume in this series shall contain a full list of the errata noted in its immediate predecessor. After the lapse of a year from the first publication of any volume, and at any time during the ensuing twelve months, any possessor of that volume who will send a stamped and addressed envelope to the Cambridge University Press, Fetter Lane, Fleet Street, London, E.C. 4, shall receive, in due course, a free copy of the errata in that volume. Thus, with the help of our critics, we may reasonably hope to put forward these monographs as roughly representing the most accurate information obtainable under present conditions. Our facts being thus secured, the reader will judge our inferences on their own merits; and something will have been done to dissipate that cloud of suspicion which hangs over too many important chapters in the social and religious history of the Middle Ages.

G. G. C.

October, 1922.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

The monastic ideal and the development of the monastic rule and orders have been studied in many admirable books. The purpose of the present work is not to describe and analyse once again that ideal, but to give a general picture of English nunnery life during a definite period, the three centuries before the Dissolution. It is derived entirely from pre-Reformation sources, and the tainted evidence of Henry VIII’s commissioners has not been used; nor has the story of the suppression of the English nunneries been told. The nunneries dealt with are drawn from all the monastic orders, except the Gilbertine order, which has been omitted, both because it differed from others in containing double houses of men and women and because it has already been the subject of an excellent monograph by Miss Rose Graham.

It remains for me to record my deep gratitude to two scholars, in whose debt students of medieval monastic history must always lie, Mr G. G. Coulton and Mr A. Hamilton Thompson. I owe more than I can say to their unfailing interest and readiness to discuss, to help and to criticise. To Mr Hamilton Thompson I am specially indebted for the loan of his transcripts and translations of Alnwick’s Register, now in course of publication, for reading and criticising my manuscript and finally for undertaking the arduous work of reading my proofs. I gratefully acknowledge suggestions received at different times from Mr Hubert Hall, Miss Rose Graham and Canon Foster, and faithful criticism from my friend Miss M. G. Jones. I have also to thank Mr H. S. Bennett for kindly preparing the index, and Mr Sydney Cockerell, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, for assistance in the choice of illustrations.

EILEEN POWER.

Girton College,
Cambridge.
September 1922

CONTENTS

LIST OF PLATES

MEDIEVAL ENGLISH NUNNERIES

CHAPTER I

THE NOVICE

There were in England during the later middle ages (c. 1270-1536) some 138 nunneries, excluding double houses of the Gilbertine order, which contained brothers as well as nuns. Of these over one half belonged to the Benedictine order and about a quarter (localised almost entirely in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire) to the Cistercian order. The rest were distributed as follows: 17 to the order of St Augustine and one (Minchin Buckland), which belonged to the order of St John of Jerusalem and followed the Austin rule, four to the Franciscan order, two to the Cluniac order, two to the Premonstratensian order and one to the Dominican order. There was also founded in the fifteenth century a very famous double house of the Brigittine order, Syon Abbey. Twenty-one of these houses had the status of abbeys; the rest were priories. They were distributed all over the country, Surrey, Lancashire, Westmorland and Cornwall being the only counties without one, but they were more thickly spread over the eastern than over the western half of the island. They were most numerous in the North, East and East Midlands, to wit, in the dioceses of York, Lincoln (which was then very large and included Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Rutland, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Leicestershire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and part of Hertfordshire) and Norwich; there were 27 houses in the diocese of York, 31 in the diocese of Lincoln, ten in the diocese of Norwich and in London and its suburbs there were seven. On the other hand if nunneries were most plentiful in the North and East Midlands it was there that they were smallest and poorest. The wealthiest and most famous nunneries in England were all south of the Thames. Apart from the new foundation at Syon, which very soon became the largest and richest of all, the greatest houses were the old established abbeys of Wessex, Shaftesbury, Wilton, St Mary’s Winchester, Romsey and Wherwell, which, together with Barking in Essex were all of Anglo-Saxon foundation; and Dartford in Kent, founded by Edward III. The only houses north of the Thames which approached these in importance were Godstow and Elstow Abbeys, in Oxfordshire and Bedfordshire respectively; the majority were small priories with small incomes.

An analysis of the incomes and numerical size of English nunneries at the dissolution gives interesting and somewhat startling results. Out of 106 houses for which information is available only seven had in 1535 a gross annual income of over £450 a year. The richest were Syon and Shaftesbury with £1943 and £1324 respectively; then came Barking with £862, Wilton with £674, Amesbury with £595, Romsey with £528 and Dartford with £488. Five others (St Helen’s Bishopsgate, Haliwell and the Minories all in London, Elstow and Godstow) had from £300 to £400; nine others (Nuneaton, Clerkenwell, Malling, St Mary’s Winchester, Tarrant Keynes, Canonsleigh, Campsey, Minchin Buckland and Lacock) had from £200 to £300. Twelve had between £100 and £200 and no less than 73 houses had under £100, of which 39 actually had under £50; and it must be remembered that the net annual income, after the deduction of certain annual charges, was less still[1]. An analysis of the numerical size of nunneries presents more difficulties, for the number of nuns given sometimes differs in the reports referring to the same house and it is doubtful whether commissioners or receivers always set down the total number of nuns present at the visitation or dissolution of a house; while lists of pensions paid by the crown to ex-inmates after dissolution are still more incomplete as evidence. A rough analysis, however, leaves very much the same impression as an analysis of incomes[2]. Out of 111 houses, for which some sort of numerical estimate is possible, only four have over thirty inmates, viz. Syon (51), Amesbury (33), Wilton (32) and Barking (30). Eight (Elstow, the Minories, Nuneaton, Denny, Romsey, Wherwell, Dartford and St Mary’s Winchester) have from 20 to 30; thirty-six have from 10 to 20 and sixty-three have under 10. These statistics permit of certain large generalisations. First, that the majority of English nunneries were small and poor. Secondly, that, as has already been pointed out, the largest and richest houses were all in London and south of the Thames; only four houses north of that river had gross incomes of over £200 and only three could boast of more than 20 inmates. Thirdly, the nunneries during this period owned land and rents to the annual value of over £15,500 and contained perhaps between 1500 and 2000 nuns.

To understand the history of the English nunneries during the later middle ages it is necessary not only to understand the smallness and poverty of many of the houses and the high repute of others; it is necessary also to understand what manner of women took the veil in them. From what social classes were the nuns drawn, and for what reason did they enter religion? What function did monasticism, so far as it concerned women, fulfil in the life of medieval society?

It has been shown that the proportion of women who became nuns was very small in comparison with the total female population. It has indeed been insufficiently recognised that the medieval nunneries were recruited almost entirely from among the upper classes. They were essentially aristocratic institutions, the refuge of the gently born. At Romsey Abbey a list of 91 sisters at the election of an abbess in 1333 is full of well-known county names[3]. The names of Bassett, Sackville, Covert, Hussey, Tawke and Farnfold occur at Easebourne[4]; Lewknor, St John, Okehurst, Michelgrove and Sidney at Rusper[5], the two small and poor nunneries in Sussex. The return of the subsidy in 1377 enumerates the sisters of Minchin Barrow and, as their historian points out, “among the family names of these ladies are some of the best that the western counties could produce”[6]. The other Somerset houses were equally aristocratic, and an examination of the roll of prioresses for almost any medieval convent in any part of England will give the same result, even in the smallest and poorest nunneries, the inmates of which were reduced to begging alms[7]. These ladies appear sometimes to have had the spirit of their race, as they often had its manners and its tastes. For 21 years Isabel Stanley, Prioress of King’s Mead, Derby, refused to pay a rent due from her house to the Abbot of Burton; at last the Abbot sent his bailiff to distrain for it and she spoke her mind in good set terms. “Wenes these churles to overlede me,” cried this worthy daughter of a knightly family, “or sue the lawe agayne me? They shall not be so hardy but they shall avye upon their bodies and be nailed with arrows; for I am a gentlewoman, comen of the greatest of Lancashire and Cheshire, and that they shall know right well”[8]. A tacit recognition of the aristocratic character of the convents is to be found in the fact that bishops were often at pains to mention the good birth of the girls whom, in accordance with a general right, they nominated to certain houses on certain occasions. Thus Wykeham wrote to the Abbess of St Mary’s Winchester, bidding her admit Joan Bleden, “quest de bone et honeste condition, come nous sumes enformes”[9]. More frequently still the candidates were described as “domicella” or “damoysele”[10]. At least one instance is extant of a bishop ordering that all the nuns of a house were to be of noble condition[11].

The fact that the greater portion of the female population was unaffected by the existence of the outlet provided by conventual life for women’s energies is a significant one. The reason for it—paradoxical as this may sound—lies in the very narrowness of the sphere to which women of gentle birth were confined. The disadvantage of rank is that so many honest occupations are not, in its eyes, honourable occupations. In the lowest ranks of society the poor labourer upon the land had no need to get rid of his daughter, if he could not find her a husband, nor would it have been to his interest to do so; for, working in the fields among his sons, or spinning and brewing with his wife at home, she could earn a supplementary if not a living wage. The tradesman or artisan in the town was in a similar position. He recognised that the ideal course was to find a husband for his growing girl, but the alternative was in no sense that she should eat out her heart and his income during long years at home; and if he were too poor to provide her with a sufficient dower, he could and often did apprentice her to a trade. The number of industries which were carried on by women in the middle ages shows that for the burgess and lower classes there were other outlets besides marriage; and then, as now, domestic service provided for many. But the case of the well-born lady was different. The knight or the county gentleman could not apprentice his superfluous daughters to a pursemaker or a weaver in the town; not from them were drawn the regrateresses in the market place and the harvest gatherers in the field; nor was it theirs to make the parti-coloured bed and shake the coverlet, worked with grapes and unicorns, in some rich vintner’s house. There remained for him, if he did not wish or could not afford to keep them at home and for them, if they desired some scope for their young energies, only marriage or else a convent, where they might go with a smaller dower than a husband of their own rank would demand.

To say that the convents were the refuge of the gently born is not to say that there was no admixture of classes within them. The term gentleman was becoming more comprehensive in the later middle ages. It included the upper class proper, the families of noble birth; and it included also the country gentry. The convents were probably at first recruited almost entirely from these two ranks of society, and a study of any collection of medieval wills shows how large a proportion of such families took advantage of this opening for women. A phrase will sometimes occur which shows that it was regarded as the natural and obvious alternative to marriage. Sir John Daubriggecourt in 1415 left his daughter Margery 40 marks, “if she be wedded to a worldly husband, and if she be caused to receive the sacred veil of the order of holy nuns” ten pounds and twenty shillings rent[12], and Sir John le Blund in 1312 bequeathed an annuity to his daughter Ann, “till she marry or enter a religious house”[13]. The anxiety of the upper classes to secure a place for their children in nunneries sometimes even led to overcrowding. At Carrow the Prioress was forced to complain that “certain lords of England whom she was unable to resist because of their power” forced their daughters upon the priory as nuns, and in 1273 a papal bull forbade the reception of more inmates than the revenues would support[14]. Archbishop William Wickwane addressed a similar mandate to two Yorkshire houses, Wilberfoss and Nunkeeling, which public rumour had informed him to be overburdened with nuns and with secular boarders “at the instance of nobles”[15]; and in 1327 Bishop Stratford wrote to Romsey Abbey that the house was notoriously burdened with ladies beyond the established number, and that he had heard that the nuns were being forced to receive more “damoyseles” as novices, which he forbade without special licence[16]. A very strong personal connection must in time have been established between a nunnery and certain families from which, in each generation, it received a daughter or a niece and her dower. Such was the connection between Shouldham and the Beauchamps[17] and between Nunmonkton and the Fairfaxes[18]. A close link bound each nunnery to the family of its patron. Thus we find a Clinton at Wroxall and a Darcy at Heynings; nor is it unlikely that these noble ladies sometimes expected privileges and homage more than the strict equality of convent life would allow, if it be permissible to generalise from the behaviour of Isabel Clinton[19] and from the fact that Margaret Darcy received a rather severe penance from Bishop Gynewell in 1351 and a special warning against going beyond the claustral precincts or speaking to strangers[20], while in 1393 there occurs the significant injunction by Bishop Bokyngham that no sister was to have a room to herself except Dame Margaret Darcy (doubtless the same woman now grown elderly and ailing) “on account of the nobility of her race”; an old lady of firm will and (despite his careful mention of extra pittances and of tolerating for a while) a somewhat sycophantic prelate[21].

It is worthy of notice that Chaucer has drawn an unmistakable “lady” in his typical prioress. There is her delicate behaviour at meals:

At mete wel ytaught was she with-alle;
She leet no morsel from her lippes falle,
Ne wette hir fingres in hir sauce depe.
Wel coude she carie a morsel, and wel kepe,
That no drope ne fille upon hir brest.
In curteisye was set ful muche hir lest.
Hir over lippe wyped she so clene,
That in hir coppe was no ferthing sene
Of grece, whan she drunken hadde hir draughte.
Ful semely after hir mete she raughte[22].

This was the ne plus ultra of feudal table manners; Chaucer might have been writing one of those books of deportment for the guidance of aristocratic young women, which were so numerous in France. So the Clef d’Amors counsels ladies who would win them lovers[23], and even so Robert de Blois depicts the perfect diner. Robert de Blois’ ideal, the chivalrous, frivolous, sensuous ideal of “courtesy,” which underlay the whole aristocratic conception of life and the attainment of which was the criterion of polite society, is the ideal of the Prioress also:

“Gardez vous, Dames, bien acertes,”
“Qu’au mengier soiez bien apertes;
C’est une chose c’on moult prise
Que là soit dame bien aprise.
Tel chose torne à vilonie
Que toutes genz ne sevent mie;
Se puet cil tost avoir mespris
Qui n’est cortoisement apris[24].”

Later he warns against the greedy selection of the finest and largest titbit for oneself, on the ground that “n’est pas cortoisie.” The same consideration preoccupies Madame Eglentyne at her supper: “in curteisye was set ful muche hir lest.” Good manners, elegant deportment, the polish of the court, all that we mean by nurture, these are her aim:

And sikerly she was of greet disport,
And ful plesaunt, and amiable of port,
And peyned her to countrefete chere
Of court, and been estatlich of manere,
And to be holden digne of reverence.

Her pets are the pets of ladies in metrical romances and in illuminated borders; “smale houndes,” delicately fed with “rosted flesh, or milk and wastel-bread.” Her very beauty

(Hir nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas,
Hir mouth ful smal, and ther-to soft and reed;
But sikerly she hadde a fair forheed;
It was almost a spanne brood, I trowe;
For, hardily, she was nat undergrowe)

conforms to the courtly standard. Only the mention of her chanting of divine service (through the tretys nose) differentiates her from any other well-born lady of the day; and if Chaucer had not told us whom he was describing, we might never have known that she was a nun. It was in these ideals and traditions that most of the inmates of English convents were born and bred.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, another class rose into prominence and, perhaps because it was originally drawn to a great extent from the younger sons of the country gentry, found amalgamation with the gentry easy. The development of trade and the new openings for the employment of capital had brought about the rise of the English merchant class. Hitherto foreigners had financed the English crown, but during the first four years of the Hundred Years’ War it became clear that English merchants were now rich and powerful enough to take their place; and the triumph of the native was complete when, in 1345, Edward III repudiated his debts to the Italian merchants and the Bardi and Peruzzi failed. Henceforth the English merchants were supreme; on the one hand their trading ventures enriched them; on the other they made vast sums out of farming the customs and the war subsidies in return for loans of ready money, and out of all sorts of government contracts. The successful campaigns of Crécy and Poitiers were entirely financed by these English capitalists. Not only trade but industry swelled the ranks of the nouveaux riches and the clothiers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries grew rich and prospered. Evidences of the wealth and importance of this middle class are to be found on all sides. The taxation of movables, which from 1334 became an important and in time the main source of national revenue, indicates the discovery on the part of the government that the wealth of the nation no longer lay in land, but in trade. The frequent sumptuary acts, the luxury of daily life, bear witness to the wealth of the nouveaux riches; and so also do their philanthropic enterprises, the beautiful churches which they built, the bridges which they repaired, the gifts which they gave to religious and to civic corporations. And it was in the fourteenth century that there began that steady fusion between the country gentry and the rich burgesses, which was accomplished before the end of the middle ages and which resulted in the formation of a solid and powerful middle class. The political amalgamation of the two classes in the lower house of Parliament corresponded to a social amalgamation in the world outside. The country knights and squires saw in business a career for their younger sons; they saw in marriage with the daughters of the mercantile class a way to mend their fortunes; the city merchants, on the other hand, saw in such alliances a road to the attainment of that social prestige which went with land and blood, and were not loath to pay the price. “Merchants or new gentlemen I deem will proffer large,” wrote Edmund Paston, concerning the marriage of one of his family. “Well I wot if ye depart to London ye shall have proffers large”[25].

This social amalgamation between the country gentry and the “new gentlemen,” who had made their money in trade, was naturally reflected in the nunneries. The wills of London burgesses, which were enrolled in the Court of Husting, show that the daughters of these well-to-do citizens were in the habit of taking the veil. There is even more than one trace of the aristocratic view of religion as the sole alternative to marriage. Langland, enumerating the good deeds which will win pardon for the merchant, bids him “marie maydens or maken hem nonnes”[26]. At Ludlow the gild of Palmers provided that:

If any good girl of the gild of marriageable age, cannot have the means found by her father, either to go into a religious house or to marry, whichever she wishes to do, friendly and right help shall be given her out of our common chest, towards enabling her to do whichever of the two she wishes[27].

Similarly at Berwick-on-Tweed the gild “ordained by the pleasure of the burgesses” had a provision entitled, “Of the bringing up of daughters of the gild,” which ran: “If any brother die leaving a daughter true and worthy and of good repute, but undowered, the gild shall find her a dower, either on marriage or on going into a religious house”[28]. So also John Syward, “stockfisshmongere” of London, whose will was proved at the Court of Husting in 1349, left, “To Dionisia his daughter forty pounds for her advancement, so that she either marry therewith or become a religious at her election, within one year after his decease”[29]; and William Wyght, of the same trade, bequeathed “to each of his daughters Agnes, Margaret, Beatrix and Alice fifty pounds sterling for their marriage or for entering a religious house” (1393)[30]; while William Marowe in 1504 bequeathed to “Elizabeth and Katherine his daughters forty pounds each, to be paid at their marriage or profession”[31]. Sometimes, however, the sound burgess sense prevailed, as when Walter Constantyn endowed his wife with “the residue of his goods, so that she assist Amicia, his niece, ... towards her marriage or to some trade befitting her position”[32].

The mixture of classes must have been more frequent in convents which were situate in or near a large town, while the country gentry had those lying in rural districts more or less to themselves. The nunnery of Carrow, for instance, was a favourite resort for girls of noble and of gentle birth, but it was also recruited from the daughters of prosperous Norwich citizens; among nuns with well-known county names there were also ladies such as Isabel Barbour, daughter of Thomas Welan, barber, and Joan his wife, Margery Folcard, daughter of John Folcard, alderman of Norwich, and Catherine Segryme, daughter of Ralph Segryme, another alderman; the latter attained the position of prioress at the end of the fifteenth century[33]. These citizens, wealthy and powerful men in days when Norwich was one of the most important towns in England, probably met on equal terms with the country gentlemen of Norfolk, and both sent their daughters with handsome dowries to Carrow. The nunneries of London and of the surrounding district contained a similar mixture of classes, ranging from some of the noblest ladies in the land to the daughters of city magnates, men enriched by honourable trade or by the less honourable capitalistic ventures of the king’s merchants. The famous house of Minoresses without Aldgate illustrates the situation very clearly. It was always a special favourite of royalty; and the storm bird, Isabella, mother of Edward III, is by some supposed to have died in the order. She was certainly its constant benefactress[34] as were Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester and his wife, whose daughter Isabel was placed in the nunnery while only a child and eventually became its abbess[35]. Katherine, widow of John de Ingham, and Eleanor Lady Scrope were other aristocratic women who took the veil at the Minories[36]. But this noble connection did not prevent the house from containing Alice, sister of Richard Hale, fishmonger[37], Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Padyngton, fishmonger[38], Marion, daughter of John Charteseye, baker[39], and Frideswida, daughter of John Reynewell, alderman of the City of London[40], girls drawn from the élite of the burgess class. An investigation of the wills enrolled in the Court of Husting shows the relative popularity of different convents among the citizens of London. Between the years 1258 and the Dissolution, 52 wills contain references to one or more nuns related to the testators[41]. From these it appears that the most popular house was Clerkenwell in Middlesex, which is mentioned in nine wills[42]. Barking in Essex comes next with eight references[43], and St Helen’s Bishopsgate with seven[44]; the house of Minoresses without Aldgate is five times mentioned[45], Haliwell[46] in London and Stratford-atte-Bowe[47] outside, having five and four references respectively, Kilburn in Middlesex three[48], Sopwell in Hertfordshire two[49], Malling[50] and Sheppey[51] in Kent two each. Other convents are mentioned once only and in some cases a testator leaves legacies to nuns by name, without mentioning where they are professed. All these houses were in the diocese of London and either in or near the capital itself; they lay in the counties of Middlesex, Kent, Essex, Hertford and Bedford[52]. It was but rarely that city girls went as far afield as Denny in Cambridgeshire, where the famous fishmonger and mayor of London, John Philpott, had a daughter Thomasina.

Thus the nobles, the gentry and the superior rank of burgess—the upper and the upper-middle classes—sent their daughters to nunneries. But nuns were drawn from no lower class; poor girls of the lowest rank—whether the daughters of artisans or of country labourers—seem never to have taken the veil. A certain degree of education was demanded in a nun before her admission and the poor man’s daughter would have neither the money, the opportunity, nor the leisure to acquire it. The manorial fine paid by a villein when he wished to put his son to school and make a religious of him, had no counterpart in the case of girls[53]; the taking of the veil by a villein’s daughter was apparently not contemplated. The chief barrier which shut out the poor from the nunneries was doubtless the dower which, in spite of the strict prohibition of the rule, was certainly required from a novice in almost every convent. The lay sisters of those nunneries which had lay sisters attached were probably drawn mainly from the lower class[54], but it must have been in the highest degree exceptional for a poor or low-born girl to become a nun.

Medieval wills (our most trusty source of information for the personnel of the nunneries) make it possible to gauge the extent to which the upper and middle classes used the nunneries as receptacles for superfluous daughters. In these wills, in which the medieval paterfamilias laboriously catalogues his offspring and divides his wealth between them, it is easy to guess at the embarrassments of a father too well-blessed with female progeny. What was poor Simon the Chamberlain of the diocese of Worcester to do, with six strapping girls upon his hands and sons Robert and Henry to provide for too? Fortunately he had a generous patron in Sir Nicholas de Mitton and it was perhaps Sir Nicholas who provided the dowers, when two of them were packed off to Nuneaton; let us hope that Christiana, Cecilia, Matilda and Joan married themselves out of the legacies which he left them in his will, when he died in 1290[55]. William de Percehay, lord of Ryton, who made his will in 1344, had to provide for five sons and one is therefore not surprised to find that two of his three daughters were nuns[56]. It is the same with the rich citizens of London and elsewhere; Sir Richard de la Pole, of a great Hull merchant house (soon to be ennobled), mentions in his will two sons and two daughters, one of whom was a nun at Barking while the other received a legacy towards her marriage[57]; Hugh de Waltham, town clerk, mentions three daughters, one at St Helen’s[58]; John de Croydon, fishmonger, leaves bequests to one son and four daughters, one at Clerkenwell[59]; William de Chayham kept Lucy, Agnes and Johanna with him, but made Juliana a nun[60]. The will of Joan Lady Clinton illustrates the proportion in which a large family of girls might be divided between the convent and the world; in 1457 she left certain sums of money to Margaret, Isabel and Cecily Francyes, on condition that they should pay four pounds annually to their sisters Joan and Elizabeth, nuns[61]. It was not infrequent for several members of a family to enter the same convent, as the lists of inmates given in visitation records, or in the reports of Henry VIII’s commissioners, as well as the evidence of the wills, bear witness[62]. The case of Shouldham, already quoted, shows that different generations of a family might be represented at the same time in a convent[63], but it was perhaps not usual for so many sisters to become nuns as in the Fairfax family; in 1393 their brother’s will introduces us to Mary and Alice, nuns of Sempringham, and Margaret and Eleanor, respectively prioress and nun of Nunmonkton[64]. Margaret (of whom more anon) took convent life easily; it is to be feared that she had all too little vocation for it. Sometimes these family parties in a nunnery led to quarrels; the sisters foregathered in cliques, or else they continued in the cloister the domestic arguments of the hearth; there was an amusing case of the kind at Swine in 1268[65], and some years later (in 1318) an Archbishop of York had to forbid the admission of more than two or three nuns of one family to Nunappleton, without special licence, for fear of discord[66].

Probably the real factor in determining the social class from which the convents were recruited, was not one of rank, but one of money. The practice of demanding dowries from those who wished to become nuns was strictly forbidden by the monastic rule and by canon law[67]. To spiritual minds any taint of commerce was repugnant; Christ asked no dowry with his bride. The didactic and mystical writers of the period often draw a contrast between the earthly and the heavenly groom in this matter. The author of Hali Meidenhad in the thirteenth century, urging the convent life upon his spiritual daughter, sets against his picture of Christ’s virgin-brides that of the well-born girl, married with disparagement through lack of dower:

What thinkest thou of the poor, that are indifferently dowered and ill-provided for, as almost all gentlewomen now are in the world, that have not wherewith to buy themselves a bridegroom of their own rank and give themselves into servitude to a man of low esteem, with all that they have? Wellaway! Jesu! what unworthy chaffer[68].

Thomas of Hales’ mystical poem A Luue Ron, in the same century, also lays stress upon this point, half in ecstatic praise of the celibate ideal, half as a material inducement[69], and the same idea is repeated at the end of the next century in Clene Maydenhod:

He asketh with the nouther lond ne leode,
Gold ne selver ne precious stone.
To such thinges hath he no neode,
Al that is good is with hym one,
Gif thou with him thi lyf wolt lede
And graunte to ben his owne lemman[70].

In ecclesiastical language the same sentiment is expressed by the injunction of Archbishop Greenfield of York, who forbade the nuns of Arden to receive any one as a nun by compact, since that involved guilt of simony, but only to receive her “from promptings of love”[71].

This sentiment was, however, set aside in practice from early times; and a glance at any conventual register, such as the famous Register of Godstow Abbey, shows something like a regular system of dowries, dating certainly from the twelfth century. The Godstow Register contains 19 deeds, ranging between 1139 and 1278, by which grants are made to the nunnery on the entrance of a relative of the grantor, the usual phrase being that such and such a man gave such and such rent-charges, pasture-rights, lands or messuages, “with” his mother or sister or daughter “to be a nun”[72]. One very curious deed dated 1259, shows that the reception of a girl at Godstow was definitely a pecuniary matter. Ralph and Agnes Chondut sold to the nunnery a piece of land called Anfric,

for thys quite claime and reles, the seyd abbas and holy mynchons of Godstowe gafe to the seyde raph and Agnes hys wyfe liiiº marke, and made Katherine the sustur of the seyd Agnes (wyfe of the seyd raph) Mynchon in the monasteri of Godstowe, with the costys of the hows, ... and the seyd holy mynchons of Godstowe shold pay to the seyd raph and Agnes hys wyfe xxv marke of the forseyd liii marke in that day in whyche the foreseyd Katerine should be delyuerd to hem to be norysshed and to be mad mynchon in the same place and in the whyche the seyd penyes shold be payd,

and a second instalment at a place to be agreed upon when confirmation of the grant is obtained[73]. That is to say the price of the land was £35. 6s. 8d. together with the cost of receiving Katherine, which was equivalent to a further sum of money, unfortunately not specified.

Any collection of wills provides ample evidence of this dowry system. Not only do they frequently contain legacies for the support of some particular nun during the term of her life, but bequests also occur for the specific purpose of paying for the admission of a girl to a nunnery, in exactly the same way as other girls are provided with dowries for their marriage. The Countess of Warwick, in 1439, left a will directing “that Iane Newmarch have cc mark in gold, And I to bere all Costes as for her bryngynge yn-to seynt Katrens, or where-ever she woll be elles”[74]. Even the clergy, who should have been the last to recognise a system so flagrantly contrary to canon law, followed the general custom; William Peke, rector of Scrivelsby, left one Isabella ten marks to make her a nun in the Gilbertine house of Catley[75] and Robert de Playce, rector of the church of Brompton, made the following bequest:

Item I bequeath to the daughter of John de Playce my brother 100s. in silver, for an aid towards making her a nun in one of the houses of Wickham, Yedingham or Muncton, if her friends are willing to give her sufficient aid to accomplish this, but if, through lack of assistance from friends, she be not made a nun,

she was to have none of this bequest (1345)[76]. Sometimes, as has already been noted, the money is left alternatively to marry the girl or to make her a nun, which brings out very clearly the dower-like nature of such bequests[77]. The accounts of great folk often tell the same tale. When Elizabeth Chaucy—probably a relative of the poet Chaucer—became a nun at Barking Abbey in 1381, John of Gaunt paid £51. 8s. 2d. in expenses and gifts on the occasion of her admission[78], and the privy purse expenses of Elizabeth of York contain the item, “Delivered to thabbesse of Elnestowe by thands of John Duffyn for the costes and charges of litle Anne Loveday at the making of her nonne there £6. 13s. 4d.”[79].

It is possible to determine the exact nature of these costs and charges from an account of the expenses of the executors of Elizabeth Sewardby, who died in 1468. This lady, the widow of William Sewardby of Sewardby, had left a legacy of £6. 13s. 4d. to her namesake, little Elizabeth Sewardby, to be given her if she should become a nun. The executors record certain payments made to the Prioress of Nunmonkton during the period when Elizabeth was a boarder there, before taking the vows, and then follows a list of “expenses made for and concerning Elizabeth Sewardby when she was made a nun at Monkton”:

They say that they paid and gave to the Prioress and Convent of Monkton, for a certain fee which the said Prioress and Convent claim by custom to have and are wont to have from each nun at her entrance £3. And in money paid for the habit of the said Elizabeth Sewardby and for other attire of her body and for a fitting bed, £3. 13s. 6½d. And in expenditure made in connection with the aforesaid Prioress and Convent and with the friends of the aforesaid Elizabeth coming together on the Sunday next after the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary A.D. 1460, £3. 11s. 4d. In a gratuity given to brother John Hamilton, preaching a sermon at the aforesaid Monkton on the aforesaid Sunday, 2s. And in a certain remuneration given to Thomas Clerk of York for his wise counsel concerning the recovery of the debts due to the said dame Elizabeth Sewardby, deceased, 12d. Total £10. 7s. 10½d.[80]

It will be noticed that Elizabeth took with her not only a lump sum of money, but also clothes and a bed, the cost of which more than doubled the dowry. Canon law specifically allowed the provision of a habit by friends, when the poverty of a house rendered this necessary; and it is clear from other sources that it was not unusual for a novice to be provided also with furniture. The inventory of the goods belonging to the priory of Minster in Sheppey, at the Dissolution, contains, under the heading of “the greate Chamber in the Dorter,” a note of

stuff in the same chamber belonging to Dame Agnes Davye, which she browghte with her; a square sparver of payntyd clothe and iiij peces hangyng of the same, iij payre of shets, a cownterpoynt of corse verder and i square cofer of ashe, a cabord of waynscott carved, ij awndyrons, a payre of tonges and a fyer panne.

And under “Dame Agnes Browne’s Chamber” is the entry:

Stuff given her by her frends:—A fetherbed, a bolster, ij pyllowys, a payre of blankatts, ij corse coverleds, iiij pare of shets good and badde, an olde tester and selar of paynted clothes and ij peces of hangyng to the same; a square cofer carvyd, with ij bad clothes upon the cofer, and in the wyndow a lytill cobard of waynscott carvyd and ij lytill chestes; a small goblet with a cover of sylver parcel gylt, a lytill maser with a bryme of sylver and gylt, a lytyll pece of sylver and a spone of sylver, ij lytyll latyn candellstyks, a fire panne and a pare of tonges, ij small aundyrons, iiij pewter dysshes, a porrenger, a pewter bason, ij skyllots, a lytill brasse pot, a cawdyron and a drynkyng pot of pewter.

She had apparently been sent into the house with a complete equipment in furniture and implements[81].

Throughout the middle ages a struggle went on between the Church, which forbade the exaction of dowries, and the convents which persisted in demanding them, sometimes in so flagrant a manner as to incur the charge of simony. The earliest prohibition of dowries in English canon law occurred at the Council of Westminster in 1175[82] and was repeated at the Council of London in 1200[83] and at the Council of Oxford in 1222[84]; this last had been anticipated by a decree of the fourth Lateran Council. The history of the struggle to apply it is to be gathered from visitational records. Archbishop Walter Giffard, visiting Swine in 1268, finds that Alicia Brun and Alicia de Adeburn were simoniacally veiled[85]; Bishop Norbury has to rebuke the Prioress of Chester for the simoniacal receipt of bribes to admit nuns[86]; Bishop Ralph of Shrewsbury has heard that the Prioress of Cannington received four women as sisters of that house for £20 each, falling into the pravity of simony[87]; William of Wykeham writes to the nuns of Romsey in 1387 that

in our said visitations it was discovered and declared that, on account of the reception of certain persons as nuns of your said monastery, several sums of money were received by the Abbess and Convent by way of covenant, reward and compact, not without stain of the pravity of simony and, if it were so, to the peril of your souls,

and he proceeds to forbid the exaction of a dowry “on pretext of any custom (consuetudinis) whatsoever, which is rather to be esteemed a corruption (corruptela),” a significant phrase, which shows that the practice was well established[88]. Bishop Buckingham of Lincoln warns the nuns of Heynings against “the reception or extortion of money or of anything else by compact for the reception of anyone into religion” (1392)[89]; and Bishop Flemyng enjoins at Elstow in 1422

that hereafter fit persons be received as nuns; for whose reception or entrance let no money or aught else be demanded; but without any simoniacal bargain and covenant of any sum of money or other thing whatsoever, which were accustomed to be made by the crime of simony, let them henceforth be admitted to your religion purely, simply and for nothing[90].

But the most detailed information as to the prevalence of the dowry-system is contained in the records of Bishop Alnwick’s visitations of religious houses in the diocese of Lincoln in 1440[91]. When the Bishop came to Heynings (which had already been in trouble under Bokyngham) one of the nuns, Dame Agnes Sutton, gave evidence to the effect that

her friends came to the Prioress and covenanted that she should be received as a nun for twelve marks and the said money was paid down before she was admitted, and she says that no one is admitted before the sum agreed upon for her reception is paid.

She added that nothing was exacted save what was a free offering, but from her previous words it is obvious that no nuns were received at Heynings without a dowry. Similarly at Langley Dame Cecily Folgeham said that her friends gave ten marks to the house “when she was tonsured, but not by covenant.” The most interesting case of all was that of Nuncoton. The Subprioress, Dame Ellen Frost, said “that it was the custom in time past to take twenty pounds or less for the admission of nuns, otherwise they would not be received.” The Bishop proceeded to examine other members of the house; Dame Maud Saltmershe confirmed what the Subprioress had said about the price for the reception of nuns; two other ladies, who had been in religion for fifteen and eight years respectively, deposed to having paid twenty pounds on their entrance and Dame Alice Skotte said that she did not know how much she had paid, but that she thought it was twenty pounds. Clearly there was a fixed entrance fee to this nunnery and it was impossible to become a nun without it; all pretence of free-will offerings had been dropped. When it is considered that this entrance fee was twenty pounds (i.e. about £200 of modern money) it is easy to see why poor girls belonging to the lower orders never found their way into convents; such a luxury was far beyond their means.

In each of these cases and at two other houses (St Michael’s Stamford, and Legbourne) Alnwick entered a stern prohibition, on pain of excommunication, against the reception of anything except free gifts from the friends of a novice. His injunction to Heynings may be quoted as typical of those made by medieval bishops on such occasions:

For as mykelle as we founde that many has been receyvede here afore into nunne and sustre in your sayde pryory by covenaunt and paccyons made be fore thair receyvyng of certeyn moneys to be payed to the howse, the whiche is dampnede by alle lawe, we charge yowe under the payn of the sentence of cursyng obove wrytene that fro hense forthe ye receyve none persons in to nunne ne sustre in your sayde pryore by no suche couenant, ne pactes or bargaines made before. Whan thai are receyvede and professede, if thaire frendes of thaire almesse wylle any gyfe to the place, we suffre wele, commende and conferme hit to be receyvede[92].

But the efforts at reform made by Alnwick and other visitors were never very successful; Nuncoton evidently continued to demand its entrance fee, for in 1531 the practice was once more forbidden by Bishop Longland[93]. Moreover it is easy to see that the distinction between the reception of what was willingly offered by friends (which was specifically permitted by the rule of St Benedict and by synods and visitors throughout the middle ages), and what was given by agreement as payment for the entry of a novice (which was always forbidden) might become a distinction without a difference, as it clearly was in the case of Heynings quoted above. The Prioress of Gokewell, who declared to Alnwick that “they take nothing for the admission of nuns, save that which the friends of her who is to be created offer of their free-will and not by agreement”[94], may have acted in reality not very differently from her erring sisters of Heynings, Nuncoton and Langley. The temptation was in fact too great. The clause of the Oxford decree, which permitted poor houses if necessary to receive a sum sufficient for the vesture of a new member and no more, broadened the way already opened by the permission of free-will offerings. The concluding words of Bishop Flemyng’s prohibition of dowries at Elstow in 1422 show that this permission had been abused; “if they must be clothed at their own or their friends’ expense, let nothing at all be in any sort exacted or required, beyond their garments or the just price of their garments”[95]. Throughout the later middle ages an increase in the cost of living went side by side with a decrease in the monastic ideal of poverty, showing itself on the one hand in the constant breach of the rule against private property, on the other in the exaction of money with novices, until the dowry system (although never during the middle ages recognised by law) became in practice a matter of course.

Lest it should seem that everyone who had enough money could become a nun, it must, however, be added that the bishops took some pains that the persons who were received as novices should be suitable and pleasing to their sisters. They seldom exercised their right of nomination without some assurance that their nominee was of honest life and station, “Mulierem honestam, ut credimus”[96], “bonae indolis, ut credimus, juvenculam”[97], “jeovene damoisele et de bone condicion, come nous sumez enformez”[98], “competeter ad hujusmodi officii debitum litterate”[99]. They were always ready to hear complaints if unsuitable persons had been admitted by the prioress; and they sometimes made special injunctions upon the matter. Bokyngham at Heynings in 1392 ordered “that they receive no one to the habit, nor even to profession, unless she be first found by diligent inquisition and approbation to be useful, teachable, capable, of legitimate age, discreet and honest”[100]. At Elstow Bishop Gray made a very comprehensive injunction:

Furthermore we enjoin and charge you the Abbess ... that henceforward you admit no one to be a nun of the said monastery, unless with the express consent of the greater and sounder part of the same convent; and no one in that case, unless she be taught in song and reading and the other things requisite herein, or probably may be easily instructed within short time, and be such that she shall be able to bear the burdens of the quire (with) the rest that pertain to religion[101].

Nevertheless, for all their precautions, some strange inmates found their way into the medieval nunneries.

The novice who entered a nunnery, to live there as a nun for the rest of her natural life, might do so for very various reasons. For those who entered young and of their own will, religion was either a profession or a vocation. They might take the veil because it offered an honourable career for superfluous girls, who were unwilling or unable to marry; or they might take it in a real spirit of devotion, with a real call to the religious life. For other girls the nunnery might be a prison, into which they were thrust, unwilling but often afraid to resist, by elders who wished to be rid of them; and many nunneries contained also another class of inmates, older women, often widows, who had retired thither to end their days in peace. A career, a vocation, a prison, a refuge; to its different inmates the medieval nunnery was all these things.

The nunnery as a career and as a vocation does not need separate treatment. It has already been shown that in large families it was a very usual custom to make one or more of the daughters nuns. Indeed the youth of many of the girls who took the veil is in itself proof that anything like a vocation, or even a free choice, was seldom possible and was hardly anticipated, even in theory. The age of profession was sixteen, but much younger children were received as novices and prepared for the veil; they could withdraw if they found the life distasteful, but as a rule, being brought up from early childhood for this career, they entered upon it as a matter of course; moreover the Church was rather apt to regard the withdrawal of novices as apostasy. Sir Guy de Beauchamp in his will (dated 1359) describes his daughter Katherine as a nun of Shouldham and Dugdale notes that Katherine, aged seven years, and Elizabeth, aged about one year, were found to be daughters and heirs of the said Guy, who died in the following year[102]. It might be supposed that this child of seven was being brought up as a lay boarder in the convent, but legacies left to Katherine “a nun at Shouldham” by her grandfather and by her uncle, in 1369 and in 1400 respectively, show that she had been thus vowed in infancy to a religious life[103]. One of the daughters of Thomas of Woodstock Duke of Gloucester, was “in infancy placed in the monastery (of the Minoresses without Aldgate) and clad in the monastic habit” and in 1401 the Pope gave her permission to leave it if she wished, but she remained and became its abbess[104]. Bishops’ registers constantly give evidence of the presence of mere children in nunneries. When Alnwick visited Ankerwyke in 1441, three of the younger nuns complained that they lacked a teacher (informatrix) to teach them “reading, song, or religious observance”; and at the end of the visitation the Bishop noted that he had examined all the nuns save three, whom he had omitted “on account of the heedlessness of their age and the simplicity of their discretion, since the eldest of them is not older than thirteen years”[105]. At Studley in 1445 he found a girl who had been in religion for two years and was then thirteen; she complained that one of the maid-servants had slapped a fellow nun (doubtless also a child) in church![106] At Littlemore there was a certain Agnes Marcham, who had entered at the age of thirteen, and had remained there unprofessed for thirteen years; she now refused to take the full vows[107]. Some of the nuns at Romsey in 1534 were very young, two being fourteen and one fifteen[108]. Indeed the reception of girls at a tender age was rather encouraged than otherwise by the Church. Archbishop Greenfield gave a licence to the Prioress of Hampole to receive Elena, daughter of the late Reyner Sperri, citizen of York, who was eight years old, and (he added solemnly) “of good conversation and life”[109], and Archbishop John le Romeyn described Margaret de la Batayle, whom he sent to Sinningthwaite, as “juvencula”[110]. The great Peckham went out of his way to make a specific defence of the practice in 1282, when the Prioress and Convent of Stratford sought to excuse themselves from veiling a little girl called Isabel Bret, by reason of her youth, “since on account of this minority she is the more able and capable to learn and receive those things which concern the discipline of your order”[111].

It is impossible to make the generalisation that even children professed at such an early age could have had no consciousness of a vocation for the religious life; the history of some of the women saints of the middle ages would be enough to disprove this[112]. The German monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, who is to be equalled as a gossip only by the less pious Salimbene, has some delightful stories of youthful enthusiasts in the Dialogus Miraculorum, which he wrote between 1220 and 1235 for the instruction of the novices in his own Cistercian house. One child, destined for a worldly match, protests daily that she will wed Christ only; and, when forced to wear rich garments, asserts “even if you turn me to gold you cannot make me change my mind,” until her parents, worn out by her prayers, allow her to enter a nunnery where, although very young, she is soon made governess of the novices. Her sister, given to an earthly husband while yet a child, is widowed and, “ipsa adhuc adolescentula” enters the same house. Another girl, fired by their example, escapes to a nunnery in man’s clothes; her sister, trying to follow, is caught by her parents and married, “but I hope,” says the appreciative Caesarius, “that God may not leave unrewarded so fervent a desire to enter religion”[113]. But the most charming tale of all is that of the conversion of Helswindis, Abbess of Burtscheid[114].

She, although the daughter of a powerful and wealthy man ... burned so from her earliest childhood with zeal to be converted (i.e. to become a nun), that she used often to say to her mother: “Mother, make me a nun.” Now she was accustomed with her mother to ascend Mount St. Saviour, whereon stood at that time the convent of the sisters of Burtscheid. One day she climbed secretly in through the kitchen window, went up to the dorter and putting on the habit of one of the maidens, entered the choir with the others. When the Abbess told this to her mother, who wanted to go, she, thinking that it was a joke, replied “Call the child; we must go.” Then the child came from within to the window, saying: “I am a nun; I will not go with thee.” But the mother, fearing her husband, replied: “Only come with me now, and I will beg thy father to make thee a nun.” And so she went forth. It happened that the mother (who had held her peace) once more went up the mountain, leaving her daughter asleep. And when the latter rose and sought her mother in vain in the church, she suspected her to be at the convent, followed her alone, and, getting in by the same window, once more put on the habit. When her mother besought her to come away she replied: “Thou shalt not deceive me again,” repeating the promise that had been made to her. Then indeed her mother went home in great fear, and her father came up full of rage, together with her brothers, broke open the doors and carried off his screaming daughter, whom he committed to the care of relatives, that they might dissuade her. But she, being (as I believe) not yet nine years of age, answered them so wisely that they marvelled. What more? The Bishop of Liège having excommunicated her father and those by whom she had been taken away, she was restored to the place and after a few years was elected Abbess there[115].

After these examples of infant zeal it is impossible to assert that even the extreme youth of many novices made a real vocation for religious life impossible. But there is no doubt that such a vocation was less probable, than in cases when a girl of more mature years entered a convent. And it is also certain that the tendency to regard monasticism as the natural career for superfluous girls and as the natural alternative to marriage, was capable of grave abuse. When medieval convents are compared unfavourably with those of the present day, and when the increasing laxity with which the rule was kept in the later middle ages is condemned, it has always to be remembered that the majority of girls in those days (unlike those of today) entered the nunneries as a career, without any particular spiritual qualification, because there was nothing else for them to do. Even in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries monasticism produced saintly women and great mystics (especially in Germany); but it is remarkable that in England, although there must have been many good abbesses like Euphemia of Wherwell, there are no outstanding names. Monasticism was pre-eminently a respectable career.

It has been said that this tendency to regard monasticism as a career was capable of abuse; and there were not wanting men to abuse it and to use the nunnery as a “dumping ground” for unwanted and often unwilling girls, whom it was desirable to put out of the world, by a means as sure as death itself and without the risk attaching to murder. Kings themselves were wont thus to immure the wives and daughters of defeated rebels. Wencilian (Gwenllian) daughter of Llewelyn was sent to Sempringham as a child, after her father’s death in 1283, and died a nun there in 1337, and the two daughters of Hugh Despenser the elder were forced to take the veil at the same convent after their father’s fall[116]. The nunnery must often have served the purpose of lesser men, desirous of shaking off an encumbrance. The guilty wife of Sir Thomas Tuddenham, unhappily married for eight years and ruined by an intrigue with her father’s servant, was sent to Crabhouse, where she lived for some forty years; and none thought kindly of her save—strangely enough—her husband’s sister[117]. Sir Peter de Montfort, dying in 1367, left ten shillings to the lady Lora Astley, a nun at Pinley, called by Dugdale “his old concubine”[118]. Illegitimate children too were sometimes sent to convents. One remembers Langland’s nunnery, where

Dame Iohanne was a bastard,
And dame Clarice a kniȝtes douȝter · ac a kokewolde was hire syre.

Nor were the clergy loath to embrace this opportunity of removing the fruit of a lapse from grace. Hugh de Tunstede, rector of Catton, left ten shillings and a bed to his daughter Joan, a nun of Wilberfoss[119], and at the time of the Dissolution there was a child of Wolsey himself at Shaftesbury[120]. It is significant that it was sometimes necessary to procure the papal dispensation of an abbess- or prioress-elect for illegitimacy, before she could hold office. The dispensation in 1472 of Joan Ward, a nun of Esholt, who afterwards became prioress, is interesting, for the Wards were patrons of the house and her presence illustrates one of the uses to which such patronage could be put[121]. The diocese of York affords other instances (they were common enough in the case of priests) of dispensation “super defectu natalium”; in 1474 one was granted to Cecily Conyers, a nun at Ellerton, “born of a married man and a single woman”[122] and in 1432 Alice Etton received one four days before her confirmation as Prioress of Sinningthwaite[123]. At St Mary’s Neasham in 1437, the Bishop of Durham appointed Agnes Tudowe prioress and issued a mandate for her dispensation for illegitimacy and her installation on the same day[124].

Less defensible from the point of view of the house was the practice, which certainly existed, of placing in nunneries girls in some way deformed, or suffering from an incurable defect.

Now earth to earth in convent walls,
To earth in churchyard sod.
I was not good enough for man,
And so am given to God.

It will be remembered that the practice roused the disapprobation of Gargantua, whose abbey of Thélème contained only beautiful and amiable persons.

Item, parcequ’en icelluy temps on ne mettoit en religion des femmes, sinon celles qu’estoyent borgnes, boiteuses, bossues, laides, deffaictes, folles, insensees, maleficiees et tarees, ... (“a propos, dist li moyne, une femme qui n’est ny belle, ny bonne, a quoi vault elle?—A mettre en religion, dist Gargantua.—Voyre, dist le moine, et a faire des chemises.”) ... feut ordonne que la (i.e. à Thélème) ne seroyent receues, sinon les belles, bien formees et bien naturees, et les beaux, bien formez et bien naturez[125].

Occasionally the nuns seem to have resented or resisted these attempts to foist the deformed and the half-witted upon them. One of the reasons urged by the obstinate inmates of Stratford against receiving little Isabel Bret was that she was deformed in her person[126]. It was complained against the Prioress of Ankerwyke at Alnwick’s visitation in 1441 that she made ideotas and other unfit persons nuns[127]; and in 1514 the Prioress of Thetford was similarly charged with intending shortly to receive illiterate and deformed persons as nuns and especially one Dorothy Sturges, a deaf and deformed gentlewoman. Her designs were frustrated, but the nuns of Blackborough were less particular and in 1532 Dorothy answered among her sisters that nothing was in need of reform in that little house[128].

At the time of the Dissolution the Commissioners found that one of the nuns of Langley was “in regard a fool”[129]; and a certain Jane Gowring (the name of whose convent has not been preserved) sent a petition to Cromwell, demanding whether two girls of twelve and thirteen, the one deaf and dumb and the other an idiot, should depart or not[130]. At Nuncoton in 1440 a nun informed Bishop Alnwick that two old nuns lay in the fermery and took their meals in the convent’s cellar “and likewise the infirm, the weak minded (imbecilles) and they that are in their seynies do eat in the same cellar”[131]. Complaints of the presence of idiots were fairly frequent. It is easy to understand the exasperation of Thetford over the case of Dorothy Sturges, when one finds Dame Katherine Mitford complaining at the same visitation that Elizabeth Haukeforth is “aliquando lunatica”[132]; but a few years later Agnes Hosey, described as “ideota,” gave testimony with her sisters at Easebourne and excited no adverse comment[133]. In an age when faith and superstition went hand in hand a mad nun might even bring glory to her house; the tale of Catherine, nun of Bungay, illustrates this. In 1319 an inquiry was held into the miracles said to have been performed at the tomb of the saintly Robert of Winchelsea, Archbishop of Canterbury, whose canonisation was ardently desired by the English; among these miracles was the following:

Sir Walter Botere, chaplain, having been sworn, says that the miracle happened thus, to wit that he saw a certain Catherine, who had been (so they say) a nun of Bungay, in the diocese of Norwich, mad (furiosam) and led to the tomb of the said father; and there she was cured of the said madness and so departed sane; and he says that there is public talk and report of this.

Three other witnesses also swore to the tale[134]. Even cases of violent and dangerous madness seem at times to have occurred, judging from a note at Alnwick’s visitation of Stainfield in 1440, in which it is said that all the nuns appeared separately before the Bishop, “with the exception of Alicia Benyntone, who is out of her mind and confined in chains”[135].

Lay and ecclesiastical opinion alike condemned another practice, which seems to have been fairly widespread in medieval England, that of forcing into convents children too young to realise their fate, or even girls old enough to resist, of whom unscrupulous relatives desired to be rid, generally in order to gain possession of their inheritance; for a nun, dead in the eyes of the law which governed the world, could claim no share in her father’s estate[136]. It is true that influential people, who could succeed in proving that a nun was unwillingly professed, might obtain her release[137]; but many little heiresses and unwanted children must have remained for ever, without hope of escape, in the convents to which they had been hurried, for it is evident that the religious houses themselves did all they could to discourage the presentation of such petitions, or the escape of unwilling members. The chanson de nonne, the song of the nun unwillingly professed, is a favourite theme in medieval popular poetry[138]; and dry documents show that it had its foundation in fact. It is possible to collect from various sources a remarkable series of legal documents which illustrate the practice of putting girls into nunneries, so as to secure their inheritance.

As early as 1197 there is a case at Ankerwyke, where a nun who had been fifteen years professed returned to the world and claimed a share of her father’s property, on the ground that she had been forced into the monastery by a guardian, who wished to secure the whole inheritance. Her relatives energetically resisted a claim by which they would have been the losers and appealed to the Pope. The runaway nun was excommunicated and her case came into the Curia Regis, but the result has not survived and it is impossible to say whether her story was true[139]. The case of Agnes, nun of Haverholme, illustrates at once the reason for which an unwilling girl might be immured in a nunnery and the obstacles which her order would place in the way of escape. She enters history in a papal mandate of 1304, by which three ecclesiastics are ordered to take proceedings in the case of Agnes, whose father and stepmother (how familiar and like a fairy tale it sounds) in order to deprive her of her heritage, shut her up in the monastery of Haverholme. “The canons and nuns of Sempringham (to which order Haverholme belonged) declare,” continues the mandate, “that she took the habit out of devotion, but refuse to confirm their assertion by oath”[140]. The inference is irresistible. Another case, the memory of which is preserved in a petition to Chancery, concerns Katherine and Joan, the two daughters of Thomas Norfolk, whose widow Agnes married a certain Richard Haldenby. Agnes was seised of certain lands and tenements in Yorkshire to the value of £40 a year, as the nearest friend of the two girls, whose share of their father’s estate the lands were. But her remarriage roused the wrath of the Norfolk family and an uncle, John Norfolk, dispossessed her of the land and took the children out of her guardianship, “with great force of armed men against the peace of our lord the king,” breaking open their doors and carrying away the deeds of their possessions. Then, according to the petition of Agnes and her second husband, “did he make the said Katherine a nun, when she was under the age of nine years, at a place called Wallingwells, against her will, and the other daughter of the aforesaid Thomas Norfolk he hath killed, as it is said.” The mother begs for an inquiry to be held[141].

But the most vivid of all these little tragedies of the cloister are those concerned with Margaret de Prestewych and Clarice Stil. The case of Margaret de Prestewych has been preserved in the register of Robert de Stretton, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield; and it is satisfactory to know that one energetic girl at least succeeded in making good her protests and in escaping from her prison. In her eighth year or thereabouts, according to her own petition to the Pope, her friends compelled her against her will to enter the priory of the nuns of Seton, of the order of St Augustine, and take on her the habit of a novice. She remained there, as in a prison, for several years, always protesting that she had never made nor ever would willingly make any profession. And then, seeing that she must by profession be excluded from her inheritance, she feigned herself sick and took to her bed. But this did not prevent her being carried to the church at the instance of her rivals and blessed by a monk, in spite of her cries and protests that she would not remain in that priory or in any other order. On the first opportunity she went forth from the priory without leave and returned to the world, which in heart she had never left, and married Robert de Holand, publicly after banns, and had issue. The bishop, to whom the case had been referred by the Pope, found upon inquiry that these things were true, and in 1383 released her from the observance of her order[142].

Within a few years of this high spirited lady’s escape the case of little Clarice Stil engaged the attention of the King’s court. The dry-as-dust pages of the medieval law-books hide many jewels for whoever has patience to seek them, but none brighter than this story. It all arose out of a writ of wardship sued by one David Carmayngton or Servyngton against Walter Reynold, whom he declared to have unjustly deforced him of the wardship of the land and heir of Robert Stil, the heir being Clarice. Walter, however, said that no action lay against him, because Clarice had entered into the order of St John of Jerusalem, of which the Prioress of Buckland was prioress, and had been professed in that order on the very day of the purchase of the writ. In answer David unfolded a strange story. He alleged that William Stil, the father of Robert, had married twice; by his first wife Constance he had one daughter Margaret, who was now the wife of Walter Reynold; by his second wife Joan he had two children, Robert and Clarice. William died seised of certain tenements which were inherited by Robert, who died without an heir of his body; whereupon (David alleged) Walter, by connivance with the Prioress of Buckland and in order to disinherit Clarice (in which case his own wife Margaret would be the next of kin), took Clarice after her brother’s death and conveyed her to Buckland Priory, she being then eight years of age, and kept her there under guard. David’s counsel gave a dramatic account of the proceeding:

Sir, we say that the same Walter by covinage to compel the said Clarice to be professed, took the said Clarice when she was between the ages of seven and eight years, to the house of nuns at Buckland, and in that place were two ladies, nuns, who were of his assent to cause the infant to be professed, and they told the child that if she passed the door the devil would carry her away.

It was furthermore pleaded that on the day of purchase of the writ, Clarice was within the age of twelve years and that she was still within that age, and that therefore she could not be considered professed by the law of the land. By this time one’s sympathies are all on the side of David, and of terrified little Clarice, with whom the devil was to run away. Unfortunately the judges referred the matter to an ecclesiastical court and ordered a writ to be sent to the Bishop of Bath and Wells. The Bishop made his return

that the said Clarice on August 1st, 1383, of her own free will, was taken to the said Prioress of Buckland by Stephen Joseph, rector of the church of Northeleye, without any connivance on the part of the said Walter and the said Prioress, and she remained at the said priory for two years to see if the life would please her. Afterwards, on October 18th, 1385, she assumed the religious habit and made profession according to the manners and customs of the said house. And on the day when Clarice entered the house she was more than eight years old and on the day of purchase of the writ more than twelve years old, and at the present time is more than fourteen years old, and is well contented with the religious life.

The Bishop also found that no guards had been placed over Clarice by Walter, or by the Prioress. So David lost his suit and was in mercy for a false claim; and he also lost, upon a technical point, another suit which he had brought against the Prioress of Buckland. Nevertheless one’s sympathies remain obstinately on his side. That touch about the devil assuredly never sprang even from the fertile brain of a lawyer[143].

The illegitimate, the deformed, the feeble-minded and the unwilling represent a not very pleasant side of the conventual system. The nunneries contained other and less tragic inmates, who may be distinguished from the majority; for to them went in voluntary retirement a large number of widows[144]. If the nun unwillingly professed has always been a favourite theme in popular literature, so also has the broken-hearted wife or lover, Guinevere hiding her sorrows in the silent cloister.

Many of the widows who took the veil were, however, less romantic figures. Although their presence as secular boarders was discouraged, because it brought too much of the world within cloister walls, those who desired to make regular profession were willingly received, the more so as they often brought a substantial dower with them. Thus when Margaret, Countess of Ulster, assumed the habit at Campsey in 1347, she took with her, by licence of the Crown, the issues of all her lands and rents in England for a year after her admission, and after that date 200 marks yearly were to be paid for her sustenance[145]. Such widows often enjoyed a respect consonant with their former position in society and not infrequently became heads of their houses. Katherine de Ingham and Eleanor Lady Scrope both entered the Minories in their widowhood and eventually became abbesses[146]. But it does not need much imagination, nor an unduly cynical temperament, to guess that this element of convent life must occasionally have been a disturbing one. The conventual atmosphere did not always succeed in killing the profaner passions of the soul; and the advent of an opinionated widow, ripe in the experience of all those things which her sisters had never known, with the aplomb of one who had long enjoyed an honoured position as wife and mother and lady of the manor, must at times have caused a flutter among the doves; such a situation, for instance, as Bishop Cobham found at Wroxall when he visited it in 1323[147]. Isabel Lady Clinton of Maxstoke, widow of the patron of the house, had retired thither and had evidently taken with her a not too modest opinion of her own importance. She found it impossible to forget that she was a Clinton and to realise that she, who had in time gone by given her easy patronage to the nuns and lodged with them when she would, was now a simple sister among them. Was she to submit to the rule of Prioress Agnes of Alesbury, she without whose goodwill Prioress Agnes had never been appointed? Was she to listen meekly to chiding in the dorter, and in the frater to bear with sulks? Impossible. How she comported herself we know not, but the bishop “found grave discord existing between the Prioress and dame Isabel Clinton, some of the sisters adhering to one and some to the other.” Evidently a battle royal. The bishop, poor man, did his best. He enjoined peace and concord among the inmates; the sisters were to treat the prioress with reverence and obedience; those who had rebelled against her were to desist and the prioress was to behave amicably to all in frater, dorter, and elsewhere. And so my lord went his way. He may have known the pertinacity of the late patroness; and it was perhaps with resignation and without surprise that he confirmed her election as prioress on the death of the harassed Agnes.

The occasional cases in which wives left their husbands to enter a convent were less likely to provoke discord. Such women as left husband and children to take the veil must have been moved by a very strong vocation for religion, or else by excessive weariness. Some may perhaps have found married life even such an odious tale, “a licking of honey off thorns,” as the misguided realist who wrote Hali Meidenhad sought to depict it. In any case, whether the mystical faith of a St Bridget drew her thither, or whether matrimony had not seemed easy to her that had tried it, the presence of a wedded wife was unlikely to provoke discord in the convent; the devout and the depressed are quiet bedeswomen. It was necessary for a wife to obtain her husband’s permission before she could take the veil, since her action entailed celibacy on his part also, during her lifetime. Sometimes a husband would endow his wife liberally on her entry into the house which she had selected. There are two such dowers in the Register of Godstow Nunnery. About 1165 William de Seckworth gave the tithes of two mills and a grant of five acres of meadow to the convent, “for the helth of hys sowle and of hys chyldryn and of hys aunceters, with hys wyfe also, the whyche he toke to kepe to the forseyd holy mynchons to serve god”[148]; and a quarter of a century later Geoffrey Durant and Molde his wife, “whan þe same Moole yelded herself to be a mynchon to the same chirch,” granted one mark of rent to be paid annually by their son Peter, out of certain lands held by him, “which were of the mariage of the said Moolde”[149]. Nor did Walter Hauteyn, citizen of London, in his solicitude for his son and three daughters, forget the mother who had left her husband and children for the service of God; to Alice his wife, a nun of St Sepulchre’s Canterbury, he bequeathed in 1292 his dwelling place and rents upon Cornhill for life, with remainder to his heirs[150].

CHAPTER II

THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE

It usually happened that the head of a nunnery was a woman of some social standing in her own right. All nuns were Christ’s brides, but an earthly father in the neighbourhood, with broad acres and loose purse strings, was not to be despised. If a great lady retired to a nunnery she was very like to end as its head; Barking Abbey in Essex had a long line of well-born abbesses, including three queens and two princesses; and when Katherine de la Pole (the youngest daughter of that earl of Suffolk who was slain at Agincourt) is found holding the position of abbess at the tender age of twenty-two, it is an irresistible inference that her birth was a factor in the choice[151]. The advantage in having a woman of local influence and rich connections as prioress is illustrated in the history of Crabhouse nunnery under Joan Wiggenhall[152]; how she worked and built “be the grace of oure Lord God an be the helpe of Edmund Perys, Person of Watlington,” her cousin; and how

whanne this good man beforeseyde was passid to God, oure Lord that is ful graciouse to alle his servauntis that have nede and that troste on hym, sente hem anothir goode frende hem to helpe and comforte in her nede, clepid Mayster Jon Wygenale, Doctoure of Canon and person of Oxborow, and Cosyn to the same Prioresse;

and how

in the xix yere of the same Prioresse, ffel a grete derth of corne, wherefore sche muste nedis have lefte werke with oute relevynge and helpe of sum goode creature, so, be the steringe of oure Lord, Mayster Jon Wygenale befor sayde sente us of his charite an 100 cowmbe malte and an 100 coumbe Barly and besyde this procurid us xx mark. And for the soule of my lord of Exetyr, of whos soule God of hys pyte he wil have mercy, we had of him xl pounte and v mark to the same werke, whiche drewe ccc mark, without mete and drinke. And within these vij yere that the dortoure was in makynge the place at Lynne clepped Corner Bothe was at the gate downe and no profite came to the place many yeris beforne. So that maystir Jon before seyde of hys gret charite lente the same prioresse good to make it up ageyne and procured hir xx mark of the sekatouris of Roger Chapeleyn[153].

The election of a superior was a complicated business, as may be gathered from the list of seventeen documents relating to the election of Alice de la Flagge as Prioress of Whiston in 1308, and enrolled in the Sede Vacante Register of Worcester diocese[154]. Indeed there were so many formalities to be fulfilled that the nuns seem often to have found great difficulty in making a canonical election, and there are frequent notices in the episcopal registers that their election has been quashed by the Bishop on account of some technical fault; in such cases, however, the Bishop’s action was merely formal and he almost always reappointed the candidate of their choice[155]. An election was, moreover, not only complicated but expensive; it began with a journey to the patron to ask for his congé d’élire and it ended with more journeys, to the patron and to the Bishop, to ask for confirmation, so that the cost of travel and the cost of paying a clerk to draw up the necessary documents were sometimes considerable; moreover a fee was payable to the Bishop’s official for the installation of the new head. The account of Margaret Ratclyff, Prioress of Swaffham Bulbeck in 1482, contains notice of payments “to the official of the lord bishop, at the installation of the said prioress for his fee i. li.” and to one Bridone “for the transcript of the decree of election of the prioress v. s.”[156]. An account roll of St Michael’s Stamford for the year 1375-6 illustrates the process in greater detail; under the heading of “expenses de nostre Elit” are the following items:

Paid for the hire of horses with expenses going to the abbot of Peterborough [the patron] to get licence to elect our choice 9½d. Paid for the hire of horses going to the bishop of Lincoln and to the abbot of Peterborough and for their expenses at our election 4s. 8½d. Paid for bread, ale and meat for our election on the election day 2s. 11½d. Paid for a letter to the abbot of Peterborough for a licence to elect 3d. Paid for the installation of our elect, 10s.[157] Total 18s. 8½d.[158]

The only necessary qualifications for the head of a house were that she should be above the age of twenty-one[159], born in wedlock and of good reputation; a special dispensation had to be obtained for the election of a woman who was under age or illegitimate.

PLATE II

ABBESS RECEIVING THE PASTORAL STAFF FROM A BISHOP

BENEDICTION OF AN ABBESS BY A BISHOP

As a rule the nuns possessed the right of free election, subject to the congé d’élire of their patron and to the confirmation of the bishop, and they secured without very much difficulty the leader of their choice. Often enough it must have been clear, especially in small communities, that one of the nuns was better fitted to rule than her sisters, and, as at Whiston, they

unanimously, as if inspired by the Holy Spirit[160], chose dame Alice de la Flagge, a woman of discreet life and morals, of lawful age, professed in the nunnery, born in lawful matrimony, prudent in spiritual and temporal matters, of whose election all approved, and afterwards, solemnly singing Te Deum Laudamus, carried the said elect, weeping, resisting as much as she could, and expostulating in a high voice, to the church as is the custom, and immediately afterwards, brother William de Grimeley, monk of Worcester, proclaimed the election. The said elect, after being very often asked, at length, after due deliberation, being unwilling to resist the divine will, consented[161].

But Jocelin of Brakelond has taught us that a monastic election was not always a foregone conclusion, that discussion waxed hot and barbed words flew in the season of blood-letting “when the cloistered monks were wont to reveal the secrets of their hearts in turn and to discuss matters one with another,” and that “many men said many things and every man was fully persuaded in his own mind.” Nuns were not very different from monks when it came to an election, and the chance survival of a bishop’s register and of another formal document among the muniments of Lincoln, has preserved the record of an election comedy at Elstow Abbey, almost worthy to rank with Jocelin’s inimitable account of the choice of Samson the subsacrist.

After the death of Abbess Agnes Gascoigne in July 1529, the nineteen nuns of Elstow, having received Henry VIII’s congé d’élire, assembled in their chapter house on August 9th, to elect her successor. They chose Master John Rayn “utriusque juris doctorem,” as director, Edward Watson, notary public as clerk, and the Prior of Caldwell and the rectors of Great Billing and Turvey as witnesses. Three novices and other lay persons having departed, the director and the other men explained the forms of election to the nuns in the vulgar tongue and they agreed to proceed by way of scrutiny. Matilda Sheldon, subprioress, Alice Boifeld, precentrix, and Anne Preston, ostiaria (doorkeeper) were chosen as scrutineers and withdrew into a corner of the chapter house, with the notary and witnesses. There Matilda Sheldon and Anne Preston nominated Cecilia Starkey, refectoraria, while Alice Boifeld nominated Elizabeth Boifeld, sacrist, evidently a relative. The three scrutineers then called upon the other nuns to give their votes; Anne Wake, the prioress, named Cecilia Starkey; Elizabeth Boifeld and Cecilia Starkey (each unable to vote for herself, but determined not to assist the other) voted for a third person, the subsacrist Helen Snawe; and Helen Snawe and all the other nuns, except two, gave their votes in favour of Elizabeth Boifeld. Consternation reigned among the older nuns, prioress, subprioress, refectoraria and doorkeeper, when this result was announced. “Well,” said the Prioress, “some of thies yong Nunnes be to blame,” and on the director asking why, she replied: “For they wolde not shewe me so muche; for I asked diverse of them before this day to whome they wolde gyve their voices, but they wolde not shewe me.” “What said they to you?” asked the director. “They said to me,” replied the flustered and indignant prioress, “they wolde not tell to whome they wolde gyve their voices tyll the tyme of thellection, and then they wolde gyve their voices as God shulde put into their mynds, but this is by counsaill. And yet yt wolde have beseemed them to have shewn as much to me as to the others.” And then she and Dame Cecilia said, “What, shulde the yong nunnes gyve voices? Tushe, they shulde not gyve voices!” Clearly the situation was the same which Jocelin of Brakelond had described over three centuries before: “The novices said of their elders that they were invalid old men and little capable of ruling an abbey.” However the Prioress was obliged to admit that the younger nuns had voted in the last election and the subprioress thereupon, in the name of the scrutineers, announced the election of Dame Elizabeth Boifeld by the “more and sounder part of the convent” (poor Anne Wake!). But the Prioress and disappointed Dame Cecilia still showed fight; the votes must be referred to the Bishop of Lincoln. Further discussion; then Dame Cecilia gracefully gave way; she consented to the election of Dame Elizabeth Boifeld and would not proceed further in the matter. Master John Rayn published the election at the steps of the altar. Helen Snawe (whom after events showed to be a leading spirit in the affair) and Katherine Wingate were chosen as proctors, to seek confirmation from the Bishop, and Dame Elizabeth was taken to the altar (amid loud chanting of Te Deum Laudamus by the triumphant younger nuns) and her election announced. She, however, preserved that decorous semblance of unwillingness, or at least of indifference, which custom demanded from a successful candidate, even when she had been pulling strings for days, for when the proctors came to her at two o’clock “in a certain upper chamber called Marteyns, in our monastery” and asked her consent to her election, “she neither gave it nor refused.” Away went the proctors, without so much as a wink to each other; let us leave our elect to meditate upon the will of God. At four p.m. they came to her “in a certain large garden, called the Pond Yard, within our monastery”; and at their repeated instances she gave her consent. “Wherefore we, the above-named nuns, pray the Lord Bishop to ratify and confirm our election of the said Elizabeth Boyfeld as our Abbess.” Which the Lord Bishop did[162].

But this was by no means the end of the matter. A year later the whole nunnery was in an uproar[163]. The bishop, for reasons best known to himself, had removed the prioress Dame Anne Wake and had appointed Dame Helen Snawe in her place; perhaps Dame Anne had said “Tush” once too often under the new régime; perhaps she was getting too old for her work; or perhaps Abbess Elizabeth Boifeld had only commanded Dame Snawe’s intrigues at a price; evidently the subsacrist was no less adroit than that other subsacrist of Bury St Edmund’s. At any rate Dame Anne Wake was put out of her office and Dame Helen Snawe ruled in her stead. It might have been expected that this change would be welcomed by the nuns, considering how strong the Boifeld faction had been at the election of the Abbess. But no; during the year of triumph Helen Snawe had aroused the hearty dislike of her sisters; led by Dames Barbara Gray (who had voted against the Abbess at the last election) and Alice Bowlis they had strenuously opposed her substitution for the old Prioress; they had been impertinent to the Abbess of their own choice (indeed she was only a figure-head); they had written letters to their friends and refused to show them to her; and finally when the election of Dame Snawe was announced, they had risen in a body and left the chapter-house as a protest. This was intolerable, and the Bishop’s vicar-general came down to examine the delinquents. Matilda Sheldon, the subprioress, admitted to having left the chapter, but denied that she had done so for the reason attributed and said that she did not know of the departure of the other nuns, until she saw them in the dorter. Margaret Nicolson showed more spirit; she said that she went out “because she wold not consent that my lady Snawe shulde be priores,” and that “ther was none that ded councell hir to goo” and that “my lady abbes did commaunde them to tary, that not withestandyng they went forthe”; and she gave the names of eight nuns who had followed the subprioress out. Dame Barbara Gray was next asked “yf she ded aske licence of my Lady Abbas to wryte letters to hir frends,” and replied “that she ded aske licens to wryte to hir frends and my Lady Abbas sade, ‘Yf ye showe me what ye wryte I am content,’ and she saide agene, ‘I have done my devoir to aske licence, and yf ye wyll nede see it I will wryte noo letters.’” Asked whether she had left the chapter house, this defiant young woman declared that “yf it were to do agene she wolde soo doo,” and moreover “that she cannot fynde in hir hert to obbey my lady Snawe as priores, and that she wyll rather goo out of the house by my lord’s licence, or she wyll obbey hir ... and that she wyll never obbey hir as priores, for hir hert cannot serve hir.” Asked for her objection to Dame Snawe, she said that “she wyll shewe noo cause at thys tyme wherfor she cannot love hir”; but after a little pressure she declared with heat that “the priores maks every faute a dedly syne”[164], treats all of them ill except her own self and if she “doo take an oppynyon she wyll kepe itt,” whether it be right or wrong. Dame Margery Preston was next examined and was evidently rather frightened at the result of her actions; she said that she had left the chapter-house as a protest against the deposition of the old prioress and not for any ill will that she bore Dame Snawe, “and she sais,” the record continues, “that she ys well content to obbey my lady Snawe as priores. And she desiers my lord to be a good lord to the olde priores, because of her age.” Ill-used Dame Cecilia Starkey, so unkindly circumvented by Dame Snawe a year ago, next appeared before the vicar-general and said “that she went forthe of the chapter howse, but she sais she gave noo occasion to eny of hir susters to goo forthe. And says she knewe not howe many of hir susters went forthe whyle she come intoo the dorter; saynge that she cannot fynde in hir hert nor wyll not accepte and take my lady Snawe as priores” (an amusing comment on her vote in 1529). Next came Dame Alice Foster, who admitted to having left the chapter-house

and sais that they war commanded by the Abbes to tare styll. But she and other went forth because the olde priores was put done [i.e. down] wrongfully and my lady Snawe put in agenst ther wylle, saynge that she wyll never agre to hir as long as she lyvys; she says the sub-prioress went forthe of the chapiter howse fyrst and then she and other folowyde;

and evidence in almost the same words was given by Dame Anne Preston and by Dame Elizabeth Sinclere, the latter adding that “she wyll take tholde priores as priores as longe as she levys and no other, and she says yf my lord commaunde vs to take my lady Snawe to be priores, she had lever goo forthe of the howse to sum other place and wyll not tare ther.” Dame Alice Bowlis, another young rebel, asked

yf she ded aske lycence of the Abbes to wryte, she sais she ded aske licens to wryte and my lady Abbes seyde “My lord hathe gevyn vs soo strate commaundement that none shuld wryte no (letter) but ye shewe it to me, what ye doo wryte”; and she sais she mayde aunswer agene to thabbes, “It hathe not bene soo in tymis paste and I have done my dewty. I wyll not wryte nowe at this tyme”; she admitted that she left the chapter house, “but she says that nobody ded move hyr to goo forthe; she says that she must neds nowe obbey the priores at my lords commaundement, saynge that my lady Snawe ys not mete for that offes, butt she wolde shewe noo cause wherfor.”

Two other nuns declared with great boldness “That my lord ded not commaunde vs to tak my lady Snawe as priores, but he saide, ‘Yf ye wyll not take hir as priores I wyll make hir priores’” and that “they was wont to have the priores chosyn by the Abbes and the convent, and not by my lord, after seynte Bennet’s rule,” one of them remarking cryptically “that she wyll take my lady Snawe as priores as other wyll doo” and not otherwise. Meek little Dame Katherine Cornwallis was then interrogated and said,

“that she was going forthe of the chapiter house wt. other of hir susters and then when she herde my lady abbes commaund them to tary, she ded tary behynde, but she sais that she thynks that none of the oder susters that went forthe ded here hyr, but only she” (kind little Dame Katherine), “and she is sory that tholde priores ys put out of hir offes. She says that my lady abbes ded tare styll and domina Alicia Boyfelde, domina Snawe, domina Katherina Wyngate, domina Dorothia Commaforthe, domina Elizabethe Repton, and domina Elizabeth Stanysmore.”

Finally the ill-used abbess made her complaint; she had bidden saucy Dame Alice Bowlis and others to stand up at matins, according to the custom of the house, “and went out of hir stall to byde them soo doo, and lady Bowlis ded make hir awnswer agene that, ‘ye have mayde hir priores that mayde ye abbes!’, brekyng her silence ther.” Evidently poor Elizabeth Boifeld had not succeeded in living down the intrigues which had preceded her election, and the convent suspected her of rewarding a supporter at the expense of an old opponent.

Here was a pretty state of affairs in the home of buxomness and peace. But the vicar-general acted firmly. Barbara Gray and Alice Bowlis were given a penance for their disobedience; they were to keep silence; neither of them was to come within “the howse calde the misericorde” (where meat was allowed to be eaten), but they were always to have their meals in the frater; neither of them was to write any letters; and they were to take the lowest places of all among the sisters in “processions and in other placys.” Finally all the nuns were enjoined to be obedient to the abbess and to the hated prioress. Their protests that they would never obey Dame Alice Snawe, while the old prioress lived, were all in vain; and when some ten years later the Reformation put an end to their dissensions by casting them all upon the world, Dame Elizabeth Boyvill (sic), “abbesse,” received an annual pension of £50, Dame Helen Snawe, “prioresse,” one of £4 and Dame Anne Wake, “prioresse quondam,” one of 66s. 8d.[165]

The turbulent diocese of York provides us with an even more striking picture of an election-quarrel. In 1308, after a vacancy, the election of the Prioress of Keldholme lapsed to the Archbishop, who appointed Emma of York. But the nuns would have none of Emma. Six of them refused obedience to the new prioress and, six being probably at least half of the whole convent, Emma of York resigned. Not to be daunted the Archbishop returned to the charge; on August 5th he wrote to the Archdeacon of Cleveland stating that as he found no one in the house capable of ruling it he had appointed Joan de Pykering, a nun of Rosedale, to be Prioress.

As a number of persons (named) had openly and publicly obstructed the appointment of the new prioress the Archdeacon was to proceed immediately to Keldholme and give her corporal possession and at the same time he was to admonish other dissentient nuns (named) that they and all others must accept Joan de Pykering as prioress and reverently obey her.

It is clear in this case that the feuds of the convent had spread beyond its walls, for the Archbishop at the same time warned all lay folk to cease their opposition on pain of excommunication and shortly afterwards imposed a penance upon one of those who had interfered. But pandemonium still reigned at Keldholme and he went down in person to interview the refractory nuns; the result of his visitation appears in a mandate issued to the official of Cleveland on September 3rd, stating that he had found four nuns, Isabella de Langetoft, Mary de Holm, Joan de Roseles and Anabilla de Lokton (all had been among the original objectors to Emma of York) incorrigible rebels. They were therefore to be packed off one after another, Isabella to Handale, Mary to Swine, Joan to Nunappleton and Anabilla to Wallingwells, there to perform their penances. In spite of this ruthless elimination of the discordant elements, the convent of Keldholme refused to submit. On February 1st following the Archbishop wrote severely to the subprioress and convent bidding them at once to direct a letter under their common seal to their patroness, declaring that they had unanimously elected Joan de Pykering as prioress; on February 5th he issued a commission to correct the crimes and excesses revealed at his visitation; and on February 17th he directed the commissioners “to enquire whether Joan de Pickering” (luckless exile in the tents of Kedar) “desired for a good reason, of her own free will, to resign and if they found that she did to enjoin the subprioress and convent to proceed to the canonical election of a new prioress”; and on March 7th the triumphant convent elected Emma of Stapelton. At the same time the Archbishop ordered the transference of two other nuns to do penance at Esholt and at Nunkeeling, perhaps for their share in these disorders but more probably for immorality.

But this was not the end. Emma of York could not forget that she had once been prioress; Mary de Holm (who had either returned from or never gone to Swine) was a thoroughly bad character; and in 1315 the Archbishop

directed Richard del Clay, custos of the monastery, to proceed at once to Keldholme and to summon before him in the chapter Emma of York and Mary de Holm, who like daughters of perdition were disobedient and rebels against the Prioress. Having read the Archbishop’s letter in the mother tongue in the chapter, he was to admonish the two nuns for the first, second and third times that they must humbly obey the Prioress in all lawful and canonical injunctions. They were not to meddle with any internal or external business of the house in any way, or to go outside of the enclosure of the monastery, or to say anything against the Prioress, on pain of expulsion and of the greater excommunication.

At the end of the year, however, harassed Archbishop Greenfield went where the wicked cease from troubling; and the two malcontents at Keldholme seized the opportunity to triumph. Scarcely a couple of months after his death Emma of Stapelton resigned; she said she was “oppressed by age,” but since Emma of York was at once elected and confirmed in her place, it is probable that the rage, like Joan de Pickering’s free will, was something of a euphemism; her reason doubtless took a concrete and menacing shape and wore a veil upon its undiminished head. The last we hear of these very unsaintly ladies is in 1318, when the new Archbishop enjoined a penance on Mary de Holm for incontinence with a chaplain[166]. It is noticeable that this was the second case of the kind which had occurred in the diocese of York within fifteen years. At Swine in 1290 the appointment by Archbishop Romeyn of Josiana de Anlaby as Prioress had been followed by similar disorders and he ordered an inquiry to be held and the rebellious nuns to be sent to Rosedale[167].

Much trouble might arise within a convent over the election of its head, as these stories show. But sometimes external persons interfered; great ladies used their influence and their wealth to secure the coveted post for a protégée of their own; and the protégée herself was not averse to oiling the palms of those in authority with good marks of silver; “blood-abbesses,” Ensfrid of Cologne would have called them (“that is, foisted in by their kinsfolk”) or “jester-abbesses” (“that is, such as had been thrust in by the power of great folks”) or “simoniacs, who had crept in through money or through worldly services”[168]. In these cases there was likely to be more trouble still, for great ladies were not always careful of the character of a friend or relative whom they wished to settle comfortably as head of a convent. In 1528 the Abbess of Wilton died and Mr John Carey thought he would like the appointment for his sister Eleanor, one of the nuns. He was brother-in-law to lovely Anne Boleyn, and a word in her ear secured her warm support; the infatuated King wished to please Anne; and Wolsey, steering his bark in troubled waters, wished to please the King; so he promised that the lady should have the post, the election to which had been placed in his hands by the nuns. It seemed that all would go well with Dame Eleanor Carey, when Anne Boleyn pulled the strings; but trouble arose, and the action taken by the Cardinal and by the future oppressor of the monasteries is greatly to the credit of them both, for both had much to lose from Anne. “As touching the matter of Wilton” Henry wrote to her

My lord cardinal hath had the Nuns before him, and examined them, Mr. Bell being present; which hath certified me, that for a truth that she hath confessed herself, (which we would have had abbesse) to have had two children by two sundry priests; and furder, since, hath been kept by a servant of the Lord Broke, that was, and that not long ago; wherefore I would not for all the gold in the world clog your conscience nor mine to make her a ruler of a house, which is of so ungudly demeanor, nor I trust you would not that neither for brother nor sister I should so destain mine honor or conscience. And as touching the prioress [Isabel Jordan] or Dame Eleanor’s eldest sister, though there is not any evident case proved against them, and that the prioress is so old that of many years she could not be as she was named [ill-famed]: yet notwithstanding to do you pleasure I have done that neither of them shall have it, but that some other good and well disposed woman shall have it, whereby the house shall be the better reformed (whereof I ensure you it had much need) and God much the better served[169].

Wolsey, however, gave the appointment to Isabel Jordan, who in spite of her having been the subject of some scandal in her youth, was favoured by the greater part of the convent as being “ancient, wise and discreet”; whereupon he brought down upon himself a severe rebuke from Henry, who had “both reported and promised to divers friends of Dame Elinor Carey that the Prioress should not have it”[170]. Without doubt pretty Mistress Anne was sulking down at Hever.

Not only did outside persons thus concern themselves in a conventual election; the nuns themselves were not always unwilling to bribe, where they desired advancement. A series of letters written by Margaret Vernon to Cromwell, concerning the office of Prioress of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, throws a lurid light upon the methods which were sometimes employed:

“Sir,” she wrote to her powerful friend in 1529, “Pleaseth it you to understand that there is a goldsmith in this town, named Lewys, and he sheweth me that Mr. More hath made sure promise to parson Larke that the subprioress of St. Helen’s shall be prioress there afore Christmas-day. Sir, I most humbly beseech you to be so good master unto me, as to know my lord’s grace’s [the king’s] pleasure in this case and that I may have a determined answer whereto I shall trust, that I may settle myself in quietness; the which I am far from at this hour. And farthermore if it might like you to make the offer to my said lord’s grace of such a sum of money as we were at a point for, my friends thinketh that I should surely be at an end.”

Soon afterwards she wrote again:

Sir, it is so that there is divers and many of my friends that hath written to me that I should make labour for the said house unto your mastership, showing you that the King’s grace hath given it to master Harper, who saith that he is proffered for his favour two hundred marks of the King’s saddler, for his sister; which proffer I will never make unto him, nor no friend for me shall, for the coming in after that fashion is neither godly nor worshipful. And beside all this must come by my lady Orell’s favour, which is a woman I would least meddle with. And thus I shall not only be burdened in conscience for payment of this great sum, but also entangled and in great cumbrance to satisfy the avidity of this gentlewoman. And though I did, in my lord cardinal’s days, proffer a hundred pounds for the said house, I beseech you consider for what purpose it was made. Your mastership knoweth right well that there was by my enemies so many high and slanderous words, and your mastership had made so great instant labour for me, that I shamed so much the fall thereof that I foresaw little what proffer was made; but now, I thank our Lord, that blast is ceased, and I have no such singular love unto it; for now I have two eyes to see in this matter clearly, the one is the eye of my soul, that I may come without burthen of conscience and by the right door, and, laying away all pomp and vanity of the world, looking warily upon the maintenance and supportation of the house, which I should take in charge, and cannot be performed, master Harper’s pleasure and my lady Orell’s accomplished. In consideration whereof I intend not willingly, nor no friend of mine shall not, trouble your mastership in this case.

In another letter she mentions a saying of Master Harper, that from the good report he has heard of her, he would rather admit her without a groat than others who offer money; but her conscientious scruples were not rewarded with St Helen’s, though she almost immediately obtained an appointment as prioress at Little Marlow, and on the dissolution of that house among the lesser monasteries, received and held for a brief space the great Abbey of Malling[171]. It is true that these instances of simony and of the use of influence belong to the last degenerate years of the monasteries in England. But cases hardly less serious undoubtedly occurred at an early date. The gross venality of the papal curia[172], even in the early thirteenth century, is not a very happy omen for the behaviour of private patrons; smaller folk than the Pope could summon a wretched abbot “Amice, ut offeras”; nor was it only abbots who thus bought themselves into favour. The thirteenth century jurist Pierre Du Bois, whose enlightened plans for the better education of women included the suppression of the nunneries and the utilisation of their wealth to form schools or colleges for girls, mentioned the reception of nuns for money and rents, by means of compacts (i.e. the dowry system) and the election of abbesses and prioresses by the same illicit bargains, as among the abuses practised in nunneries[173].

Once having been installed, the head of a house held office until she died, resigned or was deprived for incompetence or for ill behaviour. Sometimes prioresses continued to hold office until a very great age, as did Matilda de Flamstead, Prioress of Sopwell, who died in 1430 aged eighty-one, having lived in the rules of religion for over sixty years[174]. But the cases (quoted below) of the prioresses of St Michael’s Stamford and of Gracedieu prove that an aged and impotent head was bad for the discipline of the house, and it appears that a prioress who was too old or in too weak health to fulfil her arduous duties, was often allowed to resign or was relieved of her office[175]. Sometimes an ex-superior continued to live a communal life as an ordinary nun, under her successor, but sometimes she was granted a special room and a special allowance of food and attendance. In some houses certain apartments were reserved for the occupation of a retired superior. Sir Thomas Willoughby, writing to Cromwell on behalf of his sister-in-law, who had resigned her office as Abbess of Malling, begs that she may

have your letter to my lady abbess of Malling (her successor), that she at your contemplation will be so good to her as to appoint her that room and lodging within the said monastery that she and other of her predecessors that hath likewise resigned hath used to have, and as she had herself a little space, or else some other meet and convenient lodging in the same house[176].

When Katherine Pilly, Prioress of Flixton, “who had laudably ruled the house for eighteen years,” resigned in 1432 because of old age and blindness, the Bishop of Norwich made special arrangements for her sustenance:

she was to have suitable rooms for herself and her maid; each week she and the maid were to be provided with two white loaves, eight loaves of “hool” bread and eight gallons of convent beer, with a daily dish for both from the kitchen, the same as for two nuns in the refectory, and with two hundred faggots and a hundred logs and eight pounds of candles a year. Cecilia Crayke, one of the nuns, was to read divine service to her daily and to sit with her at meals, having her portion from the refectory[177].

These aged ladies probably ended their days peacefully, withdrawn from the common life of the house. But sometimes a prioress resigned while still young enough to miss her erstwhile autocracy and to torment her unlucky successor. Then indeed the new head could do nothing right and feuds and factions tore the sisterhood. Such a case occurred at Nunkeeling early in the fourteenth century. Avice de la More resigned in 1316, and the Archbishop wrote to the nuns making the usual provision for her; she had “for a long period laudably and usefully superintended the house”; she was to have a chamber to herself and one of the nuns assigned to her by the Prioress as a companion; and daily she was to receive the portion of two nuns in bread, ale and victuals and her associate that of one nun; an end, one might suppose, of Avice de la More. But the Yorkshire nuns were quarrelsome ladies; and two years later the Archbishop addressed a severe letter to Avice, threatening to remove the provision made for her if she persisted in her “conspiracies, rebellions and disobedience to the prioress” and imposing a severe penance upon her. But seven penitential psalms with the litany upon Fridays, a discipline in chapter and fasting diet could not calm the temper of Avice de la More; she stirred up the nuns to rebellion and spread the tale of her grievances “to seculars and adversaries outside.” There was some family feud perhaps between her relatives and the St Quintins to whose house the unhappy Prioress belonged; at any rate “clamorous information” reached the Archbishop concerning the intrigues of certain of the nuns. Once more he wrote to Avice “with a bitter heart.” She had broken her vow of obedience in arrogancy and elation of heart towards her prioress, “who was placed in charge of her soul and body and without whom she had no free will”; let her desist at once and study to live according to the rule; and a commission was sent to inquire into the misdeeds of the rebellious nuns of Keeling. But alas, the finding of that commission has long since powdered into dust and we hear no further news of Avice de la More[178].

The head of a house was an important person and enjoyed a considerable amount of freedom, in relation both to her convent and to the outside world. In relation to her convent her position laid her open to various temptations: she was, for instance, beset by three which must be faced by all who rule over communities. The first was the temptation to live with too great luxury and independence, escaping from the daily routine of communal life, to which her vows bound her. The second was the temptation to rule like an autocrat, instead of consulting her sisters. The third was the temptation to let human predilections have their way and to show favouritism. To begin with the first of these temptations, it is obvious that the fact that the superior nearly always had a separate room, or suite of rooms[179], and servants, and had the duty of entertaining important guests, gave her much freedom within her house, especially if she were the head of one of the great abbeys. The Abbess of St Mary’s Winchester, at the Dissolution, had her own house and a staff consisting of a cook, an undercook, a woman servant and a laundress, and she had also a gentlewoman to wait upon her, like any great lady in the world[180]. The Abbess of Barking had her gentlewoman, too, and her private kitchen; she dined in state with her nuns five times a year, and “the under celeresse must remember,” says the Charthe longynge to the Office of Celeresse,

at eche principall fest, that my lady sytteth in the fraytour; that is to wyt five times in the yere, at eche tyme schall aske the clerke of the kychyn soper eggs for the covent, and that is Estir, Wytsontyd, the Assumption of our Lady, seynt Alburgh and Cristynmasse, at eche tyme to every lady two eggs, and eche double two egges, that is the priorisse, the celeresse and the kychener[181].

The stern reformer Peckham was forced to take in hand the conduct of the Abbesses of Barking, Wherwell and Romsey, who were abusing their independence of ordinary routine. The Abbess of Barking was forbidden to remain in her private room after sunset, at which hour all doors were to be locked and all strangers excluded; she might do so only very rarely, in order to entertain distinguished guests or to transact important business; and he ordered her to eat with the convent as often as possible, “especially on solemn days” (i.e. great feasts)[182]. The Abbess of Wherwell had apparently stinted her nuns in food and drink, but caused magnificent feasts to be prepared for her in her own room, and Peckham ordered that whenever there was a shortage of food in the convent, she was to dine with the nuns, and no meal was to be laid in her chamber for servants or strangers, but all visitors were to be entertained in the exterior guest-hall; if at such times she were in ill health, and unable to use the common diet, she might remain in her room, in the company of one or two of the nuns. At times when there was no lack of food in the convent and when she was entertaining guests in her own room, all potations were to cease and all servants and visitors to depart at the hour of compline[183]. About the same time (1284) Peckham wrote two letters to the Abbess of Romsey, who had evidently been guilty of the same behaviour. She was not to keep “a number of” dogs or monkeys, or more than two maid servants, and she was not to fare splendidly in her own rooms while the nuns went short; his injunctions to her are couched in almost precisely the same language as those which he addressed to the Abbess of Wherwell[184].

According to the Benedictine rule the superior, when not entertaining guests, was permitted to invite the nuns in turn to dine with her in her own room, for their recreation, and notices of this custom sometimes occur in visitation reports; at Thicket (1309) the Prioress was enjoined to have them one by one when she dined in her room[185]; at Elstow (1421-2) the Abbess was to invite those nuns whom she knew to be specially in need of refreshment[186]; at Gracedieu (1440-1) the Prioress was ordered

that ye do the fraytour be keppede daylye ... item that no mo of your susters entende up on yowe, save onely your chapeleyn, and otherwhile, as your rule wylle, ye calle to your refeccyone oon or two of your susters to thair recreacyone[187];

at Greenfield (1519) there was a complaint that the Prioress did not invite the nuns to her table in due order, and at Stainfield it was said that she frequently invited three young nuns to her table and showed partiality to them and she was ordered to invite all the senior sisters in order[188]. In Cistercian and Cluniac houses the superior was supposed to dine in the frater and to sleep in the dorter with the other nuns, and even in Benedictine houses it was considered desirable that she should do so. But the temptation to live a more private life was irresistible, and visitation records contain many complaints that the head of the house is lax in her attendance at dorter and frater and even in following the divine services in the choir[189]. Bishops frequently made injunctions like that given by Alnwick to the Prioress of Ankerwyke in 1441:

that nyghtly ye lygge in the dormytorye to ouersee your susters how thai are there gouernede after your rewle, and that often tyme ye come to matynes, messe and other houres ... also that oftentymes ye come to the chapitere for to correcte the defautes of your susters ... also that aftere your rewle ye kepe the fraytour but if resonable cause excuse yowe there fro[190].

Sometimes a minimum number of attendances was demanded. At St Michael’s Stamford Alnwick ordered the old Prioress

that nyghtly ye lyg in the dormytorye emong your susters and that euery principale double fest and festes of xij or ix lessouns ye be at matynes, but if grete sekenes lette yowe; and that often tymes ye be at other howres and messes in the qwere, and also that ye be present in chapitres helpyng the supprioresse in correctyng and punisshyng of defautes[191].

It was further attempted to restrict the dangerous freedom of a superior’s life, by ordering her always to have with her one of the nuns as a companion and as witness to her behaviour. So Peckham ordered the Abbess of Romsey to “elect a suitable companion for herself and to change her companions yearly, to the end that her honesty should be attested by many witnesses”[192]. Usually the nun whose duty it was to accompany the superior acted as her chaplain. It will be remembered that Chaucer says of his Prioress “another Nonne with hir hadde she, That was hir chapeleyne”[193], and episcopal registers contain frequent allusions to the office. William of Wykeham gave a comprehensive account of its purpose when he wrote to the Abbess of Romsey in 1387,

since, according to the constitutions of the holy fathers, younger members must take a pattern from their rulers (prelati) and those prelates ought to have a number of witnesses to their own behaviour, we strictly order you (lady abbess) in virtue of obedience, that you annually commit the office of chaplain to one of your nuns ... and thus the nuns themselves, who shall have been with you in the aforesaid office, shall (by means of laudable instruction) be the better enabled to excel in religion, while you will be able immediately to invoke their testimony to your innocence, if (which God forbid) any crime or scandal should be imputed to you by the malice of any person[194].

So at Easebourne in 1478 the Prioress was ordered

that every week, beginning with the eldest ... she should select for herself in due course and in turns, one of her nuns as chaplain for divine services and to wait upon herself[195].

The Norwich visitations of Bishop Nykke afford further information; at Flixton discontented Dame Margaret Punder complained that the Prioress had no sister as chaplain, but slept alone as she pleased, in a chamber (cubiculo) outside the dorter, “without the continual testimony of her sisters,” and the visitors enjoined that henceforth she should have with her one sister in the office of chaplain for a witness, and especially when she slept outside the dorter[196]. At Blackborough one of the nuns complained that the Prioress had kept the same chaplain for three years[197] and at Redlingfield it was said that she never changed her chaplain[198]; the Abbess of Elstow in 1421-2[199] and the Prioress of Markyate in 1442[200] were ordered to change their chaplains every year, and this seems to have been the customary arrangement. The title of “chaplain” is sometimes found after the name of a nun in lists of the inmates of nunneries[201].

Besides the temptation to live too independent an existence the head of a house had also the temptation to abuse the considerable power given to her by the monastic rule. She was apt to govern autocratically, keeping the business of the house entirely in her own hands, instead of consulting her sisters (assembled in chapter) before making any important decision. There were constant complaints by the nuns that the Prioress kept the common seal in her own custody and performed all business without consulting them. Peckham’s letter to the Abbess of Romsey illustrates the variety of matters which might thus be settled without any reference to the nuns; she had evidently been misusing her power, for he wrote sternly:

Know that thou art not mistress of the common goods, but rather the dispenser and mother of thy community, according to the meaning of the word abbess.... We strictly command thee that thou study to transact all the more important business of the house with the convent. And by the more important business we intend those things which may entail notable expenditure in temporalities or in spiritualities, with which we wish to be included the provision of a steward; we order for the peace of the community, that H. de Chalfhunte, whom thou hast for long kept in the office of steward contrary to the will of the convent, no longer intermeddle in any way with this or with any other bailiff’s office (bajulatu) of the monastery. Moreover we make the same order concerning John le Frikiere. Let each of them, having accounted for his office before Master Philip our official ... look out for an abode elsewhere. Besides this thou shalt transact all minor business of the church according to the rule with at least twelve of the senior ladies. And because thou hast been wont to do much according to the prompting of thine own will, we adjoin to thee three coadjutresses of laudable testimony, to wit dames Margery de Verdun, Philippa de Stokes and Johanna de Revedoune, without whose counsel and attempt thou shalt not dare attempt anything pertaining to the rule of the convent in temporalities or in spiritualities. And whensoever thou shalt wittingly do the contrary in any important matter, thou shalt know thyself to be on that account suspended from the office of administration. And we mean by an important matter the provision of bailiffs of the manors and internal obedientiaries, the punishment of delinquents, all alienation of goods in gifts or presents, or in any other ways, the sending forth of nuns and the assignment of companions to those going forth, the beginning of lawsuits and all manner of church business. And if it befall that any of the aforesaid three be ill or absent, do thou receive in her stead Dame Leticia de Montegomery or Dame Agnes de Lidyerd, having called into consultation the others according to the number fixed above. And whenever thou shalt happen to fare forth upon the business of the church, thou shalt always take with thee the aforesaid three ladies, whom we have joined with thee as coadjutresses in the rule of the monastery both within and without; and if ever thou goest forth for recreation thou shalt always have with thee two; in such wise that thou shalt in no manner concern thyself to pursue any business without the three[202].

The danger of autocratic government to the convent is obvious; and it is significant that a really bad prioress is nearly always charged with having failed to communicate with her sisters in matters of business, turning all the revenues to any use that she pleased. Moreover the head of a house not only sometimes failed to consult her convent; she constantly also omitted to render an annual account of her expenditure, and by far the most common complaint at visitations was the complaint that the Prioress non reddidit compotum. At Bishop Nykke’s Norwich visitations the charge was made against the heads of Flixton, Crabhouse, Blackborough and Redlingfield[203]. At Bishop Alnwick’s Lincoln visitations it was made against the heads of Ankerwyke, Catesby, Gracedieu, Harrold, Heynings, St Michael’s Stamford, Stixwould, Studley; at Ankerwyke Dame Clemence Medforde had not accounted since her arrival at the house; at St Michael’s Stamford the Prioress had held office for twelve years and had never done so; at Studley it was said that the last Prioress who ruled for 58 years never once rendered an account during the whole of that period, nor had the present Prioress yet done so, though she had been in office for a year[204]. Sometimes the delinquent gave some excuse to the Bishop; the Prioress of Catesby said she had no clerk to write the account[205]; at Blackborough one of the nuns said that her object had been to avoid the expense of an auditor and another that she gave the convent a verbal report of the state of the house[206]. Sometimes she flatly refused, and the bishop’s repeated injunctions on the subject seem to have been of little avail; the Prioress of Flixton had not rendered account since her installation et dicit quod non vult reddere; she was superseded, but six years later the same complaint was made against her successor and the visitors ordered the latter to amend her ways, sub poena privationis, quia dixit se nolle talem reddere compotum[207]. The bishops always inquired very carefully into the administration of the conventual income and possessions by the head of each house, and invented a variety of devices for controlling her actions[208].

There remains to be considered the third pitfall into which the head of a house was liable to fall. The wise Benedictine rule contained a special warning against favouritism, for indeed human nature cannot avoid preferences and it is the hardest task of a ruler to subdue personal predilections to perfect fairness. The charge of favouritism is a fairly common one in medieval visitations. Alnwick met with an amusing case when he visited Gracedieu in 1440-1. The elder nuns complained that the old prioress did not treat all equally; some of them she favoured and others she treated very rigorously; Dame Philippa Jecke even said that corrections were made so harshly and so fussily that all charity and all happiness had gone from the house. Moreover there were two young nuns whom she called her disciples and who were always with her; these nuns had many unsuitable conversations, so their sisters thought, with the Prioress’ secular visitors; worse than this, they acted as spies upon the other nuns and told the Prioress about everything that was said and done in the convent, and then the Prioress scolded more severely than ever[209]; but her disciples could do no wrong. These nuns, indeed, were among the most voluble that Alnwick visited, and he must have remarked with a smile that the two disciples were the only ones who answered “Omnia bene”; but he did not intend to let them off without a rebuke.

“Agnes Poutrelle and Isabel Jurdane” runs the note in his Register, “who style themselves the Prioress’s disciples, are thereby the cause of quarrel between her and her sisters, forasmuch as what they hear and see among the nuns they straightway retail to the prioress. They both appeared, and, the article having been laid to their charge, expressly deny it and all things that are contained therein; wherefore they cleared themselves without compurgators; howbeit, that they may not be held suspect hereafter touching these matters or offend herein, they both sware upon the holy gospels of God that henceforth they will discover to the prioress concerning their sisters nothing whereby cause of quarrel or incentive to hatred may be furnished among them, unless they be such matters as may tend to the damage of the prioress’ body or honour”[210].

At two other houses there were complaints against the head; at Legbourne Dame Sibil Papelwyk said that the Prioress was not indifferent in making corrections, but treated some too hardly and others too favourably; and at Heynings Dame Alice Porter said that the Prioress was an accepter of persons in making corrections,

for those whom she loves she passes over lightly, and those whom she holds not in favour she harshly punishes ... and she encourages her secular serving-women, whom she believes more than her sisters, in their words, to scold the same her sisters, and for this cause quarrels do spring up between her and her sisters[211].

In neither of these cases, however, was the charge corroborated by the evidence of the other nuns. Probably the two malcontents considered themselves to have a grievance against their ruler; at Legbourne Dame Sibil’s complaint that the Prioress would not let her visit a dying parent gives a clue to her annoyance. Another charge sometimes made was that the Prioress gave more credence to the young nuns than to those who were older and wiser[212]. Injunctions that the head of a house was to show no favouritism were often made by visitors. One of Alnwick’s injunctions may stand as representative:

Also we charge yow, prioress, vnder payn of contempte and vndere the peynes writen here benethe, that in your correccions ye be sad, sowbre and indifferent, not cruelle to some and to some fauoryng agayn your rule, but that ye procede and treet your susters moderly, the qualytee and the quantitee of the persons and defautes wythe owten accepcyone of any persone euenly considerede and weyed (Legbourne)[213].

So far the position of a superior has been considered solely from the point of view of internal government, of her power over the convent and of the peculiar temptations by which she was assailed. But the head of a house was an important person, not only in her own community, but also in the circumscribed little world without her gates; though here the degree of importance which she enjoyed naturally varied with the size and wealth of her house. In the middle ages fame and power were largely local matters; roads were bad and news moved slowly and a man might live no further away than the neighbouring town and be a foreigner. The country gentry were not great travellers; occasionally they jaunted up to London, to court, or to parliament or to the law-courts; sometimes they followed the King and his lords to battles over sea or on the Scottish border; but for the most part they stayed at home and died in the bed wherein their mother bore them. The comfortable burgesses of the town travelled still less; perhaps they betook themselves upon a pilgrimage, “clothed in a liveree of a solempne and greet fraternitee,” and bearing a cook with them, lest they should lack the “chiknes with the marybones,” the “poudre-marchant tart,” the “galingale,” the “mortreux,” the “blankmanger” of their luxurious daily life; but they seldom had the Wife of Bath’s acquaintance with strange streams. And the lesser folk—peasants and artisans—looked across the chequered expanse of the common fields at a horizon, which was in truth a barrier, an impassable line drawn round the edge of the world. The fact that life was lived by the majority of men within such narrow limits gave a preeminent importance to the local magnate; and among the most local of local magnates (since a corporation never moved and never expired and never relaxed the grip of its dead fingers) must be reckoned the heads of the monastic houses. Socially in all cases, and politically when their houses were large and rich, abbots and abbesses, priors and prioresses, ranked among the great folk of the country side. They enjoyed the same prestige as the lords of the neighbouring manors and some extra deference on account of their religion. It was natural that the Prioress of a nunnery should be “holden digne of reverence.” The gentlemen whose estates adjoined her own sent their daughters to her as novices, or (if her house were poor and the Bishop not too strict) as school girls to receive their “nortelrye”; and they did not themselves scorn the discreet entertainment of her guest-chamber and a dinner of capons and wine and gossip at her hospitable board. The artisans and labourers on her land lived by her patronage. All along the muddy highroads the beggars coming to town passed word to each other that there stood a nunnery in the meadows, where they might have scraps left over from the convent meals and perhaps beer and a pair of shoes. The head of a house, indeed, was an important person from many points of view, as a neighbour, as a landlord and as a philanthropist.

The journeys which a prioress was sometimes obliged to take upon the business of the convent offered many occasions of social intercourse with her neighbours. It is, indeed, striking how great a freedom of movement was enjoyed by these cloistered women. There are constant references to journeys in account rolls. When Dame Christian Bassett, Prioress of St Mary de Pré, rode to London for the suit against her predecessor in the Common Pleas, she was accompanied on one occasion by her priest, a woman and two men; on two other occasions she took four men; and during the whole time that the suit dragged on, she was continually riding about to take counsel with great men or with lawyers and journeying to and fro between St Albans and London. On another occasion the account notes a payment

in expenses for the prioresse and the steward with their servants and for hors hyre and for the wages of them that wente to kepe the courte wyth the prioresse atte Wynge atte two tymes xvjs vd, whereof the stewards fee was that of vjs viijd; item paid to the fermour of Wynge for his expenss ixd[214].

The accounts of St Michael’s Stamford are full of items such as “in the expenses of the Prioress on divers occasions going to the Bishop, with hire of horses 3s.” “in the expenses of the Prioress going to Rockingham about our woods 1s. 2½d.,” “paid for the hire of two horses for the prioress and her expenses going to Liddington to the Bishop for a certificate 2s. 8d.,” “paid for the expenses of the Prioress at Burgh (i.e. Peterborough) for two days 5s. 8d.”; twice the Prioress went very far afield, as usual (it would appear) on legal business, for in 1377-8 there is an entry, “Item for the expenses of the Prioress and her companions at London for a month and more, in all expenses £5. 13s. 4d.” (a large sum, a long distance and a lengthy stay), and in 1409-10 there is another payment “to the Prioress for expenses in London 15s.”[215]

In spite of repeated efforts to enforce stricter enclosure upon nuns, it is evident that the head of the house rode about on the business of the convent and overlooked its husbandry in person, even where (as at St Michael’s Stamford) there was a male prior or custos charged with the ordering of its temporal affairs. The general injunction that an abbess was never to leave her house save “for the obvious utility of the monastery or for urgent necessity”[216] was capable of a very wide interpretation, and it is clear from the evidence of visitations and accounts that it was interpreted to include a great deal of temporal business outside the walls. If a house possessed a male custos the Prioress would have less occasion and less excuse for journeys, though for important affairs her presence was probably always necessary; Bishop Drokensford, appointing a custos to Minchin Barrow, warns the Prioress no longer “to intermeddle with rural business (negociis campestribus) and other secular affairs” but to leave these to the custos and to devote herself to the service of God and to the stricter enforcement of the rule[217]. But in houses where no such official existed the prioress doubtless undertook a certain amount of general estate management. One of Alnwick’s orders to the Prioress of Legbourne in 1440 was “that ye bysylly ouersee your baylly, that your husbandry be sufficyently gouernede to the avayle of your house”[218]; and in the intervals of their long struggle to keep nuns within their cloisters, the Bishops seem to have recognised the necessity for some travel on the part of the heads of houses, and to have facilitated such travel by granting them dispensations to have divine service celebrated wherever they might be. Thus in 1400 the Prioress of Haliwell obtained a licence to hear divine service in her oratory within her mansion of Camberwell, or elsewhere in the diocese, during the next two years[219], and in 1406 the Abbess of Tarrant Keynes was similarly allowed to have the service celebrated for herself and her household anywhere within the city and diocese of Salisbury[220].

It is significant that among the arguments used to oppose Henry VIII’s injunction that monks and nuns should be strictly enclosed (which was, for the nuns, only a repetition of Pope Boniface’s decree of three centuries earlier) was that of the difficulty of supervising the husbandry of a house, if its head were confined to cloistral precincts.

“Please it you to be advertised,” wrote Cecily Bodenham, the last Abbess of Wilton, to Cromwell in 1535, “that master doctor Leigh, the King’s grace’s special visitor and your deputy in this behalf, visiting of late my house, hath given injunction that not only all my sisters, but I also, should continually keep and abide within the precincts of my house: which commandment I am right well content with in regard of my own person, if your mastership shall think it so expedient; but in consideration of the administration of mine office and specially of this poor house which is in great debt and requireth much reparation and also which without good husbandry is not like, in long season, to come forward, and in consideration that the said husbandry cannot be, by my poor judgment, so well by an other overseen as by mine own person, it may please your mastership of your goodness to license me, being associate with one or two of the sad and discreet sisters of my house, to supervise abroad such things as shall be for the profit and commodity of my house. Which thing though, peradventure, might be done by other, yet I ensure you that none will do it so faithfully for my house’s profit as mine own self. Assuring your mastership that it is not, nor shall be at any time hereafter, my mind to lie forth of my monastery any night, except by inevitable necessity I cannot then return home”[221].

It is, however, very plain that the journeys taken by abbesses and prioresses were not always strictly concerned with the business of their convents, or at least they combined business most adroitly with pleasure. These ladies were of good kin and they took their place naturally in local society, when they left their houses to oversee their husbandry, to interview a bishop or a lawyer about their tithes, or quite openly to visit friends and relatives. They emerged to attend the funerals of great folk; the Prioress of Carrow attended the funeral of John Paston in 1466[222], and Sir Thomas Cumberworth in his will (1451) left the injunction:

I will that Ilke prior and priores that comes to my beryall at y^t day hafe iiis iiijd and ilke chanon and Nune xijd ... and Ilke prior and priores that comes to the xxx day (the month’s-mind) hafe vjs viijd and Ilke chanon or none that comes to the said xxx day haf xxd[223].

Sometimes they attended the deathbeds of relatives; among witnesses to the codicil to the will of Walter Skirlaw, Bishop of Durham, in 1404 was “religiosa femina Domina Johanna Priorissa de Swyna, soror dicti domini episcopi”[224]; and it was not unusual for an abbess or prioress to be made supervisor or executrix of a will[225]. Nor was the sad business of deathbeds the only share taken by these prioresses in public life. Clemence Medforde, Prioress of Ankerwyke, went to a wedding at Bromhale; and unfortunately a sheepfold, a dairy and a good timber granary chose that moment to catch fire and burn down, setting fire also to the smouldering indignation of her nuns; whence many recriminations when the Bishop came on his rounds[226]. Stranger still at times were the matters for which their friends sought their good offices. The aristocratic Isabel de Montfort, Prioress of Easebourne, was one of the ladies by whose oath Margaret de Camoys purged herself on a charge of adultery in 1295[227].

The fact that these ladies were drawn from the wealthy classes and constantly associated on terms of equality with their friends and relatives, sometimes led them to impart a most unmonastic luxury into their own lives. They came from the homes of lords like Sir John Arundel, who lost not only his life but “two and fiftie new sutes of apparell of cloth of gold or tissue,” when he was drowned off the Irish coast; or Lord Berkeley who travelled with a retinue of twelve knights, twenty-four esquires “of noble family and descent” and a hundred and fifty men-at-arms, in coats of white frieze lined with crimson and embroidered with his badge; or else of country squires and franklins, like the white-bearded gentleman of whom Chaucer says that

To liven in delyt was ever his wone,
For he was Epicurus owne sone,
······
Withoute bake mete was never his hous,
Of fish and flesh, and that so plentevous
It snewed in his hous of mete and drinke,
Of alle deyntees that men coude thinke;

or else their fathers were wealthy merchants, living in great mansions hung with arras and lighted with glass windows, rich enough to provoke sumptuary laws and to entertain kings. It is perhaps not surprising that abbesses and prioresses should have found it hard to change the way of life, which they had led before they took the veil and which they saw all around them, when they rode about in the world. Carousings, gay garments, pet animals, frivolous amusements, many guests, superfluous servants and frequent escapes to the freedom of the road, are found not only at the greater houses but even at those which were small and poor. The diverting history of the flea and the gout shows that the luxurious abbess was already a byword early in the thirteenth century.

The tale runs as follows:

The lopp (flea) and the gout on a time spake together, and among other talking either of them asked [the] other of their lodging and how they were harboured and where, the night next before. And the flea made a great plaint and said, “I was harboured in the bed of an abbess, betwixt the white sheets upon a soft mattress and there I trowed to have had good harbourage, for her flesh was fat and tender, and thereof I trowed to have had my fill. And first, when I began for to bite her, she began to cry and call on her maidens and when they came, anon they lighted candles and sought me, but I hid me till they were gone. And then I bit her again and she came again and sought me with a light, so that I was fain to leap out of the bed; and all this night I had no rest, but was chased and chevied [‘charrid’] and scarce gat away with my life.” Then answered the gout and said, “I was harboured in a poor woman’s house and anon as I pricked her in her great toe she rose and wetted a great bowl full of clothes and went with them unto the water and stood therein with me up to her knees; so that, what for cold and for holding in the water, I was nearhand slain.” And then the flea said, “This night will we change our harbourage”; and so they did. And on the morn they met again and then the flea said unto the gout, “This night have I had good harbourage, for the woman that was thine host yesternight was so weary and so irked, that I was sickerly harboured with her and ate of her blood as mickle as I would.” And then answered the gout and said unto the flea: “Thou gavest me good counsel yestereven, for the abbess underneath a gay coverlet, and a soft sheet and a delicate, covered me and nourished me all night. And as soon as I pricked her in her great toe, she wrapped me in furs, and if I hurt her never so ill she let me alone and laid me in the softest part of the bed and troubled me nothing. And therefore as long as she lives I will be harboured with her, for she makes mickle of me.” And then said the flea, “I will be harboured with poor folk as long as I live, for there may I be in good rest and eat my full and nobody let [hinder] me”[228].

The Durham man, William of Stanton, who went down St Patrick’s hole on September 20th, 1409, and was shown the souls in torment there, has much the same tale to tell. He witnessed the trial of a prioress, whose soul had come there for judgment, and

the fendis accusid hir and said that she come to religion for pompe and pride and for to have habundaunce of the worldes riches, and for ese of hir bodi and not for deuocion, mekenesse and lowenesse, as religious men and women owte to do; and the fendes said, “It is wel knowen to god and to al his angels of heven and to men dwellyng in that contree where she dwellid ynne, and all the fendes of hell, that she was more cosluer (sic) in puler [fur] weryng, as of girdelles of siluer and overgilt and ringes on hir fingers, and siluer bokeles and ouergilt on hir shone, esy lieng in nyghtes as it were [229]; and with all delicate metes and drinkes she was fedde ... and then the bisshop [her judge] enioyned hir to payne enduryng evermore til the day of dome”[230].

Our visitation documents show us many abbesses and prioresses like the gout’s hostess or the tormented lady in St Patrick’s Purgatory. In the matter of dress the accusations brought against Clemence Medforde, Prioress of Ankerwyke, in 1441, will suffice for an example:

The Prioress wears golden rings exceeding costly with divers precious stones and also girdles silvered and gilded over and silken veils, and she carries her veil too high above her forehead, so that her forehead, being entirely uncovered, can be seen of all, and she wears furs of vair.... Also she wears shifts of cloth of Reynes which costs sixteen pence the ell.... Also she wears kirtles laced with silk and tiring pins of silver and silver gilt and has made all the nuns wear the like.... Also she wears above her veil a cap of estate furred with budge. Item she has round her neck a long cord of silk, hanging below her breast and on it a gold ring with one diamond.

She confessed all except the cloth of Rennes, which she totally denied, but pleaded that she wore fur caps “because of divers infirmities in the head.” Alnwick made an injunction carefully particularising all these sins:

And also that none of yow, the prioresse ne none of the couente, were no vayles of sylke ne no syluere pynnes ne no gyrdles herneysed with syluere or golde, ne no mo rynges on your fyngres then oon, ye that be professed by a bysshope, ne that none of yow vse no lased kyrtels, but butoned or hole be fore, ne that ye vse no lases a bowte your nekkes wythe crucyfixes or rynges hangyng by thame, ne cappes of astate abowe your vayles ... and that ye so atyre your hedes that your vayles come down nyghe to your yene[231].

If anyone doubts the truth of Chaucer’s portrait of a prioress, or its satirical intent, he has only to read that incomparable observer’s words side by side with this injunction of Alnwick:

But sikerly she hadde a fair forheed;
It was almost a spanne brood, I trowe;
For, hardily, she was nat undergrowe.
Ful fetis was her cloke, as I was war.
Of smale coral aboute hir arm she bar
A peire of bedes, gauded al with grene;
And ther-on heng a broche of gold ful shene,
On which ther was first write a crowned A
And after, Amor vincit omnia.

Margaret Fairfax of Nunmonkton (1397) and the lady (her name is unknown) who ruled Easebourne in 1441 are other examples of worldly prioresses; they clearly regarded themselves as the great ladies they were by birth, and behaved like all the other great ladies of the neighbourhood. Margaret Fairfax used divers furs, including even the costly grey fur (gris)—the same with which the sleeves of Chaucer’s monk were “purfiled at the hond”; she wore silken veils and “she frequently kept company with John Munkton and invited him to feasts in her room ... and John Munkton (by whom the convent had for long been scandalised) frequently played at tables” (the fashionable game for ladies, a kind of backgammon) “with the Prioress in her room and served her with drink.” No wonder she had to sell timber in order to procure money[232]. The Prioress of Easebourne was even more frivolous; the nuns complained that the house was in debt to the amount of £40 and this principally owing to her costly expenses:

because she frequently rides abroad and pretends that she does so on the common business of the house, although it is not so, with a train of attendants much too large, and tarries long abroad, and she feasts sumptuously both when abroad and at home, and she is very choice in her dress, so that the fur trimmings of her mantle are worth a hundred shillings,

as great a scandal as Clemence Medforde’s cloth of Rennes at sixteen pence the ell. The Bishop took strong measures to deal with this worldly lady; she was deposed from all administration of the temporal goods of the priory, which administration was committed to “Master Thomas Boleyn and John Lylis, Esquire, until and so long as when the aforesaid house or priory shall be freed from debt.” It was also ordered

that the Prioress with all possible speed shall diminish her excessive household and shall only retain, by the advice and with the assent of the said John and Thomas, a household such as is merely necessary and not more. Also that the Prioress shall convert the fur trimmings, superfluous to her condition and very costly, to the discharge of the debts of the house. Also that if eventually it shall seem expedient to the said Masters Thomas and John at any time, that the Prioress should ride in person for the common business of the house, on such occasions she shall not make a lengthened stay abroad, nor shall she in the interval incur expenses in any way costly beyond what is needful, and thus when despatched to go abroad she must and ought rightly to content herself with four horses only;

and those perhaps “bothe foul and lene,” like the jade ridden by the Nonnes Preeste when Chaucer met him on the Canterbury road[233].

The charge of gadding about the country side, sometimes (as in the Prioress of Easebourne’s case) with a retinue which better beseemed the worldly rank they had abjured, was one not infrequently made against the heads of nunneries[234]. The Prioress of Stixwould was accused, in 1519, of spending the night too often outside the cloister with her secular friends and the Bishop ordered that in future she should sleep within the monastery, but might keep a private house in the precincts, for her greater refreshment and for receiving visitors[235]. The Prioress of Wroxall was ordered to stay more at home in 1323[236], and in 1303 Bishop Dalderby even found that the Prioress of Greenfield had been absent from her house for two years[237]. Even more frequent was the charge that abbesses and prioresses repaid too lavishly the hospitality which they doubtless received at neighbouring manors. Many abbesses gave that “dyscrete enterteynement,” which Henry VIII’s commissioners so much admired at Catesby[238]; but others entertained too often and too well, in the opinion of their nuns; moreover family affection sometimes led them to make provision for their kinsfolk at the cost of the house. In 1441 one of the nuns of Legbourne deposed that many kinsmen of the prioress had frequent access to the house, though she did not know whether it was financially burdened by their visits; Alnwick ordered

that ye susteyn none of your kynne or allyaunce wythe the commune godes of the house, wythe owten the hole assent of the more hole parte of the couent, ne that ye suffre your saide kynne or allyaunce hafe suche accesse to your place, where thurghe the howse shall be chargeede[239].

A similar injunction had been made at Chatteris in 1345, where the abbess was warned not to bestow the convent rents and goods unlawfully upon any of her relatives[240]. The charge was, however, most common in later times, when discipline was in all ways relaxed. At Easebourne in 1478 one of the nuns complained “that kinsmen of the prioress very often and for weeks at a time frequent the priory and have many banquets of the best food, while the sisters have them of the worst”[241]. The neighbouring nunnery of Rusper was said in 1521 to be ruinous and “greatly burdened by reason of friends and kinsmen of the lady prioress who continually received hospitality there”[242]; at Studley in 1520 there were complaints that the brother of the prioress and his wife stayed within the monastery, and ten years later it was ordered that no corrody should be given to the prioress’ mother, until more was known of her way of life[243]. At Flixton in the same year one of the nuns asserted that the mother of the prioress had her food at the expense of the house, but whether she paid anything or not was unknown; it appears, however, that she was in charge of the dairy, so that she may have been boarded in return for her services. A characteristic instance is preserved in Bishop Longland’s letter to the Prioress of Nuncoton in 1531, charging her

that frome hensforth ye do nomore burden ne chardge your house with suche a nombre of your kinnesfolks as ye haue in tymes past used. Your good mother it is meate ye haue aboute yow for your comforte and hirs bothe. And oon or ij moo of suche your saddest kynnes folke, whome ye shall thynk mooste conuenyent but passe not.... And that ye give nomore soo lyberally the goods of your monastery as ye haue doon to your brother george thomson and your brodres children, with grasing of catell, occupying your lands, making of Irneworke to pleugh, and carte, and other like of your stuff and in your forge[244].

Much information about the conduct of abbesses and prioresses may be obtained from a study of episcopal registers, and in particular of visitation documents. An analysis of Bishop Alnwick’s visitations of the diocese of Lincoln (1436-49) gives interesting results. In all but four houses there were few or no complaints against the head. Sometimes it was said that she failed to dine in the frater or to sleep in the dorter, sometimes that she was a poor financier, and in two cases the charge of favouritism was made; but the complaints at these sixteen houses were, on the whole, insignificant. The four remaining heads were unsatisfactory. The Prioress of St Michael’s Stamford was so incompetent (owing to bodily weakness) that she took little part in the common life of the house and regularly stayed away from the choir, dined and slept by herself, though the Bishop refused to give her a dispensation to do so. The administration of the temporalities of the house was committed by Alnwick to two of the nuns, but when he came back two years later one of these had had a child and the other was unpopular on account of her autocratic behaviour. The moral condition of the house (one nun was in apostasy with a man in 1440, and in 1442 and 1445 two nuns were found to have borne children) must in part be set down to the lack of a competent head[245]. The Prioress of Gracedieu was also old and incompetent; her subprioress deposed that

by reason of old age and incapacity the prioress has renounced for herself all governance of matters temporal, nor does she take part in divine service, so that she is of no use; but if she makes any corrections, she makes them with words of chiding and abuse.... She makes the secrets of their religious life common among the secular folk that sit at table with her ... and under her religious discipline almost altogether is at an end.

Other nuns gave similar evidence and all complained of her favouritism for two young nuns, whom she called her disciples. Here, as at St Michael’s Stamford, the autocratic behaviour of the nun who was in charge of the temporalities had aroused the resentment of her sisters and the whole convent was evidently seething with quarrels[246]. The Prioress of Ankerwyke, Clemence Medforde, was equally unpopular with her nuns. The ringleader against her was a certain Dame Margery Kirkby, who poured out a flood of complaints when Alnwick came to the house. The chief charge against her was that of financial mismanagement. She was obliged to admit that she received, paid and administered everything without consulting the convent, keeping the common seal in her own custody all the year round and never rendering account. She was also said to have allowed the sheepfold, dairy and granary to be burned down owing to her carelessness, one result of which was that all the grain had to stand in the church. She had alienated the plate and psalters of the house, having lent three of the latter and pawned a chalice; another chalice and a thurible had been broken up to make a drinking cup, but, as she had been unable to pay the sum demanded, the pieces remained in the hands of a monk, who had undertaken to get the work done. She was charged with having alienated timber in large quantities and with having cut down trees at the wrong time of year, so that no new wood grew again; but she denied this accusation. Another charge made against her by Margery Kirkby, that of wearing jewels and rich clothes, has already been described; she admitted it and the fault was the more grave in that she omitted to provide suitable clothes for the nuns, who went about in rags. It was also complained that she behaved with undue severity to her sisters; she made difficulties about giving them licence to see their friends; and she had a most trying habit of coming late to the services, and then making the nuns begin all over again. It is obvious that she was greatly disliked by the convent, perhaps because she was a stranger in their midst, having been imported from Bromhale to be Prioress; she evidently sought relief from the black looks of her sisters by visiting her old home, for she was away at a wedding in Bromhale when the farm buildings caught fire, and one of the missing psalters had been lent to the prioress of that place. Her régime at Ankerwyke had been fraught with ill results to the convent, for no less than six nuns had (without her knowledge, so she said) gone into apostasy; perhaps to escape from her too rigorous sway. Nevertheless one cannot help feeling that Margery Kirkby may have been a difficult person to live with; the Prioress complained that the nuns were often very easily moved against her and that Dame Margery had called her a thief to her face; and though it may have been conducive to economy that the triumphant accuser (elected by the convent) should share with the Prioress the custody of the common seal, it can hardly have been conducive to harmony[247]. At any rate poor luxury-loving Clemence died in the following year and Margery Kirkby ruled in her stead[248].

But the most serious misdemeanours of all were brought to light when Alnwick visited Catesby in 1442[249]. Here the bad example of the Prioress, Margaret Wavere, seems to have contaminated the nuns, for all of them were in constant communication with seculars and one of them had given birth to a child. The Prioress’ complaint that she dared not punish this offender is easily intelligible in the light of her own evil life. The most serious charge against her was that she was unduly intimate with a priest named William Taylour, who constantly visited the nunnery and with whom she had been accustomed to go into the gardens in the village of Catesby; and one of the younger nuns had surprised the two in flagrante delicto. She was a woman of violent temper; two nuns deposed that when she was moved to anger against any of them she would tear off their veils and drag them about by the hair, calling them beggars and harlots[250], and this in the very choir of the church; if they committed any fault she scolded and upbraided them and would not cease before seculars or during divine service; “she is very cruel and severe to the nuns and loves them not,” said one; “she is so harsh and impetuous that there is no pleasing her,” sighed another; “she sows discord among the sisters,” complained a third, “saying so-and-so said such-and-such a thing about thee, if the one to whom she speaks has transgressed.” More serious still, from the visitor’s point of view, were the threats by which she sought to prevent the nuns from revealing anything at the visitation; two of them declared that she had beaten and imprisoned those who gave evidence when Bishop Gray came to the house, and sister Isabel Benet whispered that the Prioress had boasted of having bribed the bishop’s clerk with a purse of money, to reveal everything that the nuns had said on that occasion. Her practice of compelling the nuns to perform manual labour was greatly resented—why should they

Swinken with hir handes and laboure
As Austin bit? How shal the world be served?
Lat Austin have his swink to him reserved.

It appeared, however, that they were anxious to

studie and make hemselven wood
Upon a book in cloistre alwey to poure,

or so they informed Alnwick. One Agnes Halewey complained that, though she was young and wished to be instructed in her religion and such matters, the Prioress set her to make beds and to sew and spin; another sister declared that when guests came the Prioress sent the young nuns to make up their beds, which was “full of danger and a scandal to the house”[251]; another deposed that the choir was not properly observed, because the Prioress was wont to employ the younger nuns upon her own business. There were also the usual charges of financial mismanagement and of wasting the goods of the convent; she had let buildings fall to ruin for want of repair and two sheepfolds had stood roofless for two whole years, so that the wood rotted and the lambs died of the damp. Whereas thirteen years ago, when she became prioress, the house was worth £60 a year, now it was worth a bare £50 and was in debt, owing to the bad rule of the Prioress and of William Taylour, and this in spite of the fact that she had on her entry received from Joan Catesby a sack and a half of wool and twelve marks, with which to pay debts and make repairs. She had cut down woods. She had pawned a sacramental cup and other silver pieces; the tablecloths “fit for a king” (mappalia conueniencia pro seruiendo regi), and the set of a dozen silver spoons which she had found at the priory, all had vanished away. She had not provided the nuns with clothes and money for their food for three quarters of the year, and she never rendered an account to them. Moreover all things in the house were ordered by her mother and by a certain Joan Coleworthe, who kept the keys of all the offices; and both the Prioress and her mother revealed the secrets of the chapter to people in the village. Examined upon these separate counts, the Prioress denied the majority of them; she said that she had not been cruel to the nuns or laid violent hands upon them, or called them liars and harlots or sowed discord among them; that she had not set them to make beds or to do other work; that she had never punished the nuns for giving evidence at the last visitation or bribed the Bishop’s clerk; that she had never allowed her mother and Joan to rule everything; and that she had never revealed the secrets of the chapter; on the contrary those secrets were spread abroad by the secular visitors of the nuns. She admitted her failure to render account, and gave as a reason that she had no clerk to write it for her; she said that she had pawned the cup with the consent of the convent, in order to pay tithes, and that she had cut down trees for the use of the house, partly with and partly without the consent of the house; as to the ruinous buildings, she said that some had been repaired and some not, and as to the outside debts she professed herself ready to render an account. The most serious charge of all, concerning William Taylour, she entirely denied. The Bishop thereupon gave her the next day to purge herself with four of her sisters for the things which she denied; but she was unable to produce any compurgatresses[252] and Alnwick accordingly found her guilty and obliged her to abjure all intercourse with Taylour in the future.

It might be imagined that such a case as that of Margaret Wavere was in the highest degree exceptional, likely to occur but once in a century. Unfortunately it appears to have occurred far more often. In the fifty years, between 1395 and 1445, Margaret Wavere can be matched, in different parts of the country, by no less than six other prioresses guilty of immorality and bad government; and it must be realised that this is probably an understatement, because so much evidence has been destroyed, or is as yet unexplored in episcopal registries. Of these cases two belong to the diocese of York, one (besides the case of Margaret Wavere) to the diocese of Lincoln, one to the diocese of Salisbury, one to the diocese of Winchester and one to the diocese of Norwich. Fully as bad a woman as Margaret Wavere was Eleanor, prioress of Arden, a little Yorkshire house which contained seven nuns, when it was visited by Master John de Suthwell in 1396 (during the vacancy of the see of York)[253]. The nuns were unanimous and bitter in their complaints. The Prioress kept the convent seal in her possession, sometimes for a year at a time, and did everything according to her own will without consulting her sisters. She sold woods and trees and disposed of the money as she would, and all rents were similarly received and expended by her. When she assumed office the house was in good condition, owing some five marks only, but now it owed great sums to divers people, amounting to over £16 in the detailed list given by the nuns[254], and this in spite of the fact that she had received many alms and gifts during her year of office—£18. 13s. 4d. in all; indeed the two marks which had been given her by Henry Arden’s executors that the convent might pray for his soul, had been concealed by her from the nuns, “to the deception of the said Henry’s soul, as it appeared to them.” She had pawned the goods of the house, at one time a piece of silver with a cover and a maser worth 40s., at another time a second maser and the Prioress’ seal of office itself, for which she got 5s.; even the sacred vestments were not safe in her rapacious hands and a new suit was pawned, with the result that it was soiled and worn and not yet consecrated. The walls and roof of the church and dorter and the rest of the house were in ruins; there were no waxen candles round the altar, no lights for matins or for the other canonical hours, no Paschal candles; when she first took office she found ten pairs of sheets of good linen cloth (cloth of “lake” and “inglyschclath,” to wit) and now they were worn out and in all her time not one new pair had been made; the nuns had only two sacred albs and one of them had been turned to secular uses, viz. to “bultyng mele,” and on several occasions had been found on the beds of laymen in the stable. The allowances of bread and beer due to the nuns were inadequately and unpunctually paid; sometimes she would withdraw them altogether and the sisters would be reduced to drinking water[255]. She was not even a good bargainer, for by her negligence a bushel of corn was bought by an agreement for 11d., when it could have been had in the public market for 9d., 8d. or 7d. Domineering she was, too, and sent three young nuns out haymaking, so that they did not get back before nightfall and divine service could not be said until then; and she provoked secular boys and laymen to chatter in the cloister and church in contempt of the nuns. There were graver charges against her in connection with a certain married man, John Bever, with whom she was wont to go abroad, resting in the same house by night; and once they lay alone within the priory, in the Prioress’ chamber by night; and during the whole summer she slept alone in her principal room outside the dorter and was much suspected on account of John Bever. It will be noticed that this case presents many points of similarity with that of Margaret Wavere, the chief difference being that at Arden the Prioress alone seems to have been in grave fault; she made no accusation against her nuns, save that they talked in the choir and in the offices and that the sacrist was negligent about ringing the bell for divine service. Nor had they anything to say against each other. The other Yorkshire case came to light in 1444, when Archbishop Kemp stated that at his visitation of the Priory of Wykeham very grave defaults and crimes had been detected against the Prioress, Isabella Westirdale, “who after she had been raised to that office had been guilty of incontinence with many men, both within and outside the monastery”; she was deprived and sent to do penance at Nunappleton.

After the case of Eleanor of Arden the next scandal concerning a prioress was discovered in 1404 at Bromhale in Berkshire. The nuns complained in that year to the Archbishop of Canterbury that the Prioress Juliana had for twenty years led an exceedingly dissolute life and of her own temerity and without their consent had usurped the rule of Prioress, in which position she had wasted, alienated, consumed and turned to her own nefarious uses the chalices, books, jewels, rents and other property of the house[256]. The next year an even more serious case occurred at Wintney in Hampshire, if the charges contained in a papal commission of 1405 were true[257]. The Archdeacon of Taunton and a canon of Wells were empowered to visit the house:

the Pope having heard that Alice, who has been Prioress for about twenty years, has so dilapidated its goods, from which the Prioress for the time being is wont to administer to the nuns their food and clothing, that it is 200 marks in debt; that she specially cherishes two immodest nuns one of whom, her own (suam) sister, had apostatized and left the monastery and, remaining in the world, had had children, the other like the first in evil life and lewdness but not an apostate, and feeds and clothes them splendidly, whilst she feeds the other honest nuns meanly and for several years past has not provided them with clothing; that she has long kept and keeps Thomas Ferring, a secular priest, as companion at board and in bed (in commensalem et sibi contubernalem), who has long slept and still sleeps, contrary to the institutes of the order, within the monastery, beneath the dorter, in a certain chamber (domo), in which formerly no secular had ever been wont to sleep and in which the said priest and Alice meet together at will by day and night, to satisfy their lust (pro explenda libidine), on account of which and other enormous and scandalous crimes, which Alice has committed and still commits, there is grave and public scandal against her in those parts, to the great detriment of the monastery.

If these things were found to be true the commissioners were ordered to deprive the Prioress. In 1427 there occurred another very serious case of misconduct in a Prioress, which (as at Catesby) seems to have tainted the whole flock and is a still further illustration of the fact that a bad prioress often meant an ill-conducted house. By her own admission Isabel Hermyte, Prioress of Redlingfield in Suffolk, had never been to confession nor observed Sundays and principal double feasts since the last visitation, two years before. She and Joan Tates, a novice, had not slept in the dorter with the other nuns, but in a private chamber. She had laid violent hands on Agnes Brakle on St Luke’s day; and she had been alone with Thomas Langeland, bailiff, in private and suspicious places, to wit in a small hall with closed windows “and sub heggerowes.” Nor was the material condition of the house safer in her hands. There were only nine nuns instead of the statutory number of thirteen and only one chaplain instead of three; no annual account had been rendered, obits had been neglected, goods alienated and trees cut down without the knowledge and consent of the convent. Altogether she confessed that she was neither religious nor honest in conversation and the effect of her conduct upon her charges was only too apparent, for the novice Joan Tates confessed to incontinence and asserted that it had been provoked by the bad example of the Prioress. The result of this exposure was the voluntary resignation of the guilty woman, in order to save a scandal, and her banishment to the priory of Wix; the whole convent was ordered to fast on bread and beer on Fridays, and Joan Tates was to go in front of the solemn procession of the convent on the following Sunday, wearing no veil and clad in white flannel[258].

It is the darker side of convent life that these ancient scandals call up before our eyes. The system produced its saints as well as its sinners; we have only to remember the German nunnery of Helfta to be sure of that. The English nunneries of the later middle ages produced no great mystics, but there have come down to us word-pictures of at least two heads of houses worthy to rank with the best abbesses of any age; not women of genius, but good, competent housewives, careful in all things of the welfare of their nuns, practical as well as pious. The famous description of the Abbess Euphemia of Wherwell (1226-57) is too well-known to be quoted here in full[259]:

“It is most fitting,” says her convent chartulary, “that we should always perpetuate the memory, in our special prayers and suffrages, of one who ever worked for the glory of God, and for the weal of both our souls and bodies. For she increased the number of the Lord’s handmaids in this monastery from forty to eighty, to the exaltation of the worship of God. To her sisters, both in health and sickness, she administered the necessaries of life with piety, prudence, care and honesty. She also increased the sum allowed for garments by 12d. each. The example of her holy conversation and charity, in conjunction with her pious exhortations and regular discipline, caused each one to know how, in the words of the Apostle, to possess her vessel in sanctification and honour. She also, with maternal piety and careful forethought, built, for the use of both sick and sound, a new and large farmery away from the main buildings and in conjunction with it a dorter and other necessary offices. Beneath the farmery she constructed a watercourse, through which a stream flowed with sufficient force to carry off all refuse that might corrupt the air. Moreover she built there a place set apart for the refreshment of the soul, namely a chapel of the Blessed Virgin, which was erected outside the cloister behind the farmery. With the chapel she enclosed a large place, which was adorned on the north side with pleasant vines and trees. On the other side, by the river bank, she built offices for various uses, a space being left in the centre, where the nuns are able from time to time to enjoy the pure air. In these and in other numberless ways, the blessed mother Euphemia provided for the worship of God and the welfare of her sisters.”

Nor was she less prudent in ruling secular business: “she also so conducted herself with regard to exterior affairs,” says the admiring chronicler, “that she seemed to have the spirit of a man rather than of a woman.” She levelled the court of the abbey manor and built a new hall, and round the walled court “she made gardens and vineyards and shrubberies in places that were formerly useless and barren and which now became both serviceable and pleasant”; she repaired the manor-houses at Tufton and at Middleton; when the bell tower of the dorter fell down, she built a new one “of commanding height and of exquisite workmanship”; and one of the last acts of her life was to take down the unsteady old presbytery and to lay with her own hands, “having invoked the grace of the Holy Spirit, with prayers and tears,” the foundation stone of a new building, which she lived to see completed:

These and other innumerable works our good superior Euphemia performed for the advantage of the house, but she was none the less zealous in works of charity, gladly and freely exercising hospitality, so that she and her daughters might find favour with One Whom Lot and Abraham and others have pleased by the grace of hospitality. Moreover, because she greatly loved to honour duly the House of God and the place where His glory dwells, she adorned the church with crosses, reliquaries, precious stones, vestments and books.

Finally, she “who had devoted herself when amongst us to the service of His house and the habitation of His glory, found the due reward for her merits with our Lord Jesus Christ,” and died amid the blessings of her sisters.

Less famous is the name of another mighty builder, who ruled, some two centuries later, the little Augustinian nunnery of Crabhouse in Norfolk[260]. Joan Wiggenhall was (as has already been pointed out) a lady of good family and had influential friends; she was installed as Prioress in 1420, and began to build at once. In her first year she demolished a tumble-down old barn and caused it to be remade; this cost £45. 9s. 6d., irrespective of the timber cut upon the estate and of the tiles from the old barn, but the friends of the house helped and Sir John Ingoldesthorpe gave £20 “to his dyinge,” and the Archdeacon of Lincoln 10 marks. Cheered by this, the Prioress continued her operations; in her second year she persuaded the Prior of Shouldham to co-operate with her in roofing the chancel of Wiggenhall St Peter’s, towards which she paid 20 marks, and she also made the north end of her own chamber for 10 marks, and in her third year she walled the chancel of St Peter’s and completed the south end of her chamber. Then she began the great work of her life, the church of the nunnery itself, and for three years this was the chief topic of conversation in all the villages round, and the favourite charity of all her neighbours:

“Also in the iiij yere of the same Jone Prioresse,” runs the account in Crabhouse Register, “Ffor myschefe that was on the chyrche whiche myght not be reparid but if it were newe maid, with the counseyle of here frendys dide it take downe, trostynge to the helpe of oure Lorde and to the grete charite of goode cristen men and so with helpe of the persone before seyde (her cousin, Edmund Perys, the parson of Watlington) and other goode frendes as schal be shewyd aftyrward, be the steringe of oure Lorde and procuringe of the person forseyde sche wrowght there upon iij yere and more contynuali and made it, blessyd be God, whiche chirche cost cccc mark, whereof William Harald that lithe in the chapel of Our Lady payde for the ledynge of the chirch vij skore mark. And xl li. payede we for the roofe, the whiche xl li. we hadde of Richard Steynour, Cytesen of Norwiche, and more hadde we nought of the good whiche he bequeathe us on his ded-bedde in the same Cyte, a worthly place clepyd Tomlonde whiche was with holde fro us be untrewe man his seketoures. God for his mekyl mercy of the wronge make the ryghte.”

The indignant complaint of the nuns, balked of their “worthly place clepyd Tomlonde,” is very typical; there was always an executor in hell as the middle ages pictured it, and a popular proverb affirmed that “too secuturs and an overseere make thre theves”[261]. In this case, however, other friends were ready to make up for the deficiencies of those untrue men:

And the stallis with the reredose, the person beforeseyde payde fore xx pounde of his owne goode. And xxvi mark for ij antiphoneres whiche liggen in the queer. And xx li. Jon Lawson gaf to the chirche. And xx mark we hadde for the soule of Jon Watson. And xx mark for the soule of Stevyn York to the werkys of the chirche and to other werkys doon before. And xxi mark of the gylde of the Trinite which Neybores helde in this same chirche. The glasynge of the chirche, the scripture maketh mencyon; onli God be worshipped and rewarde to all cristen soules.

After the death of the good parson of Watlington, another cousin of the Prioress, Dr John Wiggenhall, came to her aid, and in her ninth year, she set to work once more upon the church, and she

arayed up the chirche and the quere, that is for to seye, set up the ymagis and pathed the chirche and the quere, and stolid it and made doris, which cost x pownde, the veyl of the chirche with the auterclothis in sute cost xls.[262]

During the building of the church the Prioress had not neglected other smaller works and a long chamber on the east side of the hall was built; but it was not until her tenth year, when the building and “arraying” of the church was finished, that she had time and money to do much; then she made some necessary repairs to the barn at St Peter’s and built a new malt-house, which cost ten marks. In her twelfth year “for mischeef that was on the halle she toke it downe and made it agen”; but alas, on the Tuesday next after Hallowmas 1432, a fire broke out and burned down the new malt-house, and another malt-house with a solar above, full of malt. This misfortune (so common in the middle ages) only put new heart into Joan Wiggenhall:

thanne the same prioresse in here xiij yere with the grace of owre Lord God and with the helpe of mayster Johnne Wygenale beforseyd, and with helpe of good cristen men which us relevid made a malthouse with a Doffcote, that now ovyr the Kylne, whiche house is more than eyther of thoo that brent. And was in the werkynge fulli ij yere tyl her xiiij yere were passyd out, which cost l pounde. Also the same prioresse in her xv yere, sche repared the bakhous an inheyned [heightened] it and new lyngthde it, which cost x marc. And in the same yere she heyned the stepul and new rofyd it and leyde therupon a fodyr of led whiche led, freston, tymbur and werkmanshipe cost x pounde. Also in the same yere sche made the cloystir on the Northe syde and slattyd it, and the wal be the stepul, which cost viij li.

Then she began her greatest work, after the building of the church:

Also in the xvj yere of the occupacion of the same prioresse (1435) the dortoure that than was, as fer forthe as we knowe, the furste that was set up on the place, was at so grete mischeef and at the gate-downe [falling down], the Prioresse dredyinge perisschyng of her sistres whiche lay thereinne took it downe for drede of more harmys and no more was doon thereto that yere, but a mason he wande[263] with hise prentise, and in that same yere the same prioresse made the litil soler on the sowthe ende of here chaumber stondyng in to the paradise, and the wal stondinge on the weste syde of the halle, with the lityl chaumber stondynge on the southe syde, and the Myllehouse with alle the small houses dependynge there upon, the Carthouse, and the Torfehouse, and ij of stabulys and a Beerne stondynge at a tenauntry of oure on the Southe syde of Nycolas Martyn. Alle these werkys of this yere with the repare drewe iiij skore mark. In the xvij yere of the same Prioresse, be the help of God and of goode cristen men sche began the grounde of the same dortoure that now stondith, and wrought thereupon fulli vij yere betymes as God wolde sende hir good.

In the twenty-fourth year of her reign Joan Wiggenhall saw the last stone laid in its place and the last plank nailed. The future was hid from her happy eyes; she could not foresee the day, scarcely a century later, when the walls she had reared so carefully should stand empty and forlorn, and the molten lead of the roof should be sold by impious men. She must have said with Solomon, as she looked upon her great church, “I have surely built thee an house to dwell in, a settled place for thee to abide in for ever”; and no flash of tragic prescience showed her the sheep feeding peacefully over the spot where its “heyned stepul” pointed to the sky. In 1451 she departed to the heaven she knew best, a house of many mansions; and her nuns, who for four and twenty years had lived a proud but uncomfortable life in clouds of sawdust and unending noise, buried her (one hopes) under a seemly brass in her church.

The mind preserves a pleasant picture of Euphemia of Wherwell and of Joan Wiggenhall, when Margaret Wavere, Eleanor of Arden, Isabel Hermyte and the rest are only dark memories, not willingly recalled. Which is as it should be. The typical prioress of the middle ages, however, was neither Euphemia nor Margaret. As one sees her, after wading through some hundred and fifty visitation reports or injunctions, she was a well-meaning lady, doing her best to make two ends of an inadequate income meet, but not always provident; ready for a round sum in hand to make leases, sell corrodies, cut down woods and to burden her successor as her predecessor had burdened her. She found it difficult to carry out the democratic ideal of convent life in consulting her sisters upon matters of business; she knew, like all rulers, the temptation to be an autocrat; it was so much quicker and easier to do things herself: “What, shulde the yong nunnes gyfe voices? Tushe, they shulde not gyfe voices!” So she kept the common seal and hardly ever rendered an account. She found that her position gave her the opportunity to escape sometimes from that common life, which is so trying to the temper; and she did not always keep the dorter and the frater as she should. She was rarely vicious, but nearly always worldly; she could not resist silks and furs, little dogs such as the ladies who came to stay in her guest-room cherished, and frequent visits to her friends. When she was a strong character the condition of her house bore witness, for good or evil, to her strength; when she was weak disorder was sure to follow. Very often she won a contented “omnia bene” from her nuns, when the Bishop came; at other times, she said that they were disobedient and they said that she was harsh, or impotent, or addicted to favourites. In the end it is to Chaucer that we turn for her picture; as the Bishops found her, so he saw her, aristocratic, tender-hearted, worldly, taking pains to “countrefete chere of court,” smiling “ful simple and coy” above her well-pinched wimple; a lady of importance, attended by a nun and three priests, spoken to with respect and reverence by the not too mealy-mouthed host (no “by Corpus Dominus,” or “cokkes bones,” or “tel on a devel wey!” for her, but “cometh neer my lady prioresse,” and “my lady prioresse, by your leve”); clearly enjoying a night at the Tabard and some unseemly stories on the road (though her own tale was exquisite and fitting to her state). Religious? perhaps; but save for her singing the divine service “entuned in her nose ful semely” and for her lovely address to the Virgin, Chaucer can find but little to say on the point:

But for to speken of hir conscience
She was so charitable and so pitous—

that she would weep over a mouse in a trap or a beaten puppy! For charity and pity we must go to the poor Parson, not to friar or monk or nun. A good ruler of her house? doubtless; but when Chaucer met her the house was ruling itself somewhere at the “shires ende.” The world was full of fish out of water in the fourteenth century, and, by sëynt Loy, Madame Eglentyne (like Dan Piers) held a certain famous text “nat worth an oistre.” So we take our leave of her—characteristically, on the road to Canterbury.

CHAPTER III

WORLDLY GOODS

In many ways the most valuable general account of monastic property at the close of the middle ages is to be found in the great Valor Ecclesiasticus, a survey of all the property of the church, compiled in 1535 for the assessment of the tenth lately appropriated by the King[264]. It is true that only 100 out of the 126 nunneries then in existence are described with any detail and that the amount of detail given varies very much for different localities. Nevertheless the record is of the highest importance, for in order to assess the tax the gross income of each house is given (often with the sources from which it is drawn, classified as temporalities and spiritualities) and the net income, on which the tenth was assessed, is obtained by subtracting from the gross income all the necessary charges upon the house, payments of synodals and procurations, rents due to superior lords, alms and obits which had to be maintained under the will of benefactors, and the fees of the regular receivers, bailiffs, auditors and stewards.

Such a survey as the Valor Ecclesiasticus, though valuable, could not by its nature give more than the most general indication of the main classes of receipts and expenditure of the nunneries. The accounts kept by the nuns themselves, on the other hand, are a mine of detailed information on these subjects. Every convent was supposed to draw up an annual balance sheet, to be read before the nuns assembled in chapter, and though it was a constant source of complaint against the head of a house that she failed to do so, nevertheless enough rolls have survived to make it clear that the practice was common. Indeed it would have been impossible to run a community for long without keeping accounts. The finest set of these rolls which has survived from a medieval nunnery is that of St Michael’s Stamford, in Northamptonshire[265]. There are twenty-four rolls, beginning with one for the year 32-3 Edward I, and ranging over the greater part of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A study of them enables the material life of the convent for two centuries to be reconstructed and gives a vivid picture of its difficulties, for though the nuns only once ended the year without a deficit and a list of debts, yet the debts owed by various creditors to them were often larger than those which they owed.

A very good series also exists for St Mary de Pré, near St Albans, kept by the wardens 1341-57 and by the Prioress 1461-93[266]; and there is in the Record Office a valuable little book of accounts kept by the treasuresses of Gracedieu (Belton) during the years 1414-18, which has been made familiar to many readers by the use made of it by Cardinal Gasquet in English Monastic Life[267]. Very full and interesting accounts have also survived from St Radegund’s Cambridge (1449-51, 1481-2)[268], Catesby (1414-45)[269] and Swaffham Bulbeck (1483-4)[270]. These are all prioresses’ or treasuresses’ accounts of the total expenditure of the different houses; but there are in existence also a few obedientiaries’ accounts, chambresses’ accounts from St Michael’s Stamford and Syon and cellaresses’ accounts from Syon[271]. An analysis of these accounts shows, better than any other means of information, the various sources from which a medieval nunnery drew its income, and the chief classes of expenditure which it had to meet. It will therefore be illuminating to consider in turn the credit and debit side of a monastic balance sheet.

It is perhaps unnecessary to postulate that since monastic houses differed greatly in size and wealth, the sources of their income would differ accordingly. A very poor house might be dependent upon the rents and produce of one small manor; a large house sometimes had estates all over England. The entire income of Rothwell in Northamptonshire was derived from one appropriated rectory, valued in the Valor at £10. 10s. 4d. gross and at £5. 19s. 8d. net per annum[272]. The Black Ladies of Brewood (Staffs.) had an income of £11. 1s. 6d. derived from demesne in hand, rents and alms[273]. On the other hand Dartford in Kent held lands in Kent, Surrey, Norfolk, Suffolk, Wiltshire, Wales and London[274], the Minoresses without Aldgate held property in London, Hertfordshire, Kent, Berkshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Norfolk and the Isle of Wight[275]. The splendid Abbey of Syon held land as far afield as Lancashire and Cornwall, scattered over twelve counties[276]. Similarly the proportionate income derived from house-rents and land-rents would differ with the geographical situation of the nunnery. London convents, for instance, would draw a large income from streets of houses, whereas a house in the distant dales of Yorkshire would be dependent upon agriculture. At the time of the Valor twenty-two nunneries were holding urban tenements in fifteen towns, amounting in total value to £1076. 0s. 7d., but of this sum £969. 11s. 10d. was held by the seven houses in London[277]. With this proviso the conclusion may be laid down that the money derived from the possession of agricultural land, and in particular the rents paid by tenants in freehold, copyhold, customary and leasehold land, was the mainstay of the income paid into the hands of the treasuress.

A word may perhaps be said as to the method by which the nuns administered their estates. Miss Jacka distinguishes two main types of administration, discernible in the Valor:

The London houses, except Syon and a number, chiefly, of the smaller nunneries scattered throughout the country, had a single staff of officials, steward, bailiff, auditor, receiver; their revenues were drawn from scattered rents and other profits rather than from entire manors. There seem to have been about forty houses of this type in addition to the London houses. The second group comprises the great country nunneries in the south of England, including Syon and a number of smaller houses whose revenues were reckoned under the headings of various manors each managed by its own bailiff.... The staff of Syon may be taken as an unusually complete and elaborate example of the usual system, whose principle appears worked out on a smaller scale, in the case of smaller nunneries. The nuns had in the first place what may be called a central staff, a steward at £3. 6s. 8d., a steward of the hospice at £23. 15s. 4d., a general receiver at £19. 13s. 4d. and an auditor at £8. 3s. 4d. Their lands in Middlesex were managed by their steward of Isleworth, Lord Wyndesore, whose fee was £3, a steward of courts at £1 and a bailiff at £2. 13s. 4d., who had a separate fee of 13s. 4d. as bailiff of the chapel of the Angels at Brentford. Their extensive possessions in Sussex were managed by a receiver and a steward of courts for the whole county, whose fees were £3 and £2 respectively, by four stewards for various districts with fees from £1. 6s. 8d. down to 13s. 4d. and by 13 bailiffs arranged under the stewards, of whom one received £2. 3s. 4d. and the rest from £1 to 6s. 8d. Their one manor in Cambridgeshire was managed by a steward at 13s. 4d. and a bailiff at £1. With the central staff was reckoned a receiver for Somerset, Dorset and Devon, whose fee was £6. 13s. 4d.; the ladies held no temporalities in Somerset; in Dorset they had a chief steward, £1. 6s. 8d., a steward of courts, 6s. 8d., and a bailiff, 11s., and their large possessions in Devon were managed by two stewards (£2. 13s. 4d.), two stewards of courts (13s. 4d., 6s. 8d.), six bailiffs, with fees ranging from 4s. to £2 and an auditor, 3s. 4d. They received £100 a year from unspecified holdings in Lancashire and had there a steward of courts at £1. Their possessions in Lincolnshire were mainly spiritual, but they employed a receiver, whose fee was 13s. 4d. In Gloucestershire they had large possessions. The two chief stewards of Cheltenham received each £3. 6s. 8d. and the chief steward of Minchinhampton £2. Two stewards of courts each received £1. 6s. 8d. and the two stewards at Slaughter £1. Three bailiffs received £2. 13s. 4d., £2 and 13s. 4d., with livery. A bailiff and receiver of profits arising from the sale of woods was paid £4 and the steward of the abbot of Cirencester was paid 6s. 8d. for holding the abbess’ view of frankpledge. In Wiltshire the nuns held a manor and a rectory and paid £1 to a steward for both: they seem to have been leased. In counties where all their possessions were spiritual they had no local officials; in Somerset both the rectories they held were leased and in Kent, although that is not stated, it is suggested by the round sums which were received (£26. 13s. 4d., £10, £20). The leasing of property for a fixed sum of course made the administration of it very much simpler. All the temporalities of the Minoresses without Aldgate were leased and their staff consisted of a chief steward, Lord Wyndesore, whose fee was £2. 13s. 4d., a receiver at £4. 5s. 10d. and an auditor at 13s. 4d.[278]

A closer analysis of the chief sources of income of a medieval nunnery, as they may be distinguished in the Valor and in various account rolls, is now possible. They may be classified as follows: Temporalities, comprising: (1) rents from lands and houses, (2) perquisites of courts, fairs, mills, woods and other manorial perquisites, (3) issues of the manor, i.e. sale of farm produce, (4) miscellaneous payments from boarders, gifts, etc.; and Spiritualities, comprising (5) tithes from appropriated benefices, alms, mortuaries, etc. The distinction between temporalities and spiritualities is a technical one and there was sometimes little difference between the sources of the two kinds of income, but the temporal revenues were usually larger[279].

(1) Rents from lands and houses. A house which possessed several manors besides its home farm would either lease them to tenants (“farm out the manor” as it was called), or put in bailiffs, who were responsible for working the estates and handing over to the convent the profits of their agriculture, and who may also have collected rents where no separate rent collector was employed. For besides the profits arising from the demesne land (of which some account will be given below), the convent derived a much more considerable income from the rents of all tenants (whatever the legal tenure by which they held) who held their land at a money rent. The number of such tenants was likely to increase by the commutation of customary services for money payments; since, except in the particular manor or manors wherein the produce of the demesne was reserved for the actual consumption of the community, it was to the interest of a convent to lease a great part of the demesne land to tenants at a money rent and so save itself the trouble of farming the land under a bailiff[280]. In addition to these rents from agricultural land an income was sometimes derived, as has already been pointed out, from the rent of tenements in towns.

In most account rolls a careful distinction was drawn between “rents of assize” and “farms.” The former were the payments due from the tenants (whether freehold or customary) who held their holdings at a money rent; these rents were collected by the different collectors of the nunnery or brought to the treasurers by the tenants themselves. “Farms” were leases, i.e. payments for land or houses which were held directly in demesne by the nunnery, but instead of being worked by a bailiff, or occupied by the household, were “farmed out” at an annual rent. A “farmer” might thus hold in farm an entire manor, and, for the payment of an annual sum to the nuns, he would have the right to the produce of the demesne and to the rents of rent-paying tenants. He might be quite a small person and hold in farm only a few acres of the demesne (in addition perhaps to an ordinary tenant’s holding on the manor). He might hold the farm of a mill, or a stable, or a single house[281]. In any case he paid a rent to the nuns and made what he could out of his “farm”; while they much preferred these regular payments to the trouble of superintending the cultivation of distant lands, in an age when communication was difficult and slow.

Nevertheless the rents were not always easy to collect, for all the diligence of the bailiff and of the various rent-collectors[282]. There are some illuminating entries in the accounts of St Radegund’s Cambridge. In 1449-50 the indignant treasuress debits herself with “one tenement in Walleslane lately held by John Walsheman for 6s. 8d. a year, the which John fled out of this town within the first half of this year, leaving nought behind him whereby he could be distrained save 7d., collected therefrom”; and in the following year she again debits herself “for part of a tenement lately held by John Webster for 12s. a year, whence was collected only 7s. for that the aforesaid John Webster did flit [literally, devolavit] by night, leaving naught behind him whereby he could be distrained.” Yet these nuns seem to have been indulgent landlords; in this year the treasuress debits herself “for a tenement lately held by Richard Pyghtesley, because it was too heavily charged before, 2s. 3d., ... and for a portion of the rent owed by Stephen Brasyer on account of the poverty and need of the said Stephen, by grace of the lady Prioress this time only, 15d.” and there are other instances of lowered rents in these accounts[283]. Other account rolls sometimes make mention of meals and small presents of money given to tenants bringing in their rents.

(2) Various manorial perquisites and grants. Besides the rents from land and houses the position of a religious community as lord of a manor gave it the right to various other financial payments. Of these the most important were the perquisites of the manorial courts. These varied very much according to the extent and number of the liberties which had been granted to any particular house. To Syon, beloved of kings, vast liberties had been granted (notably in 1447), so that the tenants upon its estates were almost entirely exempt from royal justice. The abbess and convent had

view of frankpledge, leets, lawe-days and wapentakes for all people, tenants resiant and other resiants aforesaid, in whatsoever places, by the same abbess or her successors to be limited, where to them it shall seem most expedient within the lordships, lands, rents, fees and possessions aforesaid, to be holden by the steward or other officers.

They had the assizes of bread and ale and wine and victuals and weights and measures. They had all the old traditional emoluments of justice, which lords had striven to obtain since the days before the conquest,

soc, sac, infangentheof, outfangentheof, waif, estray, treasure-trove, wreck of the sea, deodands, chattels of felons and fugitives, of outlaws, of waive, of persons condemned, of felons of themselves [suicides], escapes of felons, year day waste and estrepement and all other commodities, forfeitures and profits whatsoever.

They had the right to erect gallows, pillory and tumbrel for the punishment of malefactors. They even had

all issues and amercements, redemptions and forfeitures as well before our [the king’s] heirs and successors, as before the chancellor, treasurer and barons of our exchequer, the justices and commissioners of us, our heirs or successors whomsoever, made, forfeited or adjudged ... of all the people ... in the lordships, lands, tenements, fees and possessions aforesaid[284].

In the eyes of the middle ages justice had one outstanding characteristic: it filled the pocket of whoever administered it. “Justitia magnum emolumentum est,” as the phrase went. All the manifold perquisites of justice, whether administered in her own or in the royal courts, went to the abbess of Syon if any of her own tenants were concerned. It is no wonder that out of a total income of £1944. 11s. 5¼d. the substantial sum of £133. 0s. 6d. was derived from perquisites of courts[285].

Few houses possessed such wholesale exemption from royal justice, but all possessed their manorial courts, at which tenants paid their heriots in money or in kind as a death-duty to the lord, or their fines on entering upon land, and at which justice was done and offenders amerced (or fined as we should now call it). Most houses possessed the right to hold the assize of bread and ale and to fine alewives who overcharged or gave short measure. Some possessed the right to seize the chattels of fugitives, and the abbess of Wherwell was once involved in a law suit over this liberty, which she held in the hundred of Mestowe and which was disputed by the crown officials. One Henry Harold of Wherwell had killed his wife Isabel and fled to the church of Wherwell and the Abbess had seized his chattels to the value of £35. 4s. 8d. by the hands of her reeve[286]. A less usual privilege was that of the Abbess of Marham, who possessed the right of proving the wills of those who died within the precincts or jurisdiction of the house[287]. The courts at which these liberties were exercised were held by the steward of the nunnery, who went from manor to manor to preside at their sittings; but sometimes the head of the house herself would accompany him. Christian Bassett, the energetic Prioress of Delapré (St Albans), not content with journeying up to London for a lawsuit, went twice to preside at her court at Wing[288].

In rather a different class from grants of jurisdictional liberties were special grants of free warren, felling of wood and fairs. Monasteries which possessed lands within the bounds of a royal forest were not allowed to take game or to cut down wood there without a special licence from the crown; but such grants to exercise “free warren” (i.e. take game) and to fell wood were often granted in perpetuity, as an act of piety by the king, or for special purposes. The Abbess of Syon had free warren in all her possessions, and in 1489 it was recorded that the Abbess of Barking had free chase within the bailiwick of Hainault to hunt all beasts of the forest in season, except deer, and free chase within the forest and without to hunt hares and rabbits and fox, badger, cat and other vermin[289]. Grants of wood were more often made on special occasions; thus in 1277 the keeper of the forest of Essex was ordered to permit the Abbess of Barking and her men to fell oak-trees and oak-trunks in her demesne woods within the forest to the value of £40[290], while in 1299 the Abbess of Wilton was given leave to fell sixty oaks in her own wood within the bounds of the forest of Savernake, in order to rebuild some of her houses, which had been burnt down[291]. The grant of fairs and markets was even more common and more lucrative, for the convent profited not only from the rents of booths and from the entrance-tolls, but not infrequently from setting up a stall of its own, for the sale of spices and other produce[292]. Henry III granted the nuns of Catesby a weekly market every Monday within their manor of Catesby and a yearly fair for three days in the same place; and almost any monastic chartulary will provide other instances of such rights[293].

The majority of the special perquisites which have been described would originate in special grants from the Crown; but it must be remembered that every manorial lord could count on certain perquisites ex officio, for which no specific grant was required. For his manor provided him with more than agricultural produce on the one hand and rents and farms on the other. Through the manor court he also received certain payments due to him from all free and unfree tenants, in particular those connected with the transfer of land, the heriot and the fines already mentioned. From unfree tenants he could also claim various other dues, the mark of their status; merchet, when their daughters married off the estate, leyrwite, when they enjoyed themselves without the intermediary of that important ceremony, a fine when they wished to send their sons to school and a number of other customary payments, exacted at the manor court and varying slightly from manor to manor. Moreover the tolls from the water- or wind-mill at which villeins had to grind their corn all went to swell the purse of the lord[294]. This is not the place for a detailed description of manorial rights, which can be studied in any text-book of economic history[295]; a word must, however, be said about the mortuary system, which did not a little to enrich the medieval church.

When a peasant died the lord of the manor had often the right to claim his best animal or garment as a mortuary or heriot, and by degrees there grew up a similar claim to his second best possession on the part of the parish priest.

“It was presumed,” says Mr Coulton, “that the dead man must have failed to some extent in due payment of tithes during his lifetime and that a gift of his second best possession to the Church would therefore be most salutary to his soul”[296].

From these claims, partly manorial and partly ecclesiastical, religious houses benefited very greatly, and their accounts sometimes mention mortuary payments. The Prioress of Catesby in the year 1414-15 records how her live stock was enriched by one horse, one mare and two cows coming as heriots, while she received a payment of 20s. for two oxen coming as heriot of Richard Sheperd[297]. In the chartulary of Marham is recorded a mortuary list of sixteen people, who died within the jurisdiction of the house, and the mortuaries vary from a sorrel horse and a book to numerous gowns and mantles[298]. The system was obviously capable of great abuse, and Mr Coulton considers that it did much to precipitate the Reformation, for the unhappy peasant resented more and more bitterly the greed of the church, which chose his hour of sorrow to wrest from him the best of his poor possessions; it must have seemed hard to him that his horse or his ox should be driven away, if he could not buy it back, to the well-stocked farm of a community which was vowed to poverty, far harder than if his lord were a layman, as free as he was himself to accumulate possessions without soiling the soul. When the parish priest followed the convent with a claim upon what was best, his despair must have grown deeper and his resentment more bitter. It was often difficult to collect these payments, just as it was often difficult to collect tithes, even when a priest was less loth to curse for them than Chaucer’s poor parson. Vicars were obliged to sue their wretched parishioners in the ecclesiastical courts, and monasteries were sometimes fain to commute such payments for an annual rent, collected by the tenants[299]. But the best ecclesiastics recognised that the system was somewhat out of keeping with Christian charity. Caesarius of Heisterbach has a story of Ulrich, the good head of the monastery of Steinfeld, who one day

came to one of his granges, wherein, seeing a comely foal, he enquired of the [lay] brother whose it was or whence it came. To whom the brother answered, “such and such a man, our good and faithful friend, left it to us at his death.” “By pure devotion,” asked the provost, “or by legal compulsion?” “It came through his death,” answered the other, “for his wife, since he was one of our serfs, offered it as a heriot.” Then the provost shook his head and piously answered: “Because he was a good man and our faithful friend, therefore hast thou despoiled his wife. Render therefore her horse to this forlorn woman; for it is robbery to seize or detain other men’s goods, since the horse was not thine before [the man’s death]”[300].

(3) Issues of the manor. Before passing on to sources of income of a more specifically ecclesiastical character, some account must be given of the third great class of receipts which came to a convent in its capacity of landowner, to wit the “issues of the manor.” Attached to almost every nunnery was its home farm, which provided the nuns with the greater part of their food[301]. A large nunnery would thus reserve for its own use several manors and granges, but usually other manors in its possession would be farmed by bailiffs, who sold the produce at market and paid in the profits to the treasuress or to one of the obedientiaries; or else a manor would be leased to a tenant. The surplus produce of the home farm, which could not be used by the nuns, was also sold. The treasuress usually entered the receipts and expenditure of the home farm in her household account and she had to keep two sets of records, the one a careful account of all the animals and agricultural produce on the farm, with details as to the use made of them; and the other (under the heading of “issues of the manor”) a money record of the sums obtained from sales of live stock, wool or grain. An analysis of the produce of the home farm of Catesby (1414-5)[302] shows that the chief crops grown were wheat and barley. Of these a certain proportion was kept for seed to sow the new crops; almost all the rest of the wheat was paid in food allowances to the servants and 1 qr. 3 bushels in alms “to friars of the four orders and other poor”; most of the barley was malted, except 6 qrs. delivered to the swineherd to feed hogs; and what remained was stored in the granaries of the convent. Oats and peas were also grown and part of the crop used for seed, part for food-allowances to the servants and oatmeal for the nuns. The Prioress also kept a most meticulous account of the livestock on her farm. All were numbered and classified, cart-horses, brood-mares, colts, foals, oxen, bulls, cows, stirks (three-year old), two-year old, yearlings, calves, sheep, wethers, hogerells, lambs, hogs, boars, sows, hilts, hogsters and pigs. In each class it was carefully set down how many animals remained in stock at the end of the year and what had been done with the others. We know something of the consumption of meat by the nuns of Catesby and their servants in this year of grace 1414-5, when the old rule against the eating of meat was relaxed; and we see something of the cares of a medieval housewife in those days before root-crops were known, when the number of animals which could be kept alive during the winter was strictly limited by the amount of hay produced on the valuable meadow land. Only in summer could the convent have fresh meat; and on St Martin’s day (Nov. 11) the business of killing and salting the rest of the stock for winter food began[303]. From good Dame Elizabeth Swynford’s account it appears that five oxen, one stirk, thirty hogs and one boar were delivered to the larderer to be salted; in summer time, when the convent could enjoy fresh meat, five calves, fourteen sheep, ten hogs and twelve pigs were sent in to the kitchen; and twenty cows were divided between the larder and the kitchen, to provide salt and fresh beef. There is unfortunately no record of the produce of the dairy, which supplied the convent with milk, cheese, eggs and occasional chickens.

But the home-farm served the purpose of providing money as well as food. The hides of the oxen and the “wool pells” of the sheep, which had been killed for food or had fallen victim to that curse of medieval farming, the murrain, were by no means wasted. Five hides belonging to animals which had died of murrain were tanned and used for collars and other cart gear on the farm; but all the rest were sold, thirty-six of them in all. Most lucrative of all, however, was the sale of wool pells and wool, and Dame Elizabeth Swynford is very exact; eighteen wool pells, from sheep which the convent had eaten as mutton, sold before shearing for 35s. 10d., thirty-eight sold after shearing for 9s. 6d., thirty-six lamb skins for 1s.; and 6d. was received “for wynter lokes sold.” Moreover the convent also sold one sack and eight weight of wool at £5. 4s. the sack, for a total of £6. 16s. Altogether the “issues of the manor” amounted to the substantial sum of £24. 8s. 8d., chiefly derived from these sales of wool and wool pells and from the sale of some timber for £6. 13s. 4d.[304] These details about wool are interesting, for it is well known that the monastic houses of England, especially in the northern counties, were great sheep farmers. Most accounts mention this important source of revenue and in the series of rolls kept by the treasuresses of St Michael’s Stamford, it is regularly entered under the heading “Fermes, dismes, leynes et pensions,” a somewhat miscellaneous classification[305]. In the thirteenth-century Pratica della Mercatura of Francesco Pergolotti there is incorporated a list of monasteries which sell wool, compiled for the use of Italian wool merchants and giving the prices per sack of the different qualities of wool at each house. The list contains a section specially devoted to nunneries, in which twenty houses are mentioned, all but two of them in Lincolnshire or Yorkshire[306]. Armed with this information the Italians would journey from nunnery to nunnery and bargain with the nuns for their wool: the whole crop would sometimes be commissioned by them in advance, sold on the backs of the sheep. The English distrusted these dark smooth-spoken foreigners; many years later the author of the Libel of English Policie charged them with dishonest practices and complained of the freedom with which they were allowed to buy in England:

In Cotteswold also they ride about,
And all England, and buy withouten doubte
What them list with freedome and franchise,
More than we English may gitten many wise[307].

But it must have been a great day for the impoverished nuns of Yorkshire when slim Italian or stout Fleming came riding down the dales under a spring sun to bargain for their wool crop. What a bustling hither and thither there would be, and what a confabulation in the parlour between my lady Prioress and her steward and her chaplain and the stranger sitting opposite to them and speaking his reasons “ful solempnely.” What a careful distinguishing of the best and the medium and the worst kind of wool, which the Italian calls buona lana and mojano lana and locchi. What a haggling over the price, which varies from nunnery to nunnery, but always allows the merchant to sell at a good profit in the markets of Flanders and Italy. What sighs of relief when the stranger trots off again, sitting high on his horse and taking with him a silken purse, or a blood-band or a pair of gloves in “courtesy” from the nuns. What blessings on the black-faced sheep, when the sorely-needed silver is locked up in the treasury chest and debts begin to look less terrible, leaking roofs less incurable, pittances less few and far between.

(4) Miscellaneous payments. A last source of temporal revenue consisted in the sums paid for board and lodging by visitors, regular boarders and schoolchildren. Though such visitors were frowned at by bishops as subversive of discipline, the nuns welcomed their contributions to the lean income of the convent, and in most nunnery accounts payments by boarders will be found among other miscellaneous receipts.

(5) Spiritualities. In the revenues which have hitherto been considered, the monastic rent-rolls differed in no way from those of any lay owner of land. The source of revenue now to be distinguished was more specifically ecclesiastical. All monasteries derived a more or less large income from certain grants made to them in their capacity as religious houses. Most important of these was the appropriation of benefices to their use. When a church was appropriated to a monastery, the monastery was usually supposed to put in a vicar at a fixed stipend to serve the parish, and the great tithes (which would otherwise have supported a rector) were taken by the corporation. Sometimes half a church was so appropriated and half the tithes were taken. The practice of appropriating churches was widespread; not only the king and other lay patrons, but also the bishops used this means of enriching religious bodies and the favourite petition of an impecunious convent was for permission to appropriate a church[308]. Over and over again the gift of the advowson of a church to a monastery is followed by appropriation[309]. The permission of the bishop of the diocese and of the pope was necessary for the transaction, but it seems rarely to have been refused; and

it has been calculated that at least a third part of the tithes of the richest benefices in England were appropriated either in part or wholly to religious and secular bodies, such as colleges, military orders, lay hospitals, guilds, convents; even deans, cantors, treasurers and chancellors of cathedral bodies were also largely endowed with rectorial tithes[310].

The practice of appropriation became a very serious abuse, for not all monasteries were conscientious in performing their duties to the parishes from which they derived such a large income, and ignorant and underpaid vicars often enough left their sheep encumbered in the mire, or swelled with their misery and discontent the democratic revolution known by the too narrow name of the Peasants’ Revolt[311]. Moreover there is no doubt that sometimes the monks and nuns neglected even the obvious duty of putting in a vicar, and the hungry sheep looked up and were not fed. The Valor Ecclesiasticus throws an interesting light on this subject. The nuns of Elstow Abbey held no less than eleven rectories, from which they derived £157. 6s. 8d., but they paid stipends to four vicars only, and the total of the four was £6. 6s. 8d.[312] The nuns of Westwood received £12. 12s. 10d. from two rectories and paid to a deacon in one of them 11s. 4d.[313] The Minoresses without Aldgate held four rectories; from that of Potton (Beds.) they received £16. 6s. 8d. and paid the vicar £2; from that of Kessingland, Suffolk, £9 and paid the vicar £2. 4s. 4d.[314] Another very common practice which cannot have conduced to the welfare of the parishioners was that of farming out the proceeds of appropriated churches, just as manors were farmed out. The farmer paid the nuns a lump sum annually and took the proceeds of the tithes. The purpose of such an arrangement was convenience, since it saved the convent the trouble of collecting the revenues and tithes. It was open to objection from all points of view; for on the one hand the nuns might, and often did, make bad bargains, and on the other they were still less likely to care for the spiritual welfare of the unfortunate parishioners, whose souls were to all intents and purposes farmed out with their tithes; though the payment of a vicar was sometimes made by the nuns or stipulated for in the agreement with the farmer. The Valor Ecclesiasticus gives the total spiritual revenue of the 84 nunneries holding spiritualities as £2705. 17s. 5d. and of this sum spiritualities to the value of £1075. 0s. 6d., belonging to 33 houses were entered as being at farm[315].

Account rolls often throw a flood of light upon the income derived from appropriated churches. To the nuns of St Michael’s Stamford had been assigned by various abbots of Peterborough the churches of St Martin, St Clement, All Souls, St Andrew and Thurlby, and in the reign of Henry II two pious ladies gave them the moieties of the church of Corby and chapel of Upton[316]. Moreover in 1354, after the little nunnery of Wothorpe had been ruined by the Black Death, all its possessions were handed over to St Michael’s and included the appropriation of the church of Wothorpe; the bishop stipulated that the proceeds of the priory with the rectory should be applied to the support of the infirmary and kitchen of St Michael’s and that the nuns should keep a chaplain to serve the parish church of Wothorpe[317]. Corby and Thurlby were afterwards farmed out by the nuns[318] and in 1377-8 they brought in £19 and £20 respectively, while the nuns got £26. 0s. 8d. from “the church of All Saints beyond the water,” £1. 13s. 4d. from the parson of Cottesmore and a pension of 6s. 8d. from the church of St Martin. They paid the vicar of Wothorpe a stipend of £2 a year[319]. Over half their income was usually derived from “farms, tithes and pensions,” i.e. from ecclesiastical sources of revenue.

It was also very common to make grants of tithes out of piety to a monastery, even when a grant of the advowson of the church was not made. A lord would make over to it the tithes of wheat, or a portion of the tithes, in certain parishes, or perhaps the tithes of his own demesne land. Sometimes the rector of a parish would pay the monks or nuns an annual rent in commutation of their tithes; sometimes he would dispute their claim and the tedious altercation would drag on for years, ending perhaps in the expense of a law-suit[320]. Besides advowsons and tithes various other pensions and payments were bestowed upon religious houses by benefactors, who would leave an annual pension to a monastery as a charge upon a particular piece of land, or church, or upon another monastery[321].