# Medieval English nunneries c. 1275 to 1535/Chapter 1: The Novice

MEDIEVAL ENGLISH NUNNERIES
CHAPTER I
THE NOVICE
Then, fair virgin, hear my spell, For I must your duty tell.
First a-mornings take your book,
The glass wherein yourself must look; Your young thoughts so proud and jolly
Must be turn'd to motions holy;
For your busk, attires and toys,
Have your thoughts on heavenly joys: And for all your follies past,
You must do penance, pray and fast.
You shall ring your sacring bell,
Keep your hours and tell your knell, Rise at midnight to your matins,
Read your psalter, sing your Latins;
And when your blood shall kindle pleasure, Scourge yourself in plenteous measure.
You must read the morning mass,
You must creep unto the cross,
Put cold ashes on your head, Have a hair cloth for your bed, Bind your beads, and tell your needs,
Your holy Aves and your Creeds; Holy maid, this must be done,
If you mean to live a nun.
The Merry Devil of Edmonton.
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. 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. 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, Dartfordand 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. The names of Bassett, Sackville, Covert, Hussey, Tawke and Farnfold occur at Easebourne; Lewknor, St John, Okehurst, Michelgrove and Sidney at Rusper, 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". 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. 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". 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". More frequently still the candidates were described as "domicella" or "damoysele". At least one instance is extant of a bishop ordering that all the nuns of a house were to be of noble condition.
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, and Sir John le Blund in 1312 bequeathed an annuity to his daughter Ann, "till she marry or enter a religious house ". 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. Archbishop William Wickwane addressed a similar mandate to two Yorkshire houses, Wilberfoss and Nunkeehng, which public rumour had informed him to be overburdened with nuns and with secular boarders "at the instance of nobles"; 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. 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 and between Nunmonkton and the Fairfaxes. 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 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, 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 nobihty 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.
​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 dronken hadde hir draughte.
Ful semely after hir mete she raughte.
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, 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."
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:
Her pets are the pets of ladies in metrical romances and in illuminated borders; "smalehoundes," dehcately fed with "rosted flesh, or milk and wastel-bread." Her very beauty
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 Enghsh 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 hfe, 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".
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". At Ludlow the gild of Palmers provided that:
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" So also John Syward, "stockfissh-mongere" 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"; 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); while William Marowe in 1504 bequeathed to "Elizabeth and Katherine his daughters forty pounds each, to be paid at their marriage or profession". 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".
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 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 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. Katherine, widow of John de Ingham, and Eleanor Lady Scrope were other aristocratic women who took the veil at the Minories. But this noble connection did not prevent the house from containing Alice, sister of Richard Hale, fishmonger, Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Padyngton, fishmonger, Marion, daughter of John Charteseye, baker, and Frideswida, daughter of John Reynewell, alderman of the City of London, girls drawn from the elite 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. From these it appears that the most popular house was Clerkenwell in Middlesex, which is mentioned in nine wills. Barking in Essex comes next with eight references, and St Helen's Bishopsgate with seven; the house of Minoresses without Aldgate is five times mentioned, Haliwell in London and Stratford-atte-Bowe outside, having five and four references respectively, Kilburn in Middlesex three, Sopwell in Hertfordshire two, Mailing and Sheppey 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 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; 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, 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. 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. 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; Hugh de Waltham, town clerk, mentions three daughters, one at St Helen's; John de Croydon, fishmonger, leaves bequests to one son and four daughters, one at Clerkenwell; William de Chayham kept Lucy, Agnes and Johanna with him, but made Juliana a nun. 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. 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. The case of Shouldham, already quoted, shows that different generations of a family might be represented at the same time in a convent, 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 Ahce, nuns of Sempringham, and Margaret and Eleanor, respectively prioress and nun of Nunmonkton. 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 chques, 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, 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.
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. 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:
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, 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.
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".
​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". 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,
and a second instalment at a place to be agreed upon when confirmation of the grant is obtained 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". Even the clergy, who should have been the last to recognise a system so flagrantly contrary to canon law, followed the general custom; Wilham Peke, rector of Scrivelsby, left one Isabella ten marks to make her a nun in the Gilbertine house of Catley and Robert de Playce, rector of the church of Bromp-ton, made the following bequest:
she was to have none of this bequest (1345). 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. 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, 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.".
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":
And under "Dame Agnes Browne's Chamber" is the entry:
She had apparently been sent into the house with a complete equipment in furniture and implements. ​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 and was repeated at the Council of London in 1200 and at the Council of Oxford in 1222; 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; Bishop Norbury has to rebuke the Prioress of Chester for the simoniacal receipt of bribes to admit nuns; 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; 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. 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); 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.
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. 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.
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. 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", 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". 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", "bonae indolis, ut credimus, juvenculam", "jeovene damoisele et de bone condicion, come nous sumez enformez", "competeter ad hujusmodi officii debitum litterate". 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". 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 witliin short time, and be such that she shall be able to bear the burdens of the quire (with) the rest that pertain to religion.
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 EKzabeth, aged about one year, were found to be daughters and heirs of the said Guy, who ​died in the following year. 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. 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. 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". 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! 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. Some of the nuns at Romsey in 1534 were very young, two being fourteen and one fifteen. 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", and Archbishop John le Romeyn described Margaret de la Batayle, whom he sent to Sinningthwaite, as "juvencula". 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".
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. 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". But the most charming tale of all is that of the conversion of Helswindis, Abbess of Burtscheid.
She, although the daughter of a powerful and wealthy man...burned so from her earhest 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 Liege 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.
​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. 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. 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" Illegitimate children too were sometimes sent to convents. One remembers Langland's nunnery, where
Dame Iohanne was a bastard, And dame Clarice a kniʒtes douʒter - 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, and at the time of the Dissolution there was a child of Wolsey himself at Shaftesbury. 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. 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" and in 1432 Alice Etton received one four days before her confirmation as Prioress of Sinningthwaite. 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.
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.
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. It was complained against the Prioress of Ankerwyke at Alnwick's visitation in 1441 that she made ideotas and other unfit persons nuns; 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.
At the time of the Dissolution the Commissioners found that one of the nuns of Langley was "in regard a fool"; 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. 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". 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"; but a few years later Agnes Hosey, described as "ideota," gave testimony with her sisters at Easebourne and excited no adverse comment. 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) an 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. 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".
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 It is true that influential people, who could succeed in proving that a nun was unwillingly professed, might obtain her release; 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 unwittingly professed, is a favourite theme in medieval popular poetry; 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. 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". 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.
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.
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 aga:inst 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 rehgious 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 rehgious 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.
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. 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. 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 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. 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 unhkely 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"; 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". 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.
* ↑ Based on Professor Savine's analysis of the returns in the Valor Ecclesiasticus (Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History), I, 269-288.
* ↑ I have based this estimate partly on a list compiled by M. E. C. Walcott, English Minsters, vol. II ("The English Student's Monasticon"), partly on one compiled by Miss H. T. Jacka in an unpublished thesis on The Dissolution of the English Nunneries; the figures, if not always exactly correct, are approximately correct as far as the classification into groups, according to size, is concerned. It must be remembered, however, that there were more nuns at the beginning than at the end of the period 1270-1536; the convents tended to diminish in size, especially those which were poor and small to begin with.
* ↑ These are discussed in Liveing, Records of Romsey Abbey, pp. 112 sqq.
* ↑ V.C.H. Sussex, II, p. 84.
* ↑ Ib. II, p. 63.
* ↑ Hugo, Medieval Nunneries of the County of Somerset, Minchin Barrow, p. 108.
* ↑ Well-known names occur, for instance, among the prioresses of the poor convents of Ivinghoe, Ankerwyke and Little Marlow in Bucks. V.C.H. Bucks, I, p. 355.
* ↑ Lysons, Magna Britannia, V, p. 113. Compare the remark of a nun of Wenningsen, near Hanover, who considered herself insulted when the great reformer Busch addressed her not as "Klosterfrau" but as "Sister." "You are not my brother, wherefore then call me sister? My brother is clad in steel and you in a linen frock" (1455). Quoted in Coulton, Medieval Garner, p. 653.
* ↑ Wykeham's Register (Hants. Rec. Soc), II, p. 462. Cf. ib. II, p. 61.
* ↑ E.g. Reg. ...of Rigaud de Asserio (Hants. Rec. Soc), p. 394; Reg. ... Stephani Gravesend (Cant. and York. Soc.), p. 200; Wykeham's Register, loc.cit.
* ↑ Bishop Cobham of Worcester at Wroxall in 1323 (V.C.H. Warwick, II, p. 71). Cf. the case of Usk in Monmouthshire, "in quo monasterio solum virgines de nobili prosapia procreate recipi consueverunt et solent" (Chron. of Adam of Usk, ed. E. M. Thompson, p. 93).
* ↑ Gibbons, Early Lincoln Wills, p. 117.
* ↑ Sharpe, Cal. of Wills enrolled in the Court of Husting, I, p. 236. Cf. ib. I, p. 350 and Testamenta Eboracensia (Surtees Soc.), I, pp. 170, 354.
* ↑ Dugdale, Mon. IV, p. 71.
* ↑ Reg. of Archbishop William Wickwane (Surtees Soc.), p. 113.
* ↑ Liveing, Records of Romsey Abbey, p. 98.
* ↑ William de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, mentions two daughters, nuns at Shouldham, in his will (1296). Sir Guy de Beauchamp mentions his little daughter Katherine, a nun there (1359) and his father Thomas de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, mentions the same Katherine and his own daughter Margaret, nuns there {1369). Katherine was still alive in 1400, when she is mentioned in the next Earl's will. Testamenta Vetusta, I, pp. 52, 63, 79, 153.
* ↑ See below, p. 15.
* ↑ See below, pp. 39—40.
* ↑ "Et pur certayn cause nous auens enioynt a dame Margaret Darcy, vostre soer, qel ne passe les lieus de cloistre, cest assauoir de quoer, de cloistre, de ffraitour, dormitorie ou fermerie, tantque nous en aueroms autre ordeigne, et qele ne parle od nul estraunge gentz, et soit darreyn enstalle, et en chescun lieu qele ne porte anele, et qele die chescun iour un sautier et june la quarte et la sexte ferie a payn et eu. Ensement voilloms qe la dit dame Margaret se puisse confesser au confessour de vostre couent quant ele auera mester." Linc. Epis. Reg. Memo. Gynewell, f. 34d. It looks like the penance for immorality.
* ↑ "Item quod nulla moniahs ibidem cameram teneat priuatam, sed quod omnes moniales sane in dormitorio et infirme in infirmaria iaceant atque cubant, prater dominam Margaretam Darcy, monialem prioratus antedicti, cui ob nobilitatem sui generis de camera sua quam tenet in privata, absque tamen alia liberata panis et ceruisie, extra casum infirmitatis manifeste, volumus ad tempus tollerare." Linc. Epis. Reg. Memo. Buckingham, f. 397d.
* ↑ Canterbury Tales (ed. Skeat), Prologue, II, 127 ff. It is interesting to notice that the Roman de la Rose, of which Chaucer translated a fragment, contains some remarks upon this subject which are almost paraphrased in his description of Madame Eglentyne.
* ↑ La Clef d' Amors..., ed. Doutrepont (1890), V, 3227 ff.
* ↑ Le Chastiement des Dames (Barbazon and Méon, Fabliaux et Contes, II, p. 200).
* ↑ See Mrs Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, II, pp. 77-80.
* ↑ Langland, Vision of Piers the Plowman, ed. Skeat, passus A, viii, i. 31.
* ↑ English Gilds, ed. L. T. Smith (E.E.T.S.), p. 194.
* ↑ Ibid. p. 340.
* ↑ Sharpe, op. cit. i, p. 589.
* ↑ Sharpe, op. cit. ii, p. 299. The Fishmongers, who, up to 1536, were divided into the two companies of salt-fishmongers and stock-fishmongers, were a powerful and important body, as the annals of the City of London in the fourteenth century show, "these fishmongers" in the words of Stow "having been jolly citizens and six mayors of their company in the space of twenty-four years." Stow's Survey of London (ed. Kingsford), i, p. 214.
* ↑ Sharpe, op. cit. ii, p. 606.
* ↑ Sharpe, op. cit. i, p. 594.
* ↑ Rye, Carrow Abbey, App. ix, pp. xvi, xvii, xviii.
* ↑ See Archaeologia, xv (1806), pp. 100-101; ib. xxxv (1853), p. 464
* ↑ V.C.H. London, i, p. 518.
* ↑ Ib. pp. 518-9.
* ↑ Sharpe, op. cit. ii, p. 267. Two years previously (1396) John de Nevill had left legacies to his sister Eleanor and to his daughter Ehzabeth, minoresses of St Clare; Durham Wills and Inventories (Surtees Soc), p. 39.
* ↑ Sharpe, op. cit. ii, p. 589.
* ↑ Ib. ii, p. 331.
* ↑ Ib. ii, p. 577.
* ↑ Not counting legacies left to various nunneries, without specific reference to a relative professed there.
* ↑ Sharpe, op. cit. i, pp. 107, 300, 313, 324, 408, 501, 585, 701. Philip dl Taillour had three daughters here in 1292 (i, p. 107), and William de Leyrevhad three daughters here in 1322 (i, p. 300)
* ↑ Ib. i, pp. 222, 303, 569, 638, 688; ii, pp. 20, 76, 115.
* ↑ Ib. i, pp. 229, 303, 342, 400, 435; ii, pp. 47, 170. Ten nuns in all
* ↑ Ib. ii, pp. 119, 267, 331, 577, 589.
* ↑ Ib. i, pp. 26, 126, 238, 349, 628. Ralph le Blund's three daughters and his sister-in-law were all nuns here in 1295 (i, p. 126) and Thomas Romayn, alderman and pepperer, left bequests to two daughters and to their aunt in 1313 (ib. i, p. 288).
* ↑ Ib. i, pp. 34, 111, 611; ii, p. 119.
* ↑ Ib. ii, pp. 167, 271, 274.
* ↑ Ib. ii, pp. 474, 564.
* ↑ Ib. i, pp. 510, 638.
* ↑ Ib. i, p. 119; ii, p. 306.
* ↑ There are two exceptions, Greenfield (Lincs.) (ib. ii, p. 327), and Amesbury (Wilts.) (ib. ii, p. 326), but the testators in these cases are not burgesses, but a knight and a clerk.
* ↑ The corresponding fines for girls were merchet if they married off the manor and leyrwite if they dispensed with that ceremony. The medieval lord concerned above all with keeping up the supply of labour upon his manor, naturally held the narrow view of the functions of women, which has been expressed in our day by Kipling: "Now the reserve of a boy is tenfold deeper than the reserve of a maid, she having been made for one end only by blind Nature, but man for several" (Stalky and Co. p. 212).
* ↑ Henry de Causton, mercator of London, left a bequest to Johanna, a "sister" at Ankerwyke, formerly servant to his father (1350). Sharpe op. cit. i, p. 638.
* ↑ Register of Bishop Godfrey Giffard (Worc. Hist. Soc), ii, pp. 288-9.
* ↑ Testamenta Eboracensia (Surtees Soc), i, p. 6.
* ↑ Test. Ebor. i, p. 9, dated 1345. Cf. will of Roger de Moreton "civis et mercerus Ebor." 1390; two of four daughters nuns at St Clement's, York (ib. i, p. 133).
* ↑ Sharpe, op. cit. i, p. 400, dated 1335.
* ↑ Ib. i, p. 501, dated 1349.
* ↑ Ib. i, p. 503, dated 1348.
* ↑ Testamenta Vetusta, i, p. 286.
* ↑ See above, p. 7. There were two Welbys, two Lekes and two Paynelles at Stixwould; Alnwick's Visit. MS. f. 76. Other references might be multiplied.
* ↑ Cf. also Sharpe, op. cit. i, p. 238; and Reg. of Bishop Ginsborough (Worc. Hist. Soc), p. 51.
* ↑ Testamenta Eboracensia (Surtees Soc.) i, pp. 187 ff. (will of Sir John Fayrfax, rector of Prescot, 1393).
* ↑ See below, p. 302.
* ↑ V.C.H. Yorks. iii, p. 172.
* ↑ On this subject see Coulton, Monastic Schools in the Middle Ages (Medieval Studies), pp. 34-5.
* ↑ Hali Meidenhad, ed. Cockayne (E.E.T.S.), p. 8.
* ↑ Old English Miscellany, ed. Morris {E.E.T.S., 1872), p. 96.
* ↑ Clene Maydenhod, ed. Furnivall (E.E.T.S.), pp. 5-6.
* ↑ V.C.H. Yorks. iii, p. 113.
* ↑ The English Register of Godstow Nunnery (E.E.T.S.), introduction, pp. xxv-xxvi. Cf. Cartulary of Buckland Priory (Somerset Rec. Soc), introd. pp. xxii-xxiii.
* ↑ Reg. of Godstow, u.s. no. 76, pp. 78-9. See also an exceedingly interesting action of quare impedit brought by John Stonor (probably the Lord Chief Justice) against the Prioress of Marlow in 1339, probably merely to secure a record. He had bought the advowsons of the two moieties of the church of Little Marlow and an acre of land with each and conveyed the whole to the Prioress, subject to the provision "that out of it the said Prioress and nuns shall find Joan and Cecily, sisters of the aforesaid John, and Katherine, daughter of the aforesaid John, nuns of the aforesaid place, 40s. a year each during their lives, and also for the sustenance of all the nuns towards their kitchen half a mark of silver each year and for the vesture of the twenty nuns serving God there each year 10s. of silver, to be divided equally between them." After the deaths of the Stonor ladies all the money is to go to the common funds of the house, with certain provisions. Year Books of Edward III, years xii and xiii, ed. L. O. Pike (Rolls Series, 1885), pp. cxi-cxvii, 260-2. For the appropriation of these money dowries to the use of the individual nuns, see below, Ch. VIII, passim.
* ↑ Nicolas, Testamenta Vetusta, i, p. 118.
* ↑ Gibbons, Early Lincoln Wills, p. 113.
* ↑ Testamenta Eboracensia, i, p. 11
* ↑ See above, p. 6. See also the interesting deed (1429—30) in which Richard Fairfax "scwyer," made arrangements for the entrance of his daughter "Elan," to Nunmonkton, always patronised by the Fairfaxes. He left an annual rent of five marks in trust for her "yat my doghtir Elan be made nun in ye house of Nun Monkton, and yat my saydes feffis graunt a nanuel rent of fourty schilyngs...terme of ye lyfie of ye sayd Elan to ye tym be at sche be a nun." His feoffees were to pay nineteen marks "for ye makyng ye sayd Elan nun." And "if sche will be no nun" his wife and feoffees were to marry her at their discretion. V.C.H. Yorks. iii, p. 123. Cf. an interesting case in which Matilda Toky, the orphan of a citizen of London, is allowed by the mayor and aldermen to become a nun of Kilburn in 1393, taking with her her share {£18. 5s. 4½d.) of her father's estate, after which the prioress of the house comes in person to receive the money from the chamberlain of the city. Riley, Memorials of London, p. 535. The father's will is in Sharpe, op. cit. ii, pp. 288-9; he had three sons and a daughter besides Matilda.
* ↑ V.C.H. Essex, ii, p. 117.
* ↑ Quoted in V.C.H. Beds. i, p. 254.
* ↑ Testamenta Eboracensia, iii, p. 168. The sum left for entrance of Ellen Fairfax to Nunmonkton was about the same, £10. 13s. 4d. {16 marks). Above, p. 18, note 4. There is an interesting note of the outfit provided for an Austin nun of Lacock on her profession in 1395, attached to a page of the cartulary of that house. "Memorandum concerning the expenses of the veiling of Joan, daughter of Nicholas Sambome, at Lacock, viz. in the 19th year of the reign of King Richard the second after the conquest. First paid to the abbess for her fee 20s. then to the convent 40s., to each nun 2s. Item paid to John Bartelot for veils and linen cloth 1102s." (this large sum may include a supply for the whole house). "Item to a certain woman for one veil 40d. Item for one mantle 10s. Item for one fur of shankes (a cheap fur made from the underpart of rabbit skin) for another mantle, 16s. Item for white cloth to line the first mantle, 16s. Item for white cloth for a tunic 10s. Item one fur for the aforesaid pilch 20s. Item for a maser (cup) 10s. Item for a silver spoon 2s. 6d. Item for blankets 6s. 8d. Item in canvas for a bed 2s. Item for the purchase of another mantle of worsted 20s. Item paid at the time of profession at one time 20s. Item for a new bed 20s. Item for other necessaries 20s,... Item paid to the said Joan by the order of the abbess." The total (excluding the last item) is £17. 6s. 2d. Archaeol. Journ. 1912, lxix, p. 117.
* ↑ Mackenzie E. C. Walcott, Inventories of...the Benedictine Priory of St Mary and Sexburga in the Island of Shepey for Nuns (1869) (reprinted from Archaeologia Cantiana, vii, pp. 272-306). Compare the letter to Cromwell from Sir Thomas Willoughby, who asks that Elizabeth Rede, his sister-in-law, who had resigned the office of Abbess of Malling, may have suitable lodging within the monastery, "not only that but such plate as my father-in-law did deliver her to occupy in her chamber, that she may have it again." Wood, Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies, ii, p. 153.
* ↑ "Nullus praelatus in recipiendo monacho, vel canonico, vel sanctimoniali pretium sumere vel exigere ab hiis, qui ad conversionem veniunt, aliqua pacti occasione praesumat. Si quis autem hoc fecerit anathema sit." Wilkins, Concilia, i, p. 477.
* ↑ "Monachi etiam sub pretio non recipiantur in monasterio...Si quis autem exactus pro sua receptione aliquid dederit, ad canonicos ordines non accedat." Ib. p. 508.
* ↑ "Praeterea statuimus, praesenti concilio approbante, ut nullus de cetero pro receptione alicujus in religionis domum pecuniam vel quicquam aliud extorquere praesumat; adeo ut si pro paupertate domus ingrediens debeat vestire seipsum praetextu vestimentorum ultra justum pretium eorum ab eo nihil penitus recipiatur." Ib. p. 591.
* ↑ Reg. of Walter Giffard (Surtees Soc.), p. 147.
* ↑ Reg. of Roger de Norbury (Will. Salt Archaeol. Soc. Collections, i), p. 259.
* ↑ Reg. of Ralph of Shrewsbury (Somerset Rec. Soc.), p. 684.
* ↑ MS. Register at New College, f. 87d.
* ↑ Linc. Epis. Reg. Memo. Bokyngham, f. 397d.
* ↑ Linc. Visit. i, p. 49.
* ↑ See Linc. Visit. ii, and Alnwick's Visit. MS., passim.
* ↑ Linc. Visit. ii, pp. 133, 134. See also the very sternly worded prohibition sent by Bishop Spofford of Hereford to Aconbury in 1438. Reg. Thome Spofford (Cantilupe Soc.), pp. 223-4.
* ↑ Archaeologia, xlvii, p. 57.
* ↑ Linc. Visit. ii, p. 117.
* ↑ Linc. Visit. i, p. 49.
* ↑ Reg. Johannis Peckham (Rolls Series), i, p. 189.
* ↑ Ib. i, pp. 40–1, 356.
* ↑ Wykeham's Reg. ii, pp. 60-61. Cf. ib. p. 462.
* ↑ Reg. Johannis de Pontissara, pp. 240, 252.
* ↑ Linc. Epis. Reg. Memo. Bokyngham, f. 397d.
* ↑ Linc. Visit. i, p. 53. Cf. Flemyng's injunction in 1422, ib.
* ↑ Testamenta Vetusta, i, pp. 63-4.
* ↑ See above, p. 7, note 2.
* ↑ V.C.H. London, i, p. 518.
* ↑ Linc. Visit. ii, p. 5.
* ↑ Alnwick's Visit. MS. f. 26d.
* ↑ Linc. Visit. ii, p. 217.
* ↑ Liveing, Records of Romsey Abbey, p. 248.
* ↑ V.C.H. Yorks, iii, p. 163. In 1312 the prioress of Hampole was rebuked for receiving a little girl (puellulam), not on account of her youth, but because she had omitted to obtain the archbishop's licence. Ib.
* ↑ Reg. of Archbishop John le Romeyn (Surtees Soc.), i, p. 66.
* ↑ Reg. Epis. Johannis Peckham (Rolls Series), i, p. 356. Compare Caesarius of Heisterbach: "In the diocese of Trèves is a certain convent of nuns named Lutzerath, wherein by ancient custom no girl is received but at the age of seven years or less; which constitution hath grown up for the preservation of that simplicity of mind which maketh the whole body to shine" (Dial. Mirac. i, p. 389, quoted in Coulton, Medieval Garner, p. 255). The thirteenth century visitations of the diocese of Rouen by Eudes Rigaud make it clear that novices there were often very young, e.g. at St-Saëns in 1266 "una earum erat novicia et minima" (Reg. Visit. Archiepiscopi Rothomagensis, ed. Bonnin, p. 566). The Archbishop ordered novices to be professed at the age of fourteen and not before (ib. pp. 51, 121, 207).
* ↑ For example the béguine Christina von Stommeln, who said of herself, "So far back as my memory can reach, from the earliest dawn of my childhood, whensoever I heard the lives and manners, the passion and the death of saints and especially of our Lord Christ and His glorious Mother, then in such hearing I was delighted to the very marrow" (quoted in Coulton, op. cit. p. 403). At the age of ten she contracted a mystic marriage with Christ, and at the age of thirteen she joined the béguines at Cologne. Cf. St Catherine of Siena.
* ↑ Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, ed. Joseph Strange, i, pp. 53-4.
* ↑ This was Helswindis von Gimmenich, first abbess of Burtscheid after the transference thither of the nuns of St Saviour of Aachen c. 1220-1222. See Quix, Gesch. der ehemaligen Reichs-Abtei Burtscheid (Aachen 1834).
* ↑ Caesarius, op. cit. i, pp. 54-5. For another case of children in this convent see the charming story of Gertrude's purgatory, ib. pp. 344-5. There are fifteenth century English translations in the Myroure of Oure Ladye (E.E.T.S.), pp. 46-7 and in An Alphabet of Tales (E.ET.S.), p. 249. A little girl of nine years old had died, and, after death, appeared in broad daylight in her own place in the choir, next to a child of her own age. The latter was so terrified that she was noticed and on being questioned told the vision to the Abbess (from whom Caesarius professes to have had the story). The Abbess says to the child "Sister Margaret,...if Sister Gertrude come to thee again, say to her: Benedicite, and if she reply to thee, Dominus, ask her whence she comes and what she seeks." On the following day (continues Caesarius) "she came again and since she replied Dominus when she was saluted, the maiden added: 'Good Sister Gertrude, why come you at such a time and what seek you with us?' Then she replied: 'I come here to make satisfaction. Because I willingly whispered with thee in the choir, speaking in half tones, therefore am I ordered to make satisfaction in that place where it befell me to sin. And unless thou beware of the same vice, dying thou shalt suffer the same penance.' And when she had four times made satisfaction in the same way (by prostrating herself) she said to her sister: 'Now have I completed my satisfaction; henceforth thou shalt see me no more.' And thus it was done. For in the sight of her friend she proceeded towards the cemetery, passing over the wall by a miracle. Behold such was the purgatory of this virgin." It is a tender little tale, and kinder to childish sins than medieval moralists sometimes were; Saint Douceline beat a little girl of seven (one of her béguines) "so shrewdly that the blood ran down her ribs, saying meanwhile that she would sacrifice her to God" simply because she had looked at some men who were at work in the house (see Coulton, op. cit. p. 321).
* ↑ V.C.H. Lincs. ii, p. 184. But the usual custom was to place such women as lay boarders in the custody of a nunnery. See below, pp. 419 ff.
* ↑ "Processus et sententia divortii inter Thomam Tudenham militem et Aliciam filiam quondam Johannis Woodhous armigeri, racione quia est monialis professa in prioratu de Crabhous et nunquam carnaliter cognita per maritum suum predictum durante matrimonio predicto, licet matrimonium predictum duravit et ut vir et uxor cohabitaverunt per spacium viij annorum. Durante matrimonio unicus filius ab eadem suscitatus, non tamen per dictum Thomam maritum suum, sed per Ricardum Stapleton servientem patris ipsius Aliciae" (1437). Her husband's sister Margaret Bedingfield left her a legacy of 10 marks in 1474. Norfolk Archaeology (Norf. and Norwich Arch. Soc.), xiii, pp. 351-2.
* ↑ Testamenta Vetusta, i, p. 74.
* ↑ Testamenta Eboracensia, i, p. 18.
* ↑ See the letter from John Clusey to Cromwell in her favour: "Rygthe honorable, after most humyll comendacyons, I lykewyce besuche you that the Contents of this my symple Letter may be secret; and that for as myche as I have grete cause to goo home I besuche your good Mastershipe to comand Mr Herytag to give attendans opon your Mastershipe for the knowlege off youre plesure in the seyd secrete mater, whiche ys this, My Lord Cardinall causyd me to put a yong gentyll homan to the Monystery and Nunry off Shafftysbyry, and there to be provessyd, and wold hur to be namyd my doythter; and the troythe ys shew was his dowythter; and now by your Visitacyon she haythe commawynment to departe, and knowythe not whether Wherefore I humely besuche youre Mastershipe to dyrect your Letter to the Abbas there, that she may there contynu at hur full age to be professed. Withoute dowyte she ys other xxiiij yere full, or shalbe at shuche tyme of the here as she was boren, which was abowyte Mydelmas. In this your doyng your Mastershipe shall do a very charitable ded, and also bynd hur and me to do you such servyce as lyzthe in owre lytell powers; as knowythe owre Lord God, whome I liumely besuche prosperyiisly and longe to preserve you. Your orator John Clusey." Ellis, Original Letters, Series I, ii, pp. 92-3. An injunction had been made that profession made under twenty-four years was invalid, and that novices or girls professed at an earlier age were to be dismissed.
* ↑ V.C.H. Yorks. iii, p. 161.
* ↑ Test. Ebor. iii, p. 289, note. She was one of the Conyers of Hornby (Richmondshire) and is mentioned in the will of her brother Christopher Conyers, rector of Rudby in 1483.
* ↑ V.C.H. Yorks. iii, p. 177.
* ↑ V.C.H. Durham, ii, p. 107. For another instance of dispensation and installation on the same day see Reg. of Bishop Bronescombe of Exeter, ed. Hingeston-Randolph, p. 163. For other dispensations super defectu natalium, see Cal. of Papal Letters, iii, p. 470 (cf. Cal. of Petit, i, p. 367), v, p. 549 and Reg. Johannis de Trillek Episcopi Herefordensis (Cantilupe Soc.), p. 404.
* ↑ Rabelais, Gargantua, ch. lii.
* ↑ Reg. Epis. Johannis Peckham (Rolls Ser.), i, p. 367. Cf. pp. 191 ff. below.
* ↑ Linc. Visit. ii, p. 4. She was also charged with the introduction of unsuitable persons as lay boarders, etc. "Item priorissa introducit in prioratum diuersos extraneos et ignotos, tam mares quam feminas et eos sustentat communibus expensis domus et aliquas quasi ideotas et alias inhabiles fecit moniales. Negat articulum." But ideota probably simply means unlearned here, and in the case of Agnes Hosey, below p. 33. Compare the case at Bival in Normandy 1251. "Ibi est quedam filia burgensis de Vallibus que stulta est." Reg. Visit. Archiep. Rothomag, ed. Bonnin, p. 111.
* ↑ Visitations of the Diocese of Norwich (Camden Soc.), pp. 91, 311.
* ↑ Gasquet, Henry VIII and the English Monasteries (pop. ed. 1899), p. 293.
* ↑ Gairdner, Letters and Papers, etc., ix, no. 1075.
* ↑ Alnwick's Visit. MS. f. 71d.
* ↑ Visitations of the Diocese of Norwich, p. 91.
* ↑ Sussex Archaeol. Coll. ix, p. 26.
* ↑ Wilkins, Concilia, ii, p. 487.
* ↑ Alnwick's Visit. MS. f. 77.
* ↑ Hence the certificates sometimes required from bishops to testify whether or not a girl had actually been professed. Such a certificate occurs in Wykeham's Register (ii, p. 192), announcing that Joan, daughter of Stephen Asshewy, deceased, was not yet professed at St Mary's Winchester or at any other house. The case of Isabel, daughter of Sir Philip de Coverle, is also interesting; she left the wretchedly poor house of Sewardsley to claim her share of her mother's inheritance, therewith to provide fit maintenance for herself among the nuns; but she was excluded from inheriting with her sisters on account of her religious profession (V.C.H. Northants. ii, pp. 125-6). Compare also the case of Joan, wife of Nicholas de Grene (1357-8); on a question of inheritance the King's court issued a writ of inquiry as to whether she had been professed at Nuneaton (Reg. of Bishop Roger de Norbury (William Salt Aichaeol. Soc. Collections, i), pp. 285-7.
* ↑ See e.g. the commission for the release of a novice preserved in the register of Ralph Baldock, Bishop of London (13 10). "We have lately received the supplication of our beloved daughter in Christ, Cristina de Burgh, daughter of the noble Sir Robert Fitzwalter, to the effect that whereas she was delivered by her parents, while not yet of a marriageable age, into the order of St Augustine in the monastery of Haliwell of our diocese, and for some time wore the habit of a novice therein and still wears it, nevertheless there is no canonical reason why she should not freely return to the world at her own free will; and whereas we do condescend to licence her to return to the world, having diligently made inquiries in the aforesaid monastery for our information as to the truth of the aforesaid matters, etc. etc."; the Bishop having no time to finish the inquiry himself commissions his official to carry it on and to release Cristina if the result is satisfactory. Reg. Radulphi Baldock (Cant, and York Soc.), p. 129. But note that this girl is only a novice.
* ↑ See below, pp. 502-9, and Note H.
* ↑ V.C.H. Bucks. i, p. 355.
* ↑ Cal. of Papal Letters, i, p. 17.
* ↑ P.R.O. Early Chanc. Proc. 7/70.
* ↑ Reg. of Bishop Robert de Stretton (Will. Salt Archaeol. Soc. Collections, N.S. viii), pp. 149-50. With her case compare that of Jane Wadham, which came up after the Dissolution in 1541. She "after arriving at years of discretion was forced by the threats and machinations of malevolent persons to become a regular nun in the house of nuns at Romsey, but having both in public and in private always protested against this seclusion, she conceived herself free from regular observance and in that persuasion joined herself in matrimony with one John Foster, per verba de presenti, intending to have the marriage solemnised as soon as she was free from her religion." For the further vicissitudes of her married life, see Liveing, Records of Romsey Abbey, p. 255. Compare also the case of Margery of Hedsor who left Burnham in 1311. V.C.H. Bucks, i, p. 383.
* ↑ Year Book of 12 Richard II, ed. G. F. Deiser (Ames Foundation, 1914), pp. 71-7. Cf. pp. 150-3. It may be noticed that Marvell, in his poem "Upon Appleton House" (dedicated to the great Lord Fairfax), preserves the tradition of another of these cases. In the time of Anna Langton, the last Prioress of Nunappleton, a certain Isabella Thwaites, who had been placed in her charge, fell in love with William Fairfax. The Prioress, who wished her to become a nun, shut her up, but eventually Fairfax, having got the law upon his side, broke his way into the nunnery and released her and she married him in 1518. It was her sons who obtained the house on its dissolution (see Markham, Life of the great Lord Fairfax, pp. 3, 4). For a somewhat similar case to that of Clarice Stil, see Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 102, p. 615. A widow Joan de Swainton married a widower Hugh de Tuthill. She had four daughters by her first husband, and of these Hugh married two to his own two sons by his first wife, and placed the other two (they being under twelve years of age) in the nunnery of Kirklees, in order that his two sons might obtain through their wives the whole inheritance of the co-heiresses. But the wardship of the girls belonged to a certain William de Notton, who prepared to dispute the arrangement, but was dissuaded by one of the young nuns.
* ↑ It was probably more common for widows to take a simple vow of chastity and to remain in the world. But the will of Thomas de Kent, fishmonger, seems to show that it would be considered quite natural for a widow to take the veil, even in the burgess class, which possibly remarried more frequently than the nobles. He left his wife a tenement for life, adding that should she wish to enter any religious house the same was to be sold and half the proceeds given for her maintenance (Sharpe, op. cit. i, p. 124).
* ↑ V.C.H. Suffolk, ii, p. 113. Cf. Testamenta Eboracensia, i, p. 117.
* ↑ V.C.H. London, i, p. 519. Cf. Sybil de Felton, widow of Sir Thomas Morley, who became Abbess of Barking in 1393, at the age of thirty-four. V.C.H. Essex, ii, p. 121.
* ↑ V.C.H. Warwick, ii, p. 71.
* ↑ English Register of Godstow Nunnery (E.E.T.S.), p. 43.
* ↑ Ib. p. 383. Confirmation of this deed of grant by Peter Durant, about 1200. Ib. p. 384.
* ↑ Sharpe, op. cit. i, p. 108.
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse