XI. THE OLDE DAUNCE…

XI. THE OLDE DAUNCE

A child of our grandmother Eve, a female; or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman. Love's Labour's Lost, I, i, 266-8.

It is difficult to form any exact impression of the moral state of the English nunneries during the later middle ages. Certainly there is widespread evidence of frailty on the part of individuals, and there are one or two serious cases in which a whole house was obviously in a bad condition. It is certain also that we retain the record of only a portion of the cases of immorality which existed; some never came to light at all, some were hushed up and the records of others are buried in Bishops' Registers, which are either unpublished or lost. On the other hand it is necessary to guard against exaggeration. The majority of nuns certainly kept their lifelong vow of chastity. Moreover when the conditions of medieval life are taken into account, the lapses of the nuns must, to anyone who considers them with sympathy and common sense, appear comprehensible. The routine of the convent was not always satisfying to the heart, and the temptations to which nuns were submitted were certainly grosser and more frequent than they are in similar institutions today.

Several considerations may fairly be urged in mitigation of the nuns. The initial difficulty of the celibate ideal need not be laboured. For many saints it was the first and necessary condition of their salvation; but for the average man it has always been an unnatural state and the monastic orders and the priesthood were full of average men. It is not surprising, therefore, that the history of ecclesiastical celibacy is one of the tragedies of religious life. The vow was constantly being broken. The focaria or priest's mistress is a well-known figure in medieval history and fiction; and the priest who lived thus with an unofficial wife was probably less dangerous to his female parishioners than was he who lived ostensibly alone. A crowd of clerks and chaplains, sometimes attached to some church, chantry or great man's chapel, sometimes unattached, filled the country with an "ecclesiastical proletariat," all vowed to chastity; and any student of the criminal records of the middle ages knows how often these men were concerned in cases of rape and other crime. A survey of the monastic visitations of a careful visitor such as Alnwick shows that consorting with women was a common charge against the monks and there is some evidence which points to a suspicion of grosser forms of vice. It would be strange indeed if the nuns were an exception to the rule. Even if they kept their vow, they kept it sometimes at a cost which psychologists have only recently begun to understand. The visions which were at once the torture and the joy of so many mystic women, were sexual as well as religious in their origin, as in their imagery[1371]. The terrible lassitude and despair of accidia grew in part at least from the repression of the most powerful of natural instincts, accentuated by the absence of sufficient counter interests and employments.

The whole monastic ideal is, however, bound up with the vow of chastity and, had only women with a vocation entered nunneries, the danger of the situation would have been small. Unfortunately a large number of the girls who became nuns had no vocation at all. They were given over to the life by their families, sometimes from childhood, because it was a reputable career for daughters who could not be dowered for marriage in a manner befitting their estate[1372]. They were often totally unsuited for it, by the weakness of their religions as well as by the strength of their sexual impulses. The lighthearted Chansons de Nonnes[1373], whose theme is the nun unwillingly professed, had a real basis in fact. If cases of immorality in convents seem all too frequent, it should be remembered how young and often how unwilling were those who took the vows:

Je sent les douls mals leis ma senturete Malois soit de deu ki me fist nonnete.

The blame is justly placed and the wonder is not how many but how few nuns went astray.

Again the nunneries of the middle ages were subjected to temptations which rarely occur in our own time. The chief of these was the ease with which the nuns moved about outside their houses in a world where sex was displayed good-humouredly, openly, grossly, by the populace, and with all the subtle charm of chivalry by the upper classes. The struggle to enforce enclosure had its root in the recognition of this danger, as episcopal references to the story of Dinah show; and it has already been seen how unsuccessful that struggle was. Nuns left their precincts, visited their friends, attended feasts, listened to wandering minstrels, with hardly any restraint upon their movements. It is true that in church and cloister the praise of virginity was forever dinned into their ears; but outside in the world it was not virginity that was praised. Were it a miller's tale or a wife of Bath's prologue, overheard on a pilgrimage, were it only the lilt of a passing clerk at a street corner,

Western wind, when wilt thou blow, The small rain down can rain? Christ, if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again,

the nun's mind must often have been troubled, as she turned her steps back to her cloister. Moreover their guest rooms were full of visitors, men as well as women; if they copied so eagerly the fine dresses and the pet dogs of worldly ladies, is it strange that they sometimes copied their lovers too? Other conditions besides the imperfect enforcement of enclosure increased the danger. The disorders of the times, ranging from the armed forays of the Scots in the north to the lawlessness of everyday life in all parts of the country, were not conducive to a fugitive and cloistered virtue[1374]. Nor was the constant struggle against financial need, leading as it did to many undesirable expedients for raising money, really compatible with either dignity or unworldliness. There is a poverty which breeds plain living and high thinking, a fair Lady Poverty whom St Francis wedded. But there is also an unworthy, grinding poverty, which occupies the mind with a struggle to make two ends meet and dulls it to finer issues. Too often the poverty of the nunneries was of the last type.

Let it be conceded, therefore, that the celibate ideal was a hard one, that the nuns were often recruited without any regard for their fitness to follow it, and that some of the conditions of convent life, insufficiently withdrawn from the temptations and disorders of the outside world, served to promote rather than to restrain a breach of it. With these preliminary warnings, an attempt may be made to estimate the moral state of the English nunneries. The evidence for such a study falls into three classes, the purely literary evidence of moralist and story-teller, the general statements of ecclesiastical councils and the exact and specific evidence of the Bishops' Registers. The literary evidence will be treated more fully in a further chapter and need not detain us here. Langland's nun, who had a child in cherry time, Gower's voice crying against the frailty of woman kind, the "Dame Lust, Dame Wanton and Dame Nice," who haunted the imaginary convent of the poem Why I can't be a Nun, are all well known, as are the serious exempla, the pretty Mary-miracles, and the ribald tales, which have for their subject an erring nun. They are useful as corroborative evidence, but without more exact information they would tell us little that is of specific value. Similarly the enactments of church councils and general chapters are quite general. By far the most valuable evidence as to monastic morals is contained in the Bishops' Registers, whether in the accounts of visitations and the injunctions which followed them, or in the special mandates ordering inquiry into a scandal, search after an apostate, or penance upon a sinner. The visitation documents are particularly useful. Where full detecta are preserved, the moral state of a house is vividly pictured; there you may see the unworthy Prioress, whose bad example or weak rule has led her flock astray; there the nuns conniving at a love affair and assisting an elopement, or complaining bitterly of the dishonour wrought upon their house. If the register of visitations be a full one, it is possible to form an approximately exact estimate of the moral condition of all the nunneries in a particular diocese at a particular time, in so far as it was known to the Bishop. If a diocese possess a long and fairly unbroken series of registers, as at York and Lincoln, the moral history of the house may be traced over a long period of years. Supplementary evidence is sometimes also to be found in the Papal Registers, when the Pope had been petitioned in favour of some nun, or had heard rumours of the evil state of some nunnery; but Papal letters on the subject are comparatively rare. The mass of the information which follows is therefore derived from the invaluable records of the bishops.

It seems quite clear that the nuns who broke their vows were always willing parties to the breach. Few men would have been bold enough to ravish a Sponsa Dei. Sometimes a bishop was led to suppose that a nun had been carried away against her will, but he always found out in the end that she had been in the plot; all abductions were in reality elopements. In the Register of Bishop Sutton of Lincoln there is notice of an excommunication pronounced in 1290 against the persons who abducted Agnes of Sheen, a nun of Godstow. The Bishop announces that she and another nun were journeying peacefully towards Godstow in a carriage belonging to their house, when suddenly, in the very middle of the King's highway at Wycombe, certain sons of perdition laid violent hands upon them and dragged the unwilling Agnes out of her carriage and carried her off. But he seems to have received a different account of the affair later, for in the following year he announces that Agnes of Sheen, Joan of Carru and "a certain kinswoman of the Lady Ela, Countess of Warwick," professed nuns of Godstow, have fled from their house and, casting off their habit, are living a worldly and dissolute life, to the scandal of the neighbourhood; and he pronounces excommunication against the nuns and all their helpers[1375].

Some nuns contrived to meet their lovers secretly, within the precincts of their own convents, or outside during the visits which they paid so freely despite the Bull Periculoso; they made no effort to leave their order, and were only discovered if their behaviour were such as to create a public scandal among the other nuns, or in the neighbouring villages. Others, smitten deeply by "amor che a nullo amato amar perdona," hailed insistently by the call of life outside, cast off their habits and left their convents. They risked their immortal souls by doing so, for the Church condemned the crime of apostasy far more severely than that of unchastity, since it involved the breach of all the monastic vows, instead of only one, and brought religion into dishonour in the eyes of laymen. The nun who sinned was given a penance; the nun who apostatised was excommunicated; and there were few who could withstand for long the sense of utter isolation, even from a God whose love they had scorned. The bride of Christ who could live happily under the shadow of the ban, who could marry knowing her union to be unrecognised and even cursed by the Church[1376], must have been of a most unmedieval scepticism, a most unfeminine indifference to the scorn of her fellows; or drowned so deep in love that she counted Heaven well lost. There were not many such; and the majority of apostates returned to their order, worn out by remorse or by persecution, or convinced at last that mortal love was but what the author of Hali Meidenhad named it, "a licking of honey off thorns."

It is no wonder that the majority of these apostates returned. What were they but individuals? Against them was arrayed the might of two great institutions, the Church and the State. Sometimes the might of the Church alone availed to retrieve them; terror brought them of their own free will, or they found themselves caught in a net of threats and excommunications, involving not only themselves, but all who helped them. When Isabel Clouvill, Maud Titchmarsh and Ermentrude Newark, for some time nuns professed in the house of St Mary in the Meadows (Delapre), Northampton, left their convent and went to live in sin in the world, they were excommunicated. Moreover their Bishop ordered the Archdeacon of Northampton to summon them to return within a week, and all who received them in their houses or gave them any help and counsel, were to be warned to desist within three days and to be given a penance. The names of the villages where they were received were to be notified to the Bishop and their aiders and abettors were to appear before him[1377]. How many people would suffer for long the displeasure of the Church for the sake of three runaway nuns? Lovers might be faithful, but even lovers must eat and drink and sleep beneath a roof: a nun was no nut-brown maid to live content in greenwood, "when the shawes be shene." If the pair could escape to a town where their story was not known, there was some chance for them; but sooner or later the Church found them out.

Suppose they scorned the Church; suppose powerful friends protected them, or careless folk who snapped their fingers at the priest and knew too much about begging friars to hold one amorous nun a monstrous, unexampled scandal. Then the Church could call in the majesty of the State to help, and what was a girl to do? Can one defy the King as well as the Bishop? To a soul in hell must there be added a body in prison? Elizabeth Arundell runs away from Haliwell in 1382, nor will she return. The Prioress thereupon petitions the King; let His Highness stretch forth the secular arm and bring back this lamb which wanders from the fold. His Highness complies; and his commission goes forth to Thomas Sayvill, sergeant-at-arms, John Olyver, John York, chaplain, Richard Clerk and John Clerk to arrest and deliver to the Prioress of Haliwell in the diocese of London, Elizabeth Arundell, apostate nun of that house[1378]. The sheriffs of London and Middlesex and Essex and Hertford, as well as a sergeant-at-arms and three other men, are all set hunting for Joan Adeleshey, nun of Rowney, who is wandering about in secular dress to the great scandal of her order[1379]. The net is wide; in the end the nun nearly always comes back. She comes to the Bishop for absolution. He sends a letter on her behalf to her convent, bidding them receive her in sisterly wise, but abate no jot of the penance imposed on her. The prodigal returns kneeling at the convent gate and begging admission, for it is an age of ceremony and in these dramatic moments onlookers learn their lesson[1380]. The gates swing open and close again: Sister Joan is back.

The most interesting of all the stories of apostasy which have been preserved is the romantic affair of Agnes de Flixthorpe (alias de Wissenden), nun of St Michael's, Stamford, which for ten years continually occupied the attention of Bishop Dalderby of Lincoln[1381]. The story of this poor woman is a tragic witness to the desperation into which convent life could throw one who was not suited for it, as well as to the implacable pursuit of her by the Church; for indeed the Hound of Heaven appears in it in the aspect of a bloodhound. In 1309 Dalderby excommunicated Agnes for apostasy and warned all persons against receiving her into their houses or giving her any help. The next year he was obliged to call in the secular arm against her. She was then living at Nottingham and the Archdeacon of Nottingham was instructed to warn her to return. Shortly afterwards the Bishop wrote to the Abbot of Peterborough, asking him to see to her being taken back to her house and there imprisoned and guarded. The combined efforts of the Sheriff, the Archdeacon of Nottingham and the Abbot of Peterborough would appear to have succeeded. The hapless woman was taken back to her house by force and still obdurate; and the Bishop ordered her to be confined in a chamber with stone walls, each of her legs shackled with fetters until she consented to resume her habit. Her perseverance seems, however, to have worn out the nuns, and in 1311 the Bishop wrote to one Ada, sister of William de Helewell, instructing her to take custody of Agnes. The reason for thus placing her in secular charge was that her case was now sub judice, for two months later the Bishop sent two commissioners to inquire into the whole question of the apostasy. Agnes had declared that she was never professed at all, because she had been married to one whose name she refused to give, before she entered religion; and she still, said the bishop, continued in obstinacy.

But the Church did not easily relax its clutch. After three months the Bishop wrote to his colleague the Bishop of Exeter, stating that Agnes de Flixthorpe, after having been professed for twenty years, left her house and was found wearing a man's gilt embroidered gown, that she was brought back to her house, excommunicated and kept in solitude, and that she remained obstinate and would not put on the religious habit. The Bishop, thinking it desirable that she should be removed from the diocese for a time, prayed his brother of Exeter that she might be received into the house of Cornworthy, there to undergo penance and to be kept in safe custody away from all the sisters. A clerk, Peter de Helewell (the Helewells seem to have had some special interest in her), duly conveyed Agnes far away from the level fields of the Midlands and the friends who had hidden her from her persecutors, to the little Devonshire priory. Solitude and despair for the moment broke her spirit and the next year, in 1312, she declared her penitence and the Bishop of Exeter was commissioned to absolve her; but she was kept in solitary confinement at Cornworthy until 1314, when Peter de Helewell once more journeyed across to Devonshire and brought her back to Stamford. Her native air blew hope and rebellion once more into that wild heart. Four years later Dalderby addressed a letter to the Prioress stating that Agnes de Flixthorpe had three times left her order and resumed a secular habit and was now in the world again and had been for two years past; reiterating once more the futile injunction that the Prioress "under pain of excommunication and without any dissimulation" was to bring her back and to keep her in safe custody and solitude; the unfortunate Prioress had doubtless had more than enough of Agnes de Flixthorpe and wished for nothing better than to leave her in the world. The story ends abruptly here and it will never be known whether Agnes de Flixthorpe was caught again.

It was perhaps merciful to receive again apostates whose hearts failed them and who besought with tears to be reconciled to the Church. But the forcible return of a hardened sinner cannot have raised the moral tone of a house. Sometimes these nuns had lived for two or three years in the world before they were brought back. Sometimes they broke out again, yielded their easy virtue to a new lover, or fled once more into the world. At Basedale (1308) Agnes de Thormondby had three times fallen thus and left her order[1382]; and cases of more than one lover are not rare. Sometimes the prioress of a house struggled to preserve her flock from contagion by refusing to admit the returned sinner; thus the Prioress of Rothwell in 1414 declined to comply with the Bishop's mandate to receive back a certain Joan, saying that by her own confession the girl had lived for three years with one William Suffewyk; whereupon the Bishop cited her for disobedience and repeated his order[1383]. The only recorded case of a woman being refused admission concerns a sister and not a professed nun; in 1346 the Archbishop of York warned the Prioress of Nunappleton on no account to receive back Margaret, a sister of the house, who had left it pregnant, as he found that in the past she had on successive occasions relapsed and been in a similar condition[1384]. It is significant that the same Archbishop wrote to the Convent of Sinningthwaite (where they opportunely preserved "the arm of St Margaret and the tunic of St Bernard, believed to be good for women lying in") concerning one of their nuns Margaret de Fonten, who had left the house pregnant, that "as she had only done so once" her penance was to be mitigated[1385]. There can be no plainer commentary on the literary theme of the nun unwillingly professed than these cases of recurring frailty and apostasy. In the world these girls might have been happy wives, each with a lover or two beside their lords, like the ladies admired by Aucassin; for convents they were totally unsuited and obeyed their natures only with woe and disgrace to themselves and to their orders.

The pages of the Registers throw some light upon the partners of their misdemeanours. In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the convents of France and Italy were the haunts of young gallants, monachini, who specialised in intrigues with nuns[1386]. But the seduction of a Sponsa Dei was not a fashionable pursuit in medieval England, and it was not as a rule lords and gentlemen who hung about the precincts. Now we hear of a married man boarding in the house[1387], now of the steward of the convent[1388], now of the bailiff of a manor[1389], now of a wandering harp-player[1390], now of a smith's son[1391], now of this or that layman, married or unmarried. But far more often the theme is Clericus et Nonna. Nuns' lovers were drawn from that great host of vicars, chaplains and chantry priests, themselves the children of the Church and under the vow of chastity, whose needs were greatest and whose very familiarity with the bonds of religion possibly bred contempt. As visitors in their convents, or as acquaintances outside, the nuns were constantly meeting members of this band of celibates, who roamed about "as thick as motes in the sunbeam." They knew well how to sing, with Chaucer's Pardoner, "Come hider, love, to me," and little enough like priests they looked with their short tunics, peaked shoes and silvered girdles,

Bucklers brode and swerdes long, Baudrike with baselardes kene, Sech toles about her necke they hong, With Antichrist seche prestes been.

Love would light on Alison, even were the lover a clerk and she a nun, and sometimes where the priest had tempted he could absolve. What the young man of fashion was to the Italian convent of the sixteenth century, the chaplain was to the English convent of the fourteenth and fifteenth. Sometimes the seducer was attached to the convent as chaplain and even dwelt within the precincts. Bishop Sutton had to write to the Prioress of Studley bidding her send away from the house John de Sevekwurth, clerk, who had borne himself in such unseemly wise while he dwelt there, that he had seduced two of the nuns[1392]. The chaplain of the house was involved in cases at White Hall, Ilchester (1323)[1393], Moxby (1325)[1394] and Catesby (1442)[1395], which may lend some support to the complaints of Gower[1396] and other medieval moralists and an additional sting to the good humoured chaff addressed by Chaucer's host to the nun's priest, Sir John. That the spiritual father of the nuns could thus abuse his position would seem almost incredible to anyone unfamiliar with medieval sources; yet Gower goes further still, suggesting that even the visitors of the convents were not always beyond suspicion[1397].

More often the lover had no connection with the nunnery, but had some post as chaplain or vicar in the neighbourhood[1398]. Opportunities for a meeting were not hard to obtain in the houses and gardens of the town[1399], even in the church and precincts of the priory itself[1400], as visitation comperta show. Nor were cloistered monks proof against temptation. They knew only too well what passionate hearts could beat beneath a monastic habit and they knew the merry rhyme of Cockaygne land, where every monk had his nun. It has already been shown that nuns and monks met freely and that Bishops were constantly sending injunctions against the admission of monks and friars to convents and the visits paid by nuns to monasteries[1401]. Yet we hear of a nun of St Sepulchre's, Canterbury, whose name scandal connected with the cellarer of the Cathedral (1284)[1402]; of a nun of Lymbrook, who was the mistress of William de Winton, Subprior of Leominster Priory, and not his only mistress (1282)[1403]; of a nun of Swine, who had had two monks of the Abbey of Meaux for her lovers (1310)[1404]. Bishop Alnwick's visitation of the Lincoln diocese brought to light two such cases and in both the monk was not the nun's sole lover. Agnes Butler (alias Pery alias Northampton) ran away from St Michael's, Stamford, for a day and a night with Brother John Harreyes, an Austin friar; her secret was kept, but when Alnwick visited her house in 1440 she had run away again, this time with a harp-player, and had been living with him a year and a half at Newcastle-on-Tyne, a far enough cry from Stamford[1405]. In 1445, when the Bishop went to Godstow, he found Dame Alice Longspey grievously suspected, by reason of her confabulations alone in the convent church with an Oxford chaplain, who gave himself out to be her kinsman. A week later, while visiting Eynsham Abbey, he received a further sidelight on her character from the evidence of the abbot that

one brother John Bengeworthe, a monk, who had been imprisoned for his ill desert, brake prison and went into apostasy, taking with him a nun of Godstow, but he has now been brought back to the monastery and is still doing penance.

The nun was Alice Longspey and it is significant that this particular escapade had been concealed from the Bishop at his recent visitation of Godstow[1406]. The most spirited enterprise of all, however, was the combined effort of William Fox, parson of Lea (near Gainsborough) and John Fox and Thomas de Lingiston, Friars Minor of Lincoln, who were indicted before the Kings Justices at Caistor, because they came to Brodholme Nunnery (one of the only two Premonstratensian houses in the kingdom) on January 15th, 1350, and then and there "violently took and carried away, against the peace of their lord the King, a certain nun, by name Margaret Everingham, a sister of the said house, stripping her of her religious habit and clothing her in a green gown of secular habit, taking also divers goods to the value of 40 shillings"[1407].

Much as the church hated sin, it hated scandal even more and a nun might often hope to have her frailty concealed by her fellows. Sometimes they may have condoned it, for they are occasionally found assisting an elopement[1408]; sometimes they feared episcopal interference and an evil reputation for their house. But it was not always possible to conceal these unhallowed unions and when a child was born the wretched nun could not hope to escape disgrace and punishment[1409].

And dame Peronelle a prestes file--Priouresse worth she neuere For she had childe in chirityme--all owre chapitere it wiste.

Usually Dame Pernell fled in despair to any friendly asylum which she could find and only returned to her house after the birth and disposal of her child. Sometimes she remained there in what privacy she might; and the affair was managed with as little scandal as possible. The nuns of St Michael's, Stamford, knew that their sister Margaret Mortimer had had a child on this side of Easter; but even the Subprioress did not know (or said she did not know) "of whom she conceived or whether she bare male or female; howbeit she was absent from quire for a fortnight"[1410]. Once we hear of an apostate, deserted and pregnant, coming back to St Mary's, Winchester, and the wise and humane William of Wykeham writes to the Abbess bidding her receive the girl gently and kindly, and keep her in safety until the birth of her child, after which he will himself make ordinance concerning her[1411]. It is hard to discover what became of these most unwelcome children. It is not surprising that they sometimes died[1412]. But if they lived their origin probably weighed but lightly on them in those days, when it was regarded as no dishonour to have bastards, who were often acknowledged by their fathers and provided for in their wills side by side with true born sons and daughters. It is true that, like other illegitimates, they could not be ordained or hold ecclesiastical preferment, without a special dispensation. But even the son of a nun could obtain such dispensation[1413] and even the daughter of a nun did not always go undowered. There were not many monastic parents like that seventeenth century abbess of Maubuisson who was rumoured to have twelve children, who were brought up diversely, each according to the rank of the father[1414], or like the Prior of Maiden Bradley, as described by Henry VIII's commissioner, "an holy father prior and hath but vj children and but one dowghter mariede, yet of the goods of the monasteries trysting shortly to mary the rest, [and] his sones be tale men waytting upon him"[1415]. Yet we hear of at least one Prioress who sold the goods of her house to make a dowry for her daughter[1416].

If it be sought to know whether any houses were particularly liable to scandals and enjoyed a bad name, it must be answered that it is almost impossible to say. But isolated cases of immorality and apostasy come from nunneries so widely distributed in different dioceses, that one must conclude that most of them had at one time or another a sinner in their midst. Often enough the case was isolated; occasionally there was scandal about the general condition of a house in its neighbourhood. The discipline and morals of convents were apt to vary with that of their heads. It is significant that when a house is in a bad moral state the fault may nearly always be traced to a weak or immoral prioress. So it was at Wintney in 1405, at Redlingfield in 1427, at Markyate in 1433, at Catesby in 1442, at St Michael's, Stamford, in 1445, at Littlemore in 1517, and at several Yorkshire nunneries. It is plain also that when a convent was very small and poor, it was apt to become lax and disorderly. The small Yorkshire houses bear witness to this and if further proof be required the state of Cannington in 1351 and Easebourne in 1478 may be quoted from among several other instances.

Cannington in Somerset was a small and poor house, but its nuns were drawn from some of the best county families. In 1351 it was visited by commissioners of Ralph of Shrewsbury, Bishop of Bath and Wells, and they found something more like a brothel than a priory. Maud Pelham and Alice Northlode (a young lady whom the Bishop had forced on the unwilling convent, on his elevation to the See some twenty years before) were in the habit of frequently admitting and holding discourse with suspected persons. The inevitable chaplain was again the occasion for a fall. On dark nights they held long and suspicious confabulations with Richard Sompnour and Hugh Willynge, chaplains, in the nave of the convent church. Hugh was apparently only too willing and Richard was even as Chaucer's summoner, "as hot he was and lecherous as a sparrow," for (say the commissioners) "it is suspected by many that as a result of these conversations they fall into yet worse sin." Moreover

"the said sisters, and in particular the said Maud, not content with this evil behaviour, are wont per insolencias, minas et tactus indecentes to provoke many of the serving men of the place to sin," and, "to make use of her own words she says that she will never once say Mea culpa for these great misdeeds, but turning like a virago upon the prioress and the other sisters who abhor the aforesaid things, when they reproach her, she threatens to do manly execution upon them with knives and other weapons."

Nor was this all:

In the said visitation the charge was made, dreadful to say, horrible to hear, and was proven by much evidence as to notoriety and by confession, that a certain nun of the said house, Joan Trimelet, having cast away the reins of modesty ... was found with child, but not indeed by the Holy Ghost, and afterwards gave birth to offspring, to the grave disgrace and confusion of her religion and to the scandal of many.

These were the most serious charges; but the same visitation revealed that the Prioress was weak and had been guilty of the simoniacal reception of four nuns, for the sake of scraping together some money, while the subprioress was incurably lazy, refused to attend matins and other canonical hours, and neglected to correct her delinquent sisters[1417]. It is plain that the whole house was utterly demoralised and the demoralisation was possibly of long standing, for there had been one of the usual election quarrels in the early part of the century, and in 1328 the then Bishop had issued a commission to inquire into the illicit wanderings of certain nuns[1418]. Yet the priory was a favourite resort of boarders.

Easebourne, again, was a poor but very aristocratic house, containing towards the close of the fifteenth century from six to ten nuns. In 1478 Bishop Story of Chichester visited it and found grave need for his interference. One of the nuns, Matilda Astom, deposed

that John Smyth, chaplain, and N. Style, a married man in the service of Lord Arundel, had and were accustomed to have great familiarity within the said priory, as well as elsewhere, with Dame Joan Portsmouth and Dame Philippa King, nuns of the said priory, but whether the said Sir John Smyth and N. Style abducted, or caused to be abducted, the said Joan Portsmouth and Philippa King she knows not, as she says.

(Another nun deposed that they did.)

And moreover she says that a certain William Gosden and John Capron of Easebourne aforesaid, guarded and kept in their own houses the said Joan and Philippa for some time before their withdrawal from the said priory and took their departure with them and so were great encouragers to them in that particular.

Another nun, Joan Stevyn, deposed that the two nuns had each had, long before their withdrawal, "children or a child." Another said that Sir John Senoke (i.e. Sevenoaks, clearly the same as John Smyth)

much frequented the priory, so that during some weeks he passed the night and lay within the priory every night, and was cause, as she believes, of the ruin of the said Sir John Smyth (sic, MS. ? Joan Portsmouth). Also she says Sir John Smyth gave many gifts to Philippa King.

All the nuns agreed in blaming the Prioress for not having properly punished the two sinners and one raked up a vague story that "she had had one or two children several years ago"; but as she admitted that this was hearsay and as the Prioress was then at least fifty years old, too much credit must not be given to it. On the same day a certain "Brother William Cotnall," evidently attached in some capacity, perhaps as custos, to the house, appeared before the Bishop and confessed that he had sealed a licence to Joan Portsmouth to go out of the Priory and had himself sinned with Philippa King. The two priests, Smyth and Cotnall, had not only debauched the convent, but had done their best to ruin it financially; for they had persuaded the Prioress to pawn the jewels of the house for fifteen pounds, in order to purchase a Bull of Capacity for Cotnall, who had then sealed with the common seal of the convent, against the wish of the Prioress, a quittance for John Smyth concerning all and every sort of actions and suits which the convent might have against him, and especially the matter of the jewels[1419].

But if small houses fell easily into disorder, great abbeys were not exempt from contagion. Cases of immorality are found at Wilton, Shaftesbury, Romsey, St Mary's Winchester, Wherwell and Elstow, all of them abbeys and among them the oldest and richest in the land. It is the same with two other houses, famous in legend, Amesbury, where Guinevere "let make herself a nun and wore white clothes and black," and Godstow, where Fair Rosamond lay buried in the chapter house. Here, where deathless romance had its dwelling place, it is not strange that the winged god ever and again took his toll of the nuns. But what sorry substitutes for Guinevere and Rosamond were the trembling apostates, who fled into hiding to bear their miserable infants and were haled back by bishops to do penance in the cloister.

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath.

The ancient house of Amesbury fell into evil ways in the twelfth century. In 1177 its abbess was said to have borne three children and its nuns were notorious for their evil lives, whereupon the convent was dissolved, most of the nuns being placed in other houses, and Amesbury was then reconstituted as a cell of Fontevrault and peopled with a prioress and twenty-four nuns, brought over from that house[1420]. Queen Eleanor, widow of Henry III, took the veil there and by her influence Edward I allowed his daughter Mary to become a nun there, together with twelve noble maidens[1421]. But the sin of Guinevere haunted it. About Mary herself there is an ancient unexplained scandal, for in a papal mandate she is declared to have been seduced by John de Warenne, the rather disreputable Earl of Surrey[1422]; and she seems to have been as much out of her house as in it, for she constantly visited court and went on pilgrimages. Later still the papal benevolence was exerted on behalf of Margaret Greenfield, nun of Amesbury, who had borne a child after her profession (1398)[1423], and Cecily Marmyll, who "after having lived laudably for some time in the said monastery, allowed herself to be carnally known by two secular priests and had offspring by each of them" (1424)[1424]. These ladies were doubtless well born, with wealthy friends, who could afford to petition the Pope and buy restoration to the monastic dignities and offices, which they had lost by their fault. The story of Godstow is very similar. There seems to have been some scandal about the morals of the subprioress in 1284, but Peckham announced that he did not believe a word of it[1425]. In 1290, however, a nun of noble birth was (as we saw) carried off from her carriage; and she and two others were apostate in the following year. Another apostate repented and was absolved in 1339. In 1432 a nun was found by the bishop with child and in 1445 Dame Alice Longspey indulged in the escapades already described with an Oxford priest and a monk of Eynsham. All through the career of the convent, it was continually being warned against the recourse of scholars from Oxford. Both Amesbury and Godstow enjoyed fame and good repute and at the latter children were received for education. Their history shows that even the most aristocratic and popular houses fell sometimes on evil days and sometimes sheltered unworthy inmates.

It is of considerable interest to study the condition of all the nunneries in a particular part of the country at a particular date. An analysis of the references to the Yorkshire houses has been made elsewhere[1426]; here we may study a diocese in which the conditions of daily life were less abnormal than they were on the Scottish border. A rather imperfect view of the state of the diocese of Lincoln between the years 1290 and 1360 may be gleaned from the registers of Bishops Sutton, Dalderby, Burghersh and Gynewell; it is imperfect because there are not many visitation records, and information has chiefly to be derived from episcopal mandates for the return of apostates[1427], which leave us with little knowledge of the internal discipline of houses from which nuns did not happen to run away. The names of eleven out of the four and thirty[1428] nunneries of the diocese occur in connection with apostates during these years, six Benedictine, four Augustinian and one Cluniac. The apostasy of three Godstow nuns in 1290 has already been described[1429]. There was an apostate at Wothorpe in 1296[1430] and two years later a nun of Harrold was found guilty of unchastity[1431]. Apostates are also mentioned from Sewardsley in 1300[1432], from Goring in 1309 and again in 1358[1433], from Markyate in 1336[1434] and from St Leonard's, Grimsby, in 1337[1435]. At Burnham there is the case of Margery Hedsor, who was excommunicated at intervals for apostasy between 1311 and 1317[1436]. St Mary in the Meadows (Delapre), Northampton, seems to have been in a bad state, for in 1300 three nuns, said to have been professed for some years, were excommunicated for leaving their convent and living in carnal sin in the world, and in 1311 there was another apostate from the house[1437]. St Michael's, Stamford, provides the curious story of Agnes de Flixthorpe, and the almost equally tragic case of Agnes Bowes, ex-Prioress of Wothorpe, all of whose fellows had died in the Black Death and whose house had therefore been annexed to St Michael's, Stamford, in 1354. She was evidently unable to settle down in her new home and she ran away from it five years later[1438]. In the plague year 1349, Ella de Mounceaux, a nun of Nuncoton, who had obtained leave of absence and instead of returning had become the mistress of John Haunsard, appeared with tears before the Bishop and begged to be sent back to her house[1439].

This list of apostates is, as has been said, necessarily incomplete and gives no details as to the state of the nunneries absolved. A much more exact impression can be gained of the diocese a century later, during the twenty years between 1430 and 1450, when Bishops Gray and Alnwick were visiting the religious houses under their control; Alnwick's Register is particularly valuable, since the verbal evidence of the nuns is preserved. If we take Gray's Register first, we find serious charges of general misconduct made against three houses, Markyate and Flamstead in 1431 and Sewardsley in 1432. The Bishop wrote to a canon of Lincoln that

abundant rumour and loud whisperings have brought to our hearing that in the priories of the Holy Trinity of the Wood by Markyate and of St Giles by Flamstead ... certain things forbidden, hateful, guilty and contrary to holy religion and regular discipline are daily done and brought to pass in damnable wise by the said prioresses, nuns and other, servingmen and agents of the said places; by reason whereof the good report of the same places is set in jeopardy, the brightness and comeliness of religion in the same persons are grievously spotted, inasmuch as the whole neighbourhood is in commotion herefrom.

The canon is accordingly told to inquire into the scandals and punish delinquents[1440]. Unfortunately the result of the inquiry has not been preserved; three years later the Bishop deputed another commissioner to inquire into the condition of Markyate and from his letters of commission it is plain that he had himself visited the house, but that the Prioress and sisters had managed to conceal their misdeeds from him. Since then he had learnt that one of the nuns, Katherine Tyttesbury, had been guilty of immorality and apostasy and that the Prioress herself had failed to obey his injunctions. The commissioner was therefore ordered to go to Markyate, absolve the apostate if she made submission and, if necessary, depose the Prioress. The result of the inquiry was that the Prioress, Denise Loweliche, was charged with having consorted with Richard, the steward of the Priory, for five years and more, up to the time of his death, so that "public talk and rumour during the said time were busy touching the premises in the town of Markyate and other places, neighbouring and distant, in the diocese of Lincoln and elsewhere." The Prioress denied the charge and begged to be allowed to clear herself, so the commissioner ordered her, in addition to her own oath, to find five out of her ten nuns as compurgatresses, i.e. to swear to her innocence. She sought in vain for help among her sisters; at the appointed hour she begged for an extension of time and the commissioner granted her this boon, "so that she might be able meanwhile to communicate and take counsel with her sisters," and also "of a more liberal grace," declared himself ready to take the word of four nuns on her behalf. The picture of the wretched Prioress going from nun to nun, imploring each to forswear herself, with heaven knows what threats and entreaties, is a melancholy one. Not even four nuns could be found to swear to her innocence, so clear and notorious was her guilt, and she laid her formal resignation in the hands of the bishop[1441].

The other nunnery against which a general charge of immorality was made by the Bishop in 1434 was the Cistercian house of Sewardsley, of which he said that the Prioress and nuns,

following the enticements of the flesh and abandoning the path of religion and casting aside the restraint of all modesty and chastity, are giving their minds to debauchery, committing in damnable wise in public and as it were, in the sight of all the people, acts of adultery, incest, sacrilege and fornication[1442].

The report of the inquiry held has not been preserved, but there was obviously something seriously amiss. Gray had also to deal with individual cases of immorality at three other houses. Already at Elstow in 1390 Archbishop Courtenay on his metropolitan visitation had made a general injunction that

no nun convicted or publicly defamed of the crime of incontinency, be deputed to any office within the monastery and especially to that of gatekeeper, until it be sufficiently established that she has made purgation of her innocence[1443],

an injunction repeated verbatim by Bishop Flemyng of Lincoln in 1421[1444]. Now in 1432 Gray found that a nun named Pernell had been "several times guilty of fleshly lapse" and was leading an apostate life in secular dress outside the house; which speaks but ill for the moral state of an important abbey[1445]. In the same year he found one of the nuns of Godstow enceinte[1446], and in 1433 inquiry showed that Ellen Cotton, nun of Heynings, had recently had a child[1447].

The worst cases found by Alnwick when he visited the religious houses of the diocese ten years later have already been described and the evidence of his register can be summarised briefly. All was well at Elstow, Heynings and Markyate; Dame Pernell [Gauthorpe], Dame Ellen Cotton and Dame Katherine Tyttesbury were all dwelling peaceably among their sisters; even the disreputable Denise Loweliche was still, in spite of her resignation, ruling as Prioress of Markyate. An echo of old difficulties remained, however, at this last house and one nun begged the Bishop to speak to the Prioress, "to the end that she take better heed to the nuns who have previously erred, so that they be kept more strictly from erring again than is wont"[1448]; evidently discipline was not strict. At Godstow disorders had not yet ceased. The nuns received visitors and paid visits freely and scholars of Oxford still haunted the house; moreover one of the nuns, Dame Alice Longspey (of whom we have heard before), was of very easy virtue[1449]. In two other houses Alnwick found great disorder prevailing: the regime of Margaret Wavere, Prioress of Catesby, has already been described, her bad language, her temper, her dishonesty and her priestly lover; and her chief accuser Isabel Benet had borne a child to the chaplain of the house[1450]. Similarly we have seen into what a disreputable state St Michael's, Stamford, fell under an aged and impotent Prioress; how one nun ran away with an Austin friar and then with a wandering harp-player, and how two others had borne children or were notoriously held to be unchaste; this is one of the worst houses which the records of medieval nunneries have brought to light[1451]. Finally there is the doubtful case of Ankerwyke, where the Prioress is said through negligence to have allowed no less than six nuns to go into apostasy, a fact which she freely admitted; but whether they had merely removed themselves through discontent with an unpopular prioress, or whether they had eloped it is impossible to say. At any rate they had not returned[1452].

It is interesting to attempt a statistical estimate of the moral condition of the Lincoln nunneries during the twenty years from 1430 to 1450. It is possible to do so with some accuracy because the nuns giving evidence in each convent are enumerated in Alnwick's reports. If we omit the general charges against Sewardsley and Flamstead and the ambiguous apostasy of the six nuns of Ankerwyke, we have twelve out of 220 nuns guilty of immoral behaviour, or a little over five per cent.; but this is certainly an understatement, having regard to the loss of the Sewardsley and Flamstead inquiries and of other visitations by the two bishops, to say nothing of possible concealment by the nuns. Between them Gray and Alnwick have left on record visitations or inquiries relating to twenty-four houses and cases of immorality came to light at eight, that is to say at one-third of the number visited. All except two of these, Elstow and Heynings, were very seriously affected, more than one nun having succumbed to sin; and the Prioress was found guilty in two and probably suspected in two others. The situation seems a serious one and Alnwick's visitations of the houses of monks and canons which were in his diocese show that the men were more lax in their behaviour than the women.

A similar statistical estimate can be made of the condition of convents in the diocese of Norwich during the visitation by Bishop Nykke or his commissary in 1514[1453]. Eight convents, containing between them seventy-two nuns, were visited and only one case of immorality was found, at Crabhouse[1454]. This is a far more favourable picture than that presented by the diocese of Lincoln in the previous century. Again in 1501 Dr Hede visited the nunneries of the diocese of Winchester as commissary of the Prior of Canterbury, during the vacancy of the sees of Canterbury and Winchester[1455]. The diocese contained only four houses, but three of them were important abbeys, St Mary's, Winchester, with fourteen nuns, Wherwell with twenty-two and Romsey with forty; the fourth was Wintney Priory, with ten nuns. All seem to have been in perfect order except Romsey, which had fallen into decay under the regime of an abbess who had herself been guilty of adultery, and where one of the nuns was charged with incontinence with the vicar of the parish church. Unfortunately the record of the visitation is left incomplete and there are no injunctions; hence it is impossible to say whether the last charge was true, but the abbey had been in a disordered state for some years past[1456]. Another diocese for which an estimate can be made is Chichester, but it contained only two nunneries, Rusper and Easebourne. At Bishop Story's visitation in 1478 all was well at Rusper, a poor and ruinous little house containing seven nuns; but all was very far from well at Easebourne, where six nuns remained and two had gone into apostasy after conducting themselves in the thoroughly dissolute manner described above[1457]. At Bishop Sherborne's visitation in 1524 the number of nuns at Rusper had fallen to four, but there was no complaint except that a certain William Tychenor had frequent access to the priory and sowed discord between the Prioress and her three sisters. At Easebourne there were eight nuns, but the house seems not to have recovered its tone after the scandals of 1524. The subprioress deposed that some twelve years before a certain Ralph Pratt had seduced a sister; yet the convent had granted him the proceeds of the church of Easebourne and he still had much access to the priory[1458]. It is a pity that more of these statistical estimates, imperfect as they are, cannot be made.

It remains to consider what steps were taken to punish offenders and to reform evils. The crime of seducing a nun was always considered an extremely serious one; she was Sponsa Dei, inviolable, sacrosanct. Anglo-Saxon law fined the ravisher heavily, and a law of Edward I declared him liable to three years imprisonment, besides satisfaction made to the convent. There is, however, no evidence that the State imprisoned or otherwise punished persons guilty of this crime, though it was always ready to issue the writ De apostata capiendo, for the recovery of a monk or nun who had fled. Whenever the lover of a nun is found undergoing punishment, it is always a punishment inflicted by the Church. If a man had abducted a nun, or were accused of seducing her, he was summoned before the Bishop or Archdeacon and required to purge himself of the charge. If he pleaded "Not guilty" a day was appointed, on which he had to clear himself by the oath of a number of compurgators. Thus the Prioress of Catesby's lover, the priest William Taylour, was summoned before Bishop Alnwick in the church of Brampton; there he denied the crime and was told to bring five chaplains, of good report, who had knowledge of his behaviour, in a few days' time to the parish church of Rothwell[1459]. The result of his attempt to find compurgators is not known, but the Prioress had already failed to get four of her nuns to support her and had been pronounced guilty. One wonders what happened when the man produced compurgators and the lady failed to do so: for these misdemeanours a deux the compurgatorial system would seem a little uncertain.

If a man's guilt were proven by his failure to provide compurgators or to come before the Bishop, it remained to decree his punishment. The obdurate were excommunicated until such time as they submitted. The penitent were adjudged a penance. There is abundant evidence that the penance given by the Church was always a severe one. The classical instance is that of Sir Osbert Giffard in 1286. The Giffards were a large and influential West country family and in the last quarter of the thirteenth century several of the children of Hugh Giffard of Boyton rose to high positions in the Church. His eldest son, Walter, became in turn Bishop of Bath and Wells and Archbishop of York, dying in 1279, and his second son Godfrey became Bishop of Worcester. Of his daughters one, Juliana, is found as Abbess of Wilton in 1275, another, Mabel, as Abbess of Shaftesbury in 1291, and a third, Agatha, would seem to have held a position of some importance at Elstow, though she was never Abbess there[1460]. These great ladies do not seem to have had a very good influence in their nunneries, in spite of the exalted position of their brothers. In 1270 the Bishop of Lincoln writes apologetically to Walter Giffard, Archbishop of York, concerning scandals which have arisen in Elstow, "whence more frequently than in any other house beneath our rule scandals of wicked deeds arise," and it is clear from his letter that the Abbess and the Bishop's sister were implicated[1461]. In 1298 also the Abbess and nuns of Shaftesbury had incurred excommunication "for their offences against God and by the creation of scandal"[1462]. But the most serious mishap occurred at Wilton in 1286. Here Juliana Giffard[1463] had under her rule a young relative named Alice Giffard, and in this year Sir Osbert Giffard, knight (whose exact relationship to the Abbess and the Bishop and to Alice is not clear), "with sacrilegious hand ravished and abducted in the silence of the night sisters Alice Russel and Alice Gyffard, professed according to the rule of St Benedict in the monastery of Wylton." Archbishop Peckham and the Bishop of Salisbury forthwith excommunicated Sir Osbert, who eventually made his submission. It was indeed an unfortunate scandal to occur in a Bishop's family and created a great stir in the country round. Godfrey's concern is shown by the appearance in his Worcester Register of the Bishop of Salisbury's letter to the Sub-dean of Salisbury and others announcing the penance to be imposed upon the abductor[1464].

This penance was as follows:

The bishop enjoined upon him that he should restore the aforesaid sisters and all goods of the monastery withdrawn and should make all the satisfaction that he possibly could to the abbess and convent. And that on Ash Wednesday in the church of Salisbury, the said crime being solemnly published before the clergy and people, he should humbly permit himself to be taken to the door of the church, with bare feet, in mourning raiment and uncovered head, with other penitents and should be beaten with sticks about the church on three holy days and on three Tuesdays through the market of Salisbury and so often and in like manner about the church of Wylton and through the market there and he should be likewise beaten about the church of Amesbury and the market there and about the church of Shaftesbury and the market there. In his clothing from henceforth there shall not appear any cloaks of lamb's wool, gilt spurs or horse trappings, or girdle of a knight, unless in the meantime he should obtain special grace of the king, but he shall take journey to the Holy Land and there serve for three years[1465].

The penance was thus severe; but it is another matter to say that it was always duly performed. A man who had already risked his immortal soul once, by the seduction of a nun, might well choose to undergo excommunication and risk it a second time, by refusing to do penance. The lover of a nun of Harrold in 1298 was thus excommunicated for refusing to be beaten through the market-place[1466]. Moreover there were endless ways of delaying the humiliating ceremony. Take the case of Richard Gray, the married boarder to whom Elizabeth Willoughby bore a child at St Michael's, Stamford. On July 3rd, 1442, in the parish church of Wellingborough, the Bishop caused him to swear upon the Holy Book that he would abjure the priory and all communication with Elizabeth. He then sentenced him to four floggings round one of the churches of Stamford on four Sundays or feast days,

carrying in his hand before the procession of the same church a taper of one pound's worth of wax, being clothed in his doublet and linen garments only, and on the last of the said four days, after the procession is finished, he has to offer the said taper to the high altar of the said Church.

Moreover he was to perform a like penance on four Fridays, going round the market-place of Stamford, and within a month he was also to make pilgrimage on horseback to Lincoln Cathedral and when he came within five miles of Lincoln, to dismount and go barefoot to the cathedral and there offer to the high altar a taper of one pound's weight. The very evening, however, that this severe penance was imposed, Richard Gray came before the Bishop again and made lowly supplication that he would deign to temper the penance; whereupon Alnwick, "moved with compassion on him," commuted the penance round the market-place to a payment of twenty shillings to the nuns of St Michael's, to be paid within a month, and another twenty shillings to the fabric of the cathedral church, to be paid within six weeks. Gray was to bring the Bishop letters testimonial as to the payment of the forty shillings and the performance of the penance at Lincoln, also within six weeks. But Richard had no intention of buying expensive wax candles, paying forty shilling fines, catching cold in his shirt at Stamford or humiliating himself at Lincoln. When summoned to do his penance he appealed to the court of Canterbury. The Bishop then got licence from the commissary of the official in that court to proceed against the delinquent and summoned him to show cause why he had not done penance. On November 15th, 1442, the slippery Richard appeared by proxy before the Bishop's commissioner and said that he was "withheld by so many and so sore infirmities of fevers and other kinds, lying in his bed every other day, that he could not without grievous bodily harm appear in person in or on the same day and place." The commissioner postponed his appearance until December 11th and eventually he appeared on that day, but showing no cause why he had not performed his penance, and was excommunicated again by the Bishop, at which point he drops out of history, with his penance still unperformed[1467].

It was no doubt an easier matter to exact penance from a nun. The apostate was excommunicated until she made submission and returned to her convent. Sometimes a very obdurate sinner was transferred to do penance at another nunnery; the punishment was a common one in the diocese of York[1468] and a wicked Prioress of Redlingfield was sent to Wix in 1427[1469]; but nunneries not unnaturally sometimes objected to having to support at their cost an evilly disposed woman from another house[1470]. More commonly the sinner did penance in her own house. If particularly obdurate, she was imprisoned for a time and even, if need be, shackled, in some secure place in the convent[1471]. A severe penance was imposed in 1321 by Archbishop Melton upon Maud of Terrington, an apostate nun of Keldholme, who had for long lived in sin in the world. She was to be last in choir at all the canonical hours, and when not in choir to be confined in solitude. She was never to go out of the precincts of the cloister and was to be forever debarred from speaking with lay folk and from sending or receiving letters. She was not to be allowed to wear the black Benedictine veil, which marked her as a nun, until such time as the Archbishop should mitigate her penance, and should fast with bread and vegetables on Wednesdays and bread and water on Fridays. For the rest of her life she was never to wear a shift next her skin. On Wednesdays and Fridays she was to go barefoot in the presence of the convent round the cloister, all secular persons having been excluded, and there receive two beatings by the hand of the Prioress and on each other day of the week she was to receive one such discipline. Every week she was to say two psalters, besides Placebo and Dirige and the commendation for the dead, which she was to say each day for the remission of her sins. She was never to be present at the daily consultations of the chapter, or at any other convent business, but "let her lie prone before the convent at the entrance of the choir, to be spurned by their feet, if they will"[1472].

This was a particularly severe, not to say inhuman, penance and it is unlikely that such was the rule even in the case of obdurate offenders. A guilty nun at Crabhouse in 1514 is told to sit last among her sisters for a month and to say seven psalters during that period[1473] and a novice at Redlingfield in 1427 is to go in front of the solemn procession of the convent on Sunday, wearing no veil and clad in white flannel[1474]. The former was not an apostate, though she had had a child, and the latter was not yet professed and had been led away by the bad example of her Prioress; nevertheless these penances seem sufficiently mild, in comparison with the orthodox view of their offence. Fasting and penitential psalms and some outward mark of degradation, such as the loss of the veil and of the place in choir and chapter, to which the nun's standing in the convent entitled her, were common penances. A guilty nun was also debarred from holding any conventual office; but it must be admitted that this salutary precaution was not always strictly carried out. Occasionally a visitor is obliged to make a general injunction against the holding of office by nuns convicted or suspected of incontinence; Archbishop Courtenay mentions specifically the office of portress[1475], a necessary precaution when one remembers how often the French and Italian touriere of a later date was little better than a procuress. Frequently notorious evil-doers retained their position, and it is surprising to notice how often persons who were obviously unsuitable and immoral were elected to the headship of a house, or continued to hold that position after conviction. Sabina de Apelgarth, who had been in apostasy when a simple nun of Moxby in 1310, is found holding office in 1318, for Archbishop Melton orders her to be removed from all offices and not to go outside the convent and couples his injunction with a general prohibition against any office being held by a nun convicted de lapsu carnis. Yet she apparently became Prioress of the house, for her removal on account of further misconduct is noted in 1328[1476]. Isabel de Berghby, Prioress of Arthington, apostatised in 1312, but returned eighteen months later and was re-elected Prioress in 1349[1477]. In 1310 Isabella de St Quintin was ordered to be removed from the office of cellaress in the presence of the whole convent of Nunkeeling, and the nuns were ordered not to appoint her to any other office nor allow her to leave the house; but in 1316 Isabella de St Quintin was elected Prioress[1478]. Denise Loweliche, the Prioress of Markyate, who had been so ready to add perjury to incontinence in 1433 and had resigned only because she could not find four nuns to swear to her innocence, was still, despite her resignation, Prioress when Alnwick visited the house in 1442. Abbess Elizabeth Broke of Romsey was similarly re-elected, after having been found guilty of perjury and adultery[1479]. Even the wicked Prioress of Littlemore (1517) was deprived but "allowed to perform the functions of her office for the present, provided she did nothing without the advice of the Bishop's commissary" and she was still acting-Prioress and behaving as badly as ever when the house was visited again some nine months later[1480]. Moreover it was possible for an influential sinner to obtain a dispensation reinstating her to her position and allowing her to hold office. Some curious papal mandates to this effect are extant. Joan Goldesburgh, a nun of Nunmonkton, is so dispensed in 1450 "to receive and hold any dignities, even of Abbess and Prioress, even conventual, of her order, even if they be elective and have cure of souls"[1481], and two nuns of Amesbury were restored to their voice and place in stall and chapter, and rendered eligible for all offices even that of Abbess in 1398 and 1424[1482]. On the other hand such a dispensation shows that the penance had been rigorously enforced; one of the nuns (a serious offender who had had children by two priests) is said to have lived laudably in the nunnery for six years since her condemnation. Occasionally, moreover, the office of head of the house is specifically excepted in the dispensation[1483].

Besides punishing offenders, the Bishops took steps to effect a general reform of convents which they found in an unsatisfactory moral state, by removing as far as possible the conditions which facilitated immorality. Such steps usually consisted in forbidding the nuns to wander about freely outside their houses and in prohibiting the visits of men, except under safeguards. Sometimes a careful Bishop issues a special injunction against a particular visitor, sometimes he enumerates painfully a list of chaplains and others whose access to the precincts of a nunnery is forbidden. These attempts to enforce enclosure have been dealt with elsewhere[1484], and a study of convent morals shows how necessary a principle of monastic life it was and how closely the breach of it was connected with moral decay. The attempt at reform by stricter enclosure was, as we know, not a success. The Bishops "beat the air" in vain with their restrictions. In the nature of the case the control exercised by any Bishop over the monastic houses of his diocese varied according to his own energy or leisure. If visitation were made only at rare intervals, abuses persisted and became public scandals before they were reformed, and even after visitation it by no means followed that abuses would be corrected[1485]. The fact is that the medieval bishops were too badly overworked to be able to keep any systematic control over the monastic houses in their dioceses, in spite of the energy which some of them gave to the task and in spite of a liberal use of commissioners.

To pass a final judgment on the moral state of English nunneries, as revealed by the bishops' registers during the later middle ages, is, as has already been suggested, a difficult task. From the monastic standard it cannot be said to have been high, but from the human standard it is not difficult to excuse these women, professed so young and with so little regard for vocation, suos calores macerantes juveniles. The nun was not a saint; she was "a child of our grandmother Eve, a female, or for thy more sweet understanding, a woman"; and only a habit of making allowances for human nature can give a right understanding of her. The explanation of the matter seems to be that monasticism as a career is not for l'homme moyen sensuel, or even for la femme moyenne sensuelle; and in the later middle ages many folk of average, or more than average, passions entered it. Indeed its whole career is from the beginning a magnificent series of recoveries from a melancholy series of relapses. Even in the Anglo-Saxon period, the golden age of the English nunneries, the scandal of Coldingham has to be set against the glory of Whitby[1486]. In the height of the twelfth century the misdeeds of Amesbury provoke episcopal, royal, and papal interference and nuns from the new order of Fontevrault are brought in to reform the house[1487]. In the middle of the splendid thirteenth century that hammer of the monks, Bishop Grosseteste, who in religiosos terribiliter et in religiosas terribilius consuevit fulgurare, conceived himself justified in employing measures of incredible brutality for assuring himself of the virtue of his nuns[1488]; and the evidence of bishops' registers for the second half of the century does not give an impression of much greater strictness of life than is found in the nunneries of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when monasticism had, by the admission of its apologists, passed its prime[1489].

Nevertheless there was a steady movement downhill in the history of the monasteries during the last two centuries and a half before the dissolution[1490]. They shared in the growing degradation of the Church in its head and members. The "mighty lord who broke the bonds of Rome" may have been actuated merely by a desire to break the bonds of matrimony, but there was some need for reform among the monastic houses. It is true that the so-called scandalous comperta of Henry VIII's visitors cannot be taken at their face value; these men had been sent to make a black case and they made it, nor was their own character such as to encourage the slightest belief in their words. Yet in those comperta themselves there is nothing which is unfamiliar to the student of episcopal registers for two centuries before, and charges which a Layton made with levity, an Alnwick was forced sometimes to make with despair[1491]. Yet this may be said for the nunneries of the age, over and above the allowance for human frailty: not all, nor even the majority, were tainted with serious sin, though all were worldly. We think a house particularly disordered, only because we have record of its failings; of its virtues we have no record in inquisitions which were directed towards the discovery of abuses. It is true that this cuts both ways, and that in dioceses where few or no registers and reports remain the fair fame of the nuns remains unblemished, whatever their lives may have been. Happy the nunnery that has no history. Nevertheless in this as in so many other tales of human endeavour

The evil that men do lives after them-- The good is oft interred with their bones,

and it will never be known what lives of self-sacrifice and devotion may be hidden behind the Omnia bene of an obscure visitation record. The words of the sixteenth century poem are the wisest judgment on medieval nuns:

For sum bene devowte, holy and towarde, And holden the right way to blysse; And sum bene feble, lewde and frowarde, Now god amend that ys amys.

The dissolution of the monasteries amputated in England a limb of the Church, which though diseased was yet far from putrid. We have no means of guessing what the later history of the nunneries might have been. The English nunneries compare on the whole favourably with contemporary French and German houses, as revealed by the visitations of Rigaud and Busch, and they certainly never reached such a laxity of morals and such a complete absence of any spirituality as was reached by the convents of the Latin countries at a later date. It was never, in the middle ages, the mode to be a monachino as it was later in France and Italy[1492]. The life of a nun had not yet lost all of its original purpose and meaning and the careers of a Virginia Maria de Leyva, of a Lucrezia Buonvisi, of an Angelique d'Estrees, even of such a virtuous flirt as Felice Rasponi, would not have been possible then[1493]. No Casanova could have found in medieval England opportunity for those astounding intrigues with the M.M. of Venice and the M.M. of Chambery, which fill so large a place in his Memoirs and are so significant a commentary upon monastic life in the eighteenth century[1494]. The reason lies perhaps in the less inflammable temperament of the North, but still more in the different standards of the time. The middle ages expressed and satisfied their passions freely, but debauchery was then less all-pervading and less elegant. Passion was not yet degraded to fashion and the lover had not yet become the gallant. The sins of these fifteenth century nuns are a matter of rude nature and not of "all the adulteries of art." That which was expelled with a pitchfork had not yet returned with a fan. The distinction is a relevant one. A vow broken for love may yet have force and reality; a vow broken for amusement has none. The medieval nunneries never sank to the moral degradation of a more refined and artificial age.

XII. THE MACHINERY OF REFORM

And whan they had resceyuede [t]her charge They spared nether mud ne myer, But roden over Inglonde brode and large, To seke owte nunryes in every schyre. Why I can't be a Nun (15th century).

A community, living together under a somewhat rigid rule and obliged to concern itself with a large measure of temporal business, has to face many difficulties and abuses. The strictness of its discipline and the prosperity of its affairs will necessarily depend very largely upon the character and intelligence of the individuals who compose it. A diseased limb may corrupt the whole body politic; or on the other hand a low state of vitality in the body politic may render the limb liable to corruption. Again rule and routine inevitably tend in the course of time to become slackened, as human nature wins its way against the austerity of a primitive ideal. Every community, therefore, needs some sort of machinery on the one hand for keeping itself up to the mark and on the other for the external inspection and regulation of its affairs. The monastic houses of the middle ages were provided with internal machinery for self-reform in the daily meeting of the whole convent in the chapter house, to transact business and to denounce and punish faults. The external machinery was provided by an elaborate system of visitation by ecclesiastical authorities, sometimes by a parent house, sometimes by the chapter-general of the order, sometimes by the bishop of the diocese; by means of such visitation breaches of discipline and morality could be rectified and the temporal business of the house could be scrutinised for evidence of mismanagement.

The daily routine of the chapter house is too well known to need a detailed description here. The whole monastic community was bound by the rule to meet every day, usually after Prime, in the chapter house on the east side of the cloister, with the head of the house (to use modern terminology) in the chair. At this meeting a chapter of the Rule was solemnly read, after which the corporate business of the house was discussed. Leases, sales, and corrodies were approved or disapproved, and the common seal of the convent was affixed to letters and grants, in the presence of all the monks or nuns. The neglect to transact common business by common advice in chapter was not infrequently a legitimate source of complaint by a convent against its superior. Besides temporal business of this kind, the moral and spiritual welfare of the convent was considered. Wrongdoers publicly accused themselves of fault, or were publicly accused by their fellows, and correction was administered by a "discipline," or by some other penance. By means of the chapter, a convent of reasonable seriousness and goodwill could keep up its own standard of life and control its own backsliders.

Undoubtedly the chapter was a useful instrument of self-reform, but its efficacy obviously depended entirely on whether the convent as a whole were desirous of keeping the Rule and punishing black sheep. If the number of sheep who were black, or even grey, preponderated and if laxity were general in the community, the chapter would not concern itself to raise its own standard. From the frequent injunctions of medieval bishops that the daily meeting in the chapter should not be omitted, it would appear that not only the public transaction of business, but also the public confession and punishment of faults was sometimes neglected. Moreover, unless entered into with modesty and a sense of responsibility, the right of every member to charge another with fault was a sure source of discord, for it certainly provided ample opportunity for frail human nature to exhibit malice. The younger nuns were apt to indulge in what their elders regarded as impudent criticism; private grudges found an opportunity to vent themselves; and rival cliques sometimes turned the meeting into an unseemly hubbub. It was perhaps for this reason that the Abbot of St Albans, visiting Sopwell in 1338, decreed that

for the avoidance of evils and for the promotion and maintenance of peace and charity, but three voices shall henceforth be heard in chapter, to wit those of the president, of the subprioress or of another official of the order, and of her who shall be challenged or accused of a fault[1495].

Another common abuse was the gossip to which such revelations in chapter sometimes gave rise, gossip which was not confined to the ears of the nuns. Bishop Flemyng's injunction to Elstow in 1421-2 "that the Abbess shall narrowly espy what secrets of chapter be in any way disclosed, punishing severely also those who trangress in this matter"[1496] is only one of many similar injunctions; and visitation reports sometimes show considerable interference by lay folk in cloister disputes. During the election quarrel which raged at Nunkeeling from 1316 to 1319 Archbishop Melton accused certain nuns of revealing the secrets of the chapter to seculars and adversaries outside, and during a similar quarrel at Keldholme a number of laymen were cited, together with certain nuns, for obstructing the appointment of a new prioress in 1308[1497]. One is left with the impression that the nuns called in the support of their friends and kinsfolk in the world, if they found themselves at odds with their Prioress. In the feud between the wicked Prioress of Littlemore and her nuns (1518) both parties had adherents in Oxford: the Prioress brought in her friends to subdue the nuns and the nuns fled to theirs, when they could no longer bear the Prioress[1498]. At Hampole, where Archbishop Bowet found the Prioress and nuns out of all charity with each other in 1411, he even had to ordain that no nun, having any complaint against the Prioress, was to ignore the Archbishop's authority and call in the aid of any secular or regular person. If any sister wished to complain and could find another to join with her, she was to have access to the Archbishop, the necessary expenses being given her by the Prioress. If the Prioress refused leave or delayed it beyond three days, the two nuns were to have access to the Archbishop, without incurring the charge of apostasy[1499]. Sometimes the revelation of convent secreta was made in a spirit of pure gossip, rather than with the object of obtaining external aid; the complaint of the nuns of Catesby in 1442 that the Prioress' mother "knows well the secrets of the chapter and publishes them in the town; so also does the Prioress publish them," and that of the nuns of Gracedieu in 1440-1 that "the Prioress makes the secrets of their religious life common among the secular folk that sit at table with her" are typical of many others[1500].

The meeting of the chapter, therefore, though a useful instrument of self-reform, when the necessary goodwill was present, was liable to abuses. It was apt to be neglected; it gave rise to ill-feeling; and it sometimes led to undesirable gossip, both inside and outside the house. It is obvious, moreover, that a measure of external control was necessary to keep up the standard of life in the many monastic houses of Europe and to reform common breaches of discipline. This external control was exercised in the middle ages by three distinct authorities: (1) a parent house, (2) the chapter general of the Order and (3) the diocesan of the see.

Certain houses, which had founded other houses as offshoots or colonies, retained the right to visit and reform their daughter-houses. Some monasteries had small outlying priories, known as "cells," founded originally to look after distant estates of the house; sometimes such cells contained only one or two monks, living in an ordinary dwelling house, and had no real existence apart from the parent house. Sometimes, however, the cells grew and achieved an independent existence, though still maintaining their connection with their founders. This frequently happened to the English cells of foreign houses, and certain cells of English houses also grew into independent priories. Among nunneries, originally founded as cells of foreign houses, may be mentioned Lyminster in Sussex. Few English nunneries had cells; but Seton in Coupland was a cell of Nunburnholme. The connection between mother house and cell is illustrated by a licence granted by Archbishop Greenfield to the Prioress of Nunburnholme in 1313 to visit, "your cell of Seton in Coupland, which is subject to your monastery," taking with her two honest nuns of the house, in order to visit the nuns of Seton, and returning without delay[1501]. The visitation of the cell was usually included in that of the mother house and the larger independent cells were often subject to episcopal visitation.

Rather different in origin from a cell was a house founded by a monastery, less as a colony than as a distinct but dependent institution. The most interesting example of this is provided by the great Abbey of St Albans, which founded two nunneries, St Mary de Pre and Sopwell. Both the nunneries were always very dependent on St Albans and are often mentioned in the chronicles of that house. St Mary de Pre, having been founded in the twelfth century as a hospital for leprous women living under a rule, became later an ordinary nunnery, containing nuns, and both lay sisters and lay brothers; in the time of Abbot Thomas de la Mare (1349-96) the rank of sister was abolished and a higher standard of education was insisted upon for the nuns, who were to profess the rule of St Benedict[1502]. Sopwell was also founded in the twelfth century as a Benedictine nunnery[1503]. In both houses nuns were admitted only by consent of the Abbot of St Albans, who also claimed the right to appoint their prioress. In both the temporal affairs of the convent were administered by wardens, appointed by the Abbot from among the monks of the abbey[1504]. The close connection was not always maintained without friction. At Sopwell the nuns more than once tried to elect their own prioress and seem to have found the Abbot somewhat high-handed[1505]. In 1481 Abbot Wallingford sent the archdeacon and subprior of the house to remove the prioress from office on account of her age and infirmities and to put Elizabeth Webbe in her place, but some years later the archdeacon deposed Elizabeth, whereupon she brought an action against him in the Court of Arches and was reinstated. Thereupon "two monks of St Albans, sent by the archdeacon, came to the nunnery, broke down Elizabeth's door with an iron bar, beat her and put her in prison," after which she appealed to Archbishop Morton as Chancellor[1506]. She may have been at the bottom of the famous letter written by Morton to the Abbot of St Albans in 1490, accusing him of changing prioresses at Pre and at Sopwell as he pleased and deposing good and religious persons for the benefit of the evil and vicious, and stating that the Prioress of St Mary de Pre, Helen Germyn, was a married woman who had left her husband for a lover and that she and some of her nuns were leading immoral lives with monks of St Albans[1507]. The same letter accused the monks put in as wardens of using their opportunities to dissipate the goods of the house, and the turbulent Prioress of Sopwell, Elizabeth, is found complaining to the Chancellor that a deed of lease by the convent had been secretly altered to their disadvantage by their "keeper" and his clerk, who had been bribed by a tenant[1508].

It is difficult to say how much truth there was in these charges and they certainly do not seem to show overmuch care for the reform of the daughter houses by their august parent. But it would not be fair to judge St Albans by this quarrel at the end of its career, and there is evidence to show that past abbots tried conscientiously to maintain good order in the dependent nunneries. Among other rights the abbot possessed that of visitation, and chance has fortunately preserved an interesting set of injunctions sent by Abbot Michael to Sopwell, after a visitation held in 1338[1509]. The orders given to the Warden of Sopwell by Abbot Thomas (1349-96) have also been preserved in the Gesta Abbatum[1510].

Another nunnery founded by a famous abbey of monks was St Michael's, Stamford, founded by William of Waterville, Abbot of Peterborough in 1155; and this house remained for long dependent upon its parent abbey[1511]. In its early years it was customary for the prioress in the name of the chapter to pay an annual pension of a mark of silver to the Abbot and to make formal recognition of subjection, once every year, on the morrow of the Feast of St Michael. The Abbot had the right of receiving the profession of the sisters and his consent was necessary to the election of the prioress. He also had the appointment of the warden or prior, who looked after the temporalities of the house. In 1270 Bishop Gravesend sanctioned the personal visitation of the house once a year by the abbot and two or three monks, with power to correct and reform, and the Register of the Abbey records such visitations in 1297, 1300, 1303 and 1323. The tendency was, however, for the diocesan to oust the abbey from the control of the house; from time to time he claimed and exercised the right of instituting the warden, and from the end of the thirteenth century he regularly instituted the prioress. From this time the bishops' registers show that the regulation and reform of the house were in the hands of the bishop and it was duly visited by Alnwick in the fifteenth century. The accounts of St Michael's, Stamford, show that the nuns still had dealings with the Abbey; but Peterborough did not retain over this nunnery the exclusive rights of appointment and visitation, which St Albans, owing to its exemption from diocesan control, exercised to the end over Sopwell and St Mary de Pre. There is no mention of either of these houses in the episcopal registers.

Nunneries subject to visitation by a parent abbey were highly exceptional. Another exceptional method of external control was visitation by the chapter-general of the order, to which the nunnery belonged. Nuns as well as monks were constantly legislated for by these chapters-general, but they were very rarely visited, because (as we shall see) they were almost all subject to visitation by the bishop of their diocese. A trace of visitation by order of the chapter-general seems to survive in a letter from the Abbot of Stratford (4 December, 1491), preserved among the Cistercian documents in the archives at Dijon[1512]. The Abbot relates that he had visited Cokehill, found it in a very unsatisfactory condition and tried in vain to depose the prioress; at other times, however, Cokehill was visited by the Bishops of Worcester. The Cistercian order claimed exemption from episcopal visitation for male houses and we shall see that it made occasional attempts to exert its right over nunneries too.

By far the most common method of reforming nunneries from outside was by means of the control of the bishop of the diocese[1513]. It is an interesting fact that not even the greatest and most important Benedictine abbeys of women, such as Shaftesbury, Amesbury and Romsey, succeeded in obtaining an exemption from episcopal jurisdiction such as was enjoyed by St Albans and some other houses; and nunneries belonging to "exempt" orders were invariably under episcopal control. Bishops, who would never have dreamed of interfering with houses of Cistercian or Cluniac monks, visited the nuns of those orders as a matter of course and no objection was as a rule raised by the houses or by the orders. There is, it is true, one extremely interesting case in which this right of visitation was contested. In 1276 the nuns of Sinningthwaite contested the right of Archbishop Giffard of York to visit them and appealed against him to the Pope. Unfortunately the papal decision is not recorded, but as they were regularly visited until their dissolution, it was evidently against them. They possibly acted in collusion with the Cistercian abbots of their diocese, for in the same year Archbishop Giffard ordered them to have Friars Minor as their confessors, in spite of the inhibition of Cistercian abbots, who had no jurisdiction over them[1514]. The Cokehill case quoted above may represent a similar attempt of the Cistercian chapter-general to control a nunnery belonging to the order. For the historian of the English nunneries it is an exceedingly fortunate thing that the diocesans enjoyed this unchallenged right of visitation over almost all the nunneries in the kingdom; for the episcopal registers are the best source of monastic history and an exempt house (save when it was a famous abbey with a chronicle) is not infrequently a house without history, because without visitation records.

Since the periodical visitation by the diocesan was not only the main method of external control and reformation, but also incidentally gave rise to the records on which so much of this history of nunneries is based, it is worth while to study what exactly happened when a bishop, or his commissioners, came to inspect a nunnery. A regular routine was followed, which can easily be reconstructed from such full records as those kept by Bishop Alnwick of Lincoln[1515]. A formal summons was sent by the bishop to the house to be visited, warning the convent to hold itself in readiness for visitation by himself, or by one or more commissioners (named). On the appointed day he rode up to the house, accompanied by his clerks, and was met at the door of the church by the convent and conducted to the high altar. Here high mass was celebrated and the bishop, his clerks and the convent then adjourned to the chapter house for the business of visitation. The proceedings began with the preaching of a sermon by one of the bishop's clerks; in houses of monks this was given in Latin until the end of our period, but knowledge of Latin had died out in nunneries before the fifteenth century and at Alnwick's visitation the sermon was always preached in the vulgar tongue, on some such text as "Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion and behold king Solomon" (Cant. iii. 11), "Present your bodies a living sacrifice ... unto God" (Rom. xii. 1), or others less specifically appropriate to nuns. When this had been finished, the head of the house was required to present a certificate of receipt of the summons to visitation, which had to be drawn up according to a common form; and this not infrequently caused some delay in nunneries, where the inmates were often too ignorant of Latin to draw up the document correctly, unless they could call in the help of a clerk[1516]. The head of the house then produced the certificate of her election, confirmation by the diocesan and installation. Here again there was sometimes a delay, for prioresses were occasionally all at sea over documents and the necessary certificates were apt to be lacking at the last minute. Thus Dame Alice Dunwyche, the incompetent old Prioress of Gracedieu, was unable to produce any evidence of her confirmation in 1440 and the bishop had to appoint a special commissary to inquire into the matter; three months later the commissary examined two laymen brought by her as witnesses to her confirmation and installation[1517]. Meanwhile the visitation would continue; and the last formality to be observed was the production by the prioress of the foundation charter of the house, and the financial balance sheet (or status domus) for the year, this last an important item, since it enabled the bishop to see at a glance whether the financial affairs of the convent were in a satisfactory condition[1518]. This completed the preliminary business.

There now followed the main business of the visitation, the verbal examination of the nuns, in order to detect what abuses might stand in need of reform. Some abuses were patent to the eyes of the bishop; he could see garments in holes, and veils spread wide to show fair foreheads; he might have caught the scuttle of little dogs round corners as he rode in at the gates, or the whisk of a boarder's murrey-coloured skirts behind a pillar. But the bulk of his information had to be obtained by careful cross-examination. The chapter house was cleared and he proceeded to question the nuns separately and in private, beginning with the prioress. Experience would teach him what were the most common breaches of discipline about which to make specific inquiry, but the nuns were encouraged to complain freely and the bishop's clerks were kept busy scribbling notes of what each shrill tale-bearer told, to be written out afterwards under her name as detecta, or things discovered to the bishop.

These detecta are an amusing commentary on life in a community and grist (it must be admitted) to the cynic's mill. Serious charges of immorality are mingled with trivialities, much as the chroniclers of the period mingle battles, monastic gossip and sea monsters cast upon the shore. The beer is too light; swine do come into the churchyard and root up the earth and befoul the churchyard; all corrections are made with so great harshness and so much ado that charity and loving-kindness are banished from the house; the nuns do hold drinkings of evenings in the guestchamber, even after Compline; the prioress has pawned the jewels of the house; sister so-and-so is defamed with sir so-and-so, sometime chaplain in that place and did conceive of him and bear a child; the buildings and tenements of the priory are dilapidated and many have fallen to the ground because of default in repairs; secular persons do lie in the dorter near the nuns; the nuns wear silken veils and robes; in the prioress' default six nuns have now left the house in apostasy; the nuns frequent taverns and continually go into town without leave; silence is not observed in due places; the nuns do help secular folk in garnering their grain during the autumn season; the nuns are somewhat sleepy and come late to matins; the prioress does not render an account. Besides this infinite variety of complaint, the detecta exhibit also an infinite variety of motive, ranging from the disciplinarian's zeal for reform to the private grudge of one individual against another. Sometimes the prioress and the nuns engage in mutual recriminations: she is harsh, or autocratic, or incompetent, they are lax or disobedient. Sometimes, on the other hand, a whole convent declares omnia bene. About some houses there still hangs a gentle atmosphere of peace and goodwill, others are rent with feud and petty bickering, others are in a condition of very lax morality. Human nature is truly unchanging, for all the types to be met with in a modern community, be it school or college, ship or government office, have their prototypes among these medieval monks and nuns. The amateur in human nature and the social historian alike may find in these little studied monastic detecta material of more absorbing interest and entertainment than is to be found in any other class of medieval documents.

After the bishop had heard the evidence of the nuns, given thus chaotically, the next business was to summarise, in some sort of order, the result of the inquiry. Such complaints of the nuns as the bishop considered worthy of notice were therefore classified as comperta, or things discovered by the bishop. If any member of the convent had been accused of serious breaches of the rule, she was summoned and the articles of accusation were read to her, and one by one she was invited to admit or to deny them. If she pleaded guilty, a penance was enjoined upon her. If she denied the charge, she was ordered to find a certain number of compurgators, who would swear to her innocence, and to produce them by a certain hour. The number of cases in which misconduct was sufficiently serious to make this necessary was not great. During Alnwick's visitation it happened at Catesby, where the prioress and Isabel Benet were charged with immorality; the prioress denied the charge, but was unable to find four sisters to vouch for her and was adjudged guilty; Isabel Benet admitted misconduct, but not with the man whose name was coupled with hers, and she seems to have cleared herself of intercourse with him by the oath of four of the nuns[1519]. Usually the bishop showed himself lenient and allowed the agitated sinner an extension of time, if she could not find her compurgators within the period allotted to her[1520]. Whether this leniency is to be attributed to Christian charity, or to a desire to avoid scandal, is not clear; but if a prioress could not in two hours find four nuns to swear that she was not guilty, the value of their oaths, when they appeared after four hours' canvassing, would not appear to be very great. Yet it is impossible not to understand the bishop's desire to give a sinner the benefit of the doubt; fright and admonition alone might reform her, and it was exceedingly difficult to deal with a really bad prioress, when she could not be ejected from her order.

The bishop having dealt with individual offenders, the whole convent was summoned once more to the chapter house. The detecta and comperta were read aloud to the nuns and the bishop made verbal injunctions upon points which stood in special need of reform. He then dissolved the visitation; or, if any further business remained to be dealt with, prorogued it until a later date. Then he rode away again, and the fluttered convent settled down again to gossip and to await further injunctions. For the admonitions of the bishop at the visitation were only interim injunctions; his business was not finished until he had sent to the nunnery a set of written injunctions, embodying the reforms shown to be necessary by the comperta. These written injunctions were sent to the convent shortly after the visitation. Sometimes the clerk who brought them was ordered to expound them, or some reverend commissioner was sent to complete at the same time any special business arising out of the visitation. For instance, when Peckham sent a set of injunctions on April 20th, 1284, to the Priory of the Holy Sepulchre, Canterbury, which had been visited by commissioners on his behalf, he also addressed a letter to his commissary Martin, bidding him go in person to the house and expound the injunctions to the nuns. At the same time he was ordered (1) to appoint two coadjutresses to the prioress, who had been wasting the goods of the house; one of these was named and Martin was particularly warned against appointing another nun, who was said to be contumelious; (2) to beseech the Vicar of Wickham on behalf of the Archbishop to undertake the office of master of the house, so as to order its temporal affairs; (3) to receive the compurgation of Isabella de Scorue, who was defamed with the cellarer of the cathedral church and to forbid all the nuns access to the cathedral and the cellarer access to the priory[1521]. These pieces of specific and administrative business were not mentioned in Peckham's more general injunctions. The injunctions were left in the hands of the convent and from that moment became as canonically binding upon the nuns, as was their original rule; any breach of them was liable to punishment by excommunication. The prioress was usually ordered to display them in a place where they could be easily read by the sisters, or to have them solemnly read aloud in chapter a certain number of times each year.

It was by this machinery of visitation and injunction that the diocesans endeavoured to control and reform the nunneries. But how far was the control adequate and the reform successful? It is obvious that the efficacy of the visitation system depended on three things: (1) the success of the cross-examination in drawing the real state of the convent from the nuns, (2) the regularity with which visitation was repeated, (3) the ability of the bishop to enforce his injunctions. As to the first of these conditions, the extent to which breaches of discipline came to light depended on the skill of the bishop in cross-examination on the one hand, and on the other the honesty of the nun's desire to assist him. If a convent were seriously discontented the chances were that charges would be freely made: thus Alnwick experienced no difficulty in extracting an almost unanimous testimony against the Prioress of Catesby. But this did not always happen; as is shown by Gray's letter bidding his commissary visit Markyate in 1433:

When we some time ago made actual visitation ... of the priory of the Holy Trinity of the Wood by Markyate ..., we, making anxious inquiry touching the state of the same priory and the concerns of religion in the same, found that in such our visitation certain crimes, transgressions and offences worthy of reformation were discovered to us, by occasion whereof ... we enjoined upon the prioress and convent of the same place certain injunctions.... But ... it has lately come to our hearing, as loud whispering abounds and the notoriousness of the fact has made public, that more grievous offences than were discovered to us in the same our visitation were before the beginning of the same unhappily brought to pass and done in the same priory, the which the said prioress and her sisters of their design aforethought concealed from us undiscovered at the time of such our visitation[1522].

One of the matters thus concealed was the immorality of the prioress with the steward of the house, a fact which seems to have been notorious throughout the neighbourhood.

When such a grave defect could be successfully hidden from the bishop at his visitation, it is obvious that he could do little against a unanimous determination on the part of a convent to keep him in the dark. He was really dependent upon disagreement within the house; a conscientious nun or a nun with a grudge served him equally well. But it seems likely that concealment was not seldom practised, for, as Mr Coulton points out, "among the earliest and most frequently-repeated general chapter statutes are those providing against (a) conspiracy of the Religious against reformation, or (b) vengeance wreaked afterwards upon brethren who have dared to reveal the truth"[1523]. Some of the detecta at Alnwick's visitation throw light on the efforts made (usually by the prioress) by conspiracy and by vengeance to prevent the nuns from testifying. At Catesby the evil prioress, Margaret Wavere, had excellent reasons for fearing a disclosure of her way of life. Sister Juliane Wolfe deposed "that the prioress did threaten that, if the nuns disclosed aught in the visitation, they should pay for it in prison." Dame Isabel Benet (by no means a paragon of virtue herself) deposed that "in the last visitation which was made by the Lord William Graye, the prioress said that for a purse and certain moneys a clerk of the said bishop made known what every nun disclosed in that visitation." Sister Alice Kempe said that "because the nuns at the last visitation disclosed what should be disclosed, the prioress whipped some of them." All of these articles the prioress denied, but she was undoubtedly guilty and was unable to find compurgators[1524]. At Legbourne the prioress took a course with which one cannot avoid a certain sympathy. Dame Joan Gyney deposed that

the prioress, after she received my lord's mandate for the visitation, called together the chapter and said, if there were aught in need of correction among them, they should tell it her; because she said it was more suitable that they should correct themselves than that others should correct them[1525].

At Ankerwyke Prioress Clemence Medforde, conscious of many misdeeds and of the cordial dislike of her nuns, "did invite several outside folk from the neighbourhood to this visitation at great cost to the house, saying to them, 'Stand on my side in this time of visitation, for I do not want to resign.'" She admitted the entertainment of her friends, "but it was not to this end"[1526]. Recriminations after the visitation are even commoner than preliminary attempts to circumvent it. At Gracedieu the ill-tempered old prioress confessed, on being confronted with the detectum of one of her nuns to that effect, that she

since and after the visitation last held therein by his [Alnwick's] predecessor, did reproach her sisters, because of the disclosures at the same visitation and did blame them therefore and has held and holds them in hatred, by reason whereof charity and loving-kindness were utterly banished and strivings, hatreds, back-bitings and quarrellings have ever flourished[1527].

The second condition for the efficacy of episcopal visitation as a method of reform is the regularity of such visitation. Obviously if visitations are very rare the hold of the diocesan on a house will be weak; for much water may flow under the bridge between one visitation and the next. The general rule in vogue in the middle ages was that each house should be visited once in every three years, which was in theory a very adequate arrangement. It seems clear, however, that it was not always carried out. The work was done by one overworked bishop in person or by commissioners specially appointed by him for the visitation of each house. In a big diocese, such as Lincoln or York, which abounded in monastic houses, the work of visitation was a really considerable labour, for it was only one part of the bishop's multifarious duties; and it is impossible not to conclude that the regularity of visitation differed very much from diocese to diocese and from time to time. The bishops themselves varied very much in energy and conscientiousness, but on the whole it is evident that they took their duties seriously and honestly endeavoured to keep up the standard of life in their dioceses. No one can put down the record of Rigaud's visitations of the diocese of Rouen, Greenfield's visitations of the diocese of York, and Alnwick's visitations of the diocese of Lincoln, without a profound respect for those prelates. But though they did much, they could not do enough.

There is a good deal of incidental evidence in the visitation reports, which shows that visitations were held too seldom to be really effectual. Gracedieu, for instance, had not been visited between 1433, when Gray came, and 1440-1; and by this last date it had fallen into such laxity that reform must have been difficult. Markyate was unvisited between 1433 and 1442, in spite of the deprivation of the prioress for immorality and the apostasy of one of the nuns in 1433. There are few houses in the annals of English nunneries in so bad a state as Littlemore was in 1517; yet the Prioress, forced at last to confess her misdeeds, which comprised not only habitual incontinence but the persecution of her nuns, stated that though these things had been going on for eight years, yet no inquiry had been made and, as it seems, no visitation of the house had been held; only on one occasion certain injunctions of a general kind had been sent her[1528]. On the other hand the registers show that a real attempt was often made to grapple with a really serious case. St Michael's, Stamford, for instance, was visited by Alnwick in 1440 and found to be in a disorderly state; he gave careful interim injunctions on the spot and sent written injunctions afterwards. The house, however, was ruled by a thoroughly incompetent prioress, and the bishop seems to have made inquiries and found that his reforms had not been carried out, for in 1442 he came again,

and then after the cause of such his visitation had been set forth and explained to the said prioress and nuns by the same reverend father, to wit because his injunctions at his first visitation ... were not duly kept, he proceeded to his preparatory inquiry.

This inquiry showed that matters were if anything worse than before; and in 1445 the bishop visited the house again[1529]. Similarly, when once Bishop Atwater had awakened to the moral condition of Littlemore in the next century, he took pains to reform it. The scandals were brought to light at the visitation by his commissary Dr Horde in 1517; a few months later the bishop summoned the prioress before him to answer the charges made against her and after a lapse of nine months the house was visited again in 1518[1530].

But if visitations were sometimes not held regularly enough to be really effective, a still greater cause of weakness was the great difficulty experienced by the bishops in controlling the religious houses in the period between one visitation and the next and in enforcing their injunctions. A bishop might send a set of the most salutary injunctions to an undisciplined house; but how was he to secure that the nuns followed them, save by the most solemn threats of excommunication, which they seem often enough to have disregarded. Markyate, St Michael's, Stamford, and Littlemore went steadily from bad to worse between each of the visitations made by Gray, Alnwick and Atwater respectively. In 1442

Dame Elizabeth the prioress [of St Michael's], being asked whether she has observed and caused to be observed by the others my lord's injunctions made to them at another time, says that, so far as she has been able she has kept them and caused them to be kept by the others: howbeit she says that she does not lie in the dorter, or keep frater, or even keep cloister or church according to my lord's injunction and this because of her bodily incapacity. And she avers that my lord granted her a dispensation touching these things, the which my lord utterly disavows[1531].

These were comparatively trivial faults; since the last visitation one of the nuns had had a child; and at the next visitation, three years later, the same fate was found to have overtaken another, which is a significant commentary on the effectuality of episcopal control.

The fundamental difficulty was that the bishop was obliged in the nature of things to trust largely to the prioress and to the nuns themselves to enforce his decrees. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Sometimes the very women whom he singled out for special trust were subsequently found to be worse than their sisters. Indeed it is sometimes difficult to account for the principle on which coadjutresses were appointed. It surely seems somewhat like tempting providence that Alnwick should have selected Isabel Benet, the only other nun in the house who was defamed of incontinence, to be administrator in place of the suspended Prioress of Catesby, and it is not surprising to read of the later escapade of that lady at a dance with the friars of Northampton and of their refusal to obey his ordinance against private rooms[1532]. The only intelligible principle of the bishop would appear to have been that applied by Henry VII to the Earl of Kildare, "All Ireland cannot rule this man; then he shall rule all Ireland." It is moreover significant (as has already been pointed out)[1533] that in the majority of cases a prioress, however wicked, was suspended rather than deprived; even Denise Loweliche and Katherine Wells remained in office after their resignation. It was indeed too embarrassing to know what to do with a sinner. She could not be expelled from her order; if she were kept in the same house in a subordinate position she would probably make her successor's life a burden; if she were transferred to another house she would probably corrupt a hitherto unblemished flock. The bishops did their best in the face of great difficulties, but it is plain that the prioresses sometimes thought little enough of their authority. The rather disreputable old Abbess of Romsey, Joyce Rowse, said openly to her nuns that when the inquiry (held in 1492) was finished she would do as she had done before; and she kept her word[1534]. At Ankerwyke in 1441 one little nun of tender age explained to the bishop "that the prioress doth not provide this deponent with bed-clothes, insomuch that she lies in the straw; and when my lord had commanded this deponent to lie in the dorter, and this deponent asked bed-clothes of the prioress, she said chidingly to her, 'Let him who gave you leave to lie in the dorter supply you with raiment'"[1535].

Though the bishops for the most part did their work conscientiously it is difficult, in the light of the considerations which have been urged above to conclude that their visitations had a lasting effect. But if the visitations and the injunctions based on them were sometimes of small value for their purpose, they have an incidental value to historians which cannot be overestimated. There have come down to us in the bishops' registers a comparatively small number of complete visitation reports, comprising detecta and comperta (or sometimes comperta only) and injunctions[1536], and a much larger number of injunctions, without the comperta on which they were based. The similarity in wording of episcopal injunctions, combined with the fact that the most important collection of complete reports (Alnwick's visitations) was until recently unknown, has led many writers to argue that injunctions were mere general "common form," without any relation to specific abuses found at the house to which they were sent, "left," as Mr Hamilton Thompson says, "like portentous visiting cards upon a convent, to show that the diocesan had duly called"[1537]. The point is of great importance, for it involves the reliability of injunctions as evidence of the state of a particular convent at a particular time.

The answer to this view of "common form" is easily found if we study the process by which injunctions were composed, as revealed in the great series of visitations by Bishop Alnwick. They were drawn up with great care by the bishop's registrar and he based them upon two sources, the detecta and comperta of each visitation, which had been noted down on the spot by clerks, and the sets of injunctions sent to other religious houses, which were regularly copied into the episcopal register as models for future use. It is inherent in the nature of the case that monasteries subject to the same original rule and statutory regulations and living under almost identical conditions, should be subject to similar breaches of discipline. It is only necessary to study those detecta which have been preserved to perceive how universal, in all dioceses and among both sexes, were (for instance) the customs of drinking after Compline, forming separate "households," taking unlicensed boarders, making unwise grants of corrodies and long leases, wandering abroad in the world, and wearing worldly garments. The registrar did not wish to invent new wording every time these offences occurred; he used a common form for them. But "common form" has here a different sense from that in which it is used by those who question the value of injunctions as evidence. The registrar never made an injunction which was not based upon a detectum made at the house to which the injunction was directed. Injunctions are common form only because they deal with common errors. If an almost similar set be sent to two houses, it is because the houses have displayed (as is indeed only natural) almost similar faults; and where the two sets differ, they differ not accidentally, but of careful purpose. It was the business of the registrar to express the injunctions in general terms, even though a fault may have been that of a single individual, because they were intended to be canonically binding upon the whole convent. The reason why injunctions have survived in much greater numbers than the detecta upon which they were based, is that the clerks copied into the bishop's register only common forms, which would be likely to be useful. The record of individual evidence would not help them; but a carefully worded injunction might be used over and over again, whenever the fault with which it dealt recurred at the same or another house. No one who has studied the relation of detecta and injunctions in Alnwick's book of visitations can doubt the value of the latter as evidence, when they appear alone; the very process by which "Dame Alice Decun says that only two little girls, of six or seven years, do lie in the dorter" is transmuted into the common injunction "that ye suffre ne seculere persones wymmen ne childern lyg by nyghte in the dormytory" is patent in the register.

If the reliability of the injunctions be thus accepted, it is almost unnecessary to point out what an invaluable source of evidence is to be found in the bishops' registers. Controversialists have fought ad nauseam over the truth or falsehood of the "scandalous comperta" of Henry VIII's commissioners, without understanding that for nearly three hundred years before the Dissolution the comperta and injunctions in the registers give a picture of English monasticism coloured by no ulterior motive. Even after a large number of the registers have been published, historians are still content to paint monastic life in the later middle ages from the monastic rule, ignoring the evidence of practice which is always necessary to supplement the evidence of theory. Not even the chronicles of an earlier age are more interesting; the record of Alnwick is as valuable as that of Jocelin of Brakelonde. In dioceses where registers were regularly kept and have survived uninjured and where injunctions were punctiliously copied, the history of a house may be traced throughout the whole period covered by this book. The dioceses of Winchester, Lincoln and York are most fortunate in this respect. To select a few examples at random, there are extant records of the visitation of Romsey Abbey by Archbishop Peckham in 1284, by Bishop John of Pontoise in 1302, by Bishop Henry Woodlock in 1311, by Bishop William of Wykeham in 1387, by Archbishop Morton (through his vicar-general, Robert Shirbourne) in 1492, by Dr Hede, commissary of the Prior of Canterbury, during the vacancies of the sees of Canterbury and Winchester in 1502, by Bishop Fox (through his vicar-general, John Dowman) in 1507, again (through Master John Incent) in 1523 and again (through the vicar-general) in 1527[1538]. It is thus possible to describe with approximate accuracy the life of this great convent during the whole period from 1284 to the Dissolution. Similarly records have survived of visitations of Elstow Abbey by Bishop Gynewell in 1359, Bishop Buckingham in 1387, Archbishop Courtenay in 1389, Bishop Flemyng in 1421-2, Bishop Gray in 1434, Bishop Alnwick in 1442-3, and Bishop Longland in 1530 and 1531. Of Nunappleton Priory there are recorded visitations by Archbishop Wickwane in 1281, Archbishop Melton in 1318, Archbishop Zouche in 1346, Archbishop Rotherham in 1489 and Archbishop Lee in 1534. Moreover mandates concerning isolated pieces of business, elections, permits to receive boarders, orders to reform specific abuses, are scattered through the registers and provide useful supplementary information.

All houses are not as well represented. In some dioceses injunctions are rarely recorded: the fine series of registers for Hereford yield surprisingly few. Some houses emerge only rarely into the light with a single set of injunctions; others (and among them important houses such as Lacock and Amesbury) lack even a single visitation report to rescue their inmates from oblivion. But the geographical range of the surviving reports is sufficiently great to enable the formation of an accurate general account of English nunneries during the later middle ages. One warning only must be borne in mind by the reader. If it is unhistorical to write an account of monastic houses based solely upon the rule, it is also unhistorical to write one based solely on visitation documents. The detecta made to a bishop were, and were intended to be, revelations of faults; it was not the function of the bishop's clerk to catalogue virtues, though sometimes a string of "omnia bene," or a curt note to the effect that my lord, finding little in need of reformation, passed on, bears positive witness to a convent's good life. It must always be remembered, in estimating the state of a house from a set of detecta and injunctions, that though they are indubitably the truth, they are not the whole truth. Goodness is after all largely a matter of proportion; and though convents are to be found which were positively bad, in others there were probably virtues of kindness, piety and a brave struggle against poverty, which would counterbalance (if we knew them), the unfavourable impression left by a string of accusations. Moreover by far the larger number of the detecta witnesses to a growing worldliness and to minor breaches of the rule, rather than to serious moral defects. If the community concerned were other than a nunnery ostensibly following a strict rule, we should hardly consider the faults to be faults at all. The immorality, bad temper and financial mismanagement revealed at some houses would be reprehensible in all communities at all ages; but in themselves boarders, pretty clothes, pet dogs and attendance at christenings are not heinous crimes. It is necessary, in dealing with medieval nuns as with all other subjects, to preserve a sense of proportion and a firm hold upon human nature.