Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 Part 16

that silence be kept in due places, according to the Rule and observances of St Benedict; and, if it be desirable that any word be spoken in the aforesaid places, for any reasonable occasion, then let it be gently and so low that it be scarce heard of the other nuns, and in as few words as may be needed for the comprehension of those who hear; and better in Latin than in any other tongue; yet the Latin need not be well-ordered by way of grammar, but thus, _candela_, _liber_, _missale_, _gradale_, _panis_, _vinum_, _cervisia_, _est_, _non_, _sic_ and so forth[909].

The nuns of Syon had a table of signs drawn up for them by Thomas Betsone, one of the brethren of the house, a person of extraordinary ingenuity and no sense of humour[910]. The sort of dumb pandemonium which went on at the Syon dinner table must have been more mirth provoking than speech. The sister who desired fish would "wagge her hande displaied sidelynges in manere of a fissh taill," she who wanted milk would "draw her left little fynger in maner of mylkyng"; for mustard one would "hold her nose in the uppere part of her righte fiste and rubbe it," and another for salt would "philippe with her right thombe and his forefynger ouere the left thombe"; another, desirous of wine, would "meue her fore fynger vp and downe vpon the ende of her thombe afore her eghe"; and the guilty sacristan, struck by the thought that she had not provided incense for the ma.s.s, would "put her two fyngers vnto her nose thirles (nostrils)." There are no less than 106 signs in the table and on the whole it is not surprising that the Rule enjoins that "it is never leful to use them witheoute some reson and profitable nede, ffor ofte tyme more hurt ethe an euel sygne than an euel worde, and more offence it may be to G.o.d"[911].

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VI

DOMINICAN NUNS IN QUIRE]

The time set apart in the monastic day for work was divided between brain work and manual labour. In the golden days of monasticism the time devoted to reading enabled the monasteries to become homes of learning; splendid libraries were collected for the use of the monks and in the scriptorium men skilled in writing and in illumination copied books and maintained the great series of chronicles, in which the middle ages live again. The nuns of certain Anglo-Saxon houses, and of certain continental houses at a later date, had some reputation for learning. In early days, too, the hours devoted to labour were spent in the fields, or more often in the workshops of the house; and those who had been skilled in crafts in the world continued to exercise them. The nuns of Anglo-Saxon England were famed for the needlework executed during the hours of work. Besides this labour the Rule ordained that the monks and nuns should take it in turns to serve their brethren in the kitchen every week and an eleventh century chronicler records "in the monasteries I saw counts cooking in the kitchens and margraves leading the pigs out to feed"[912]. It was by reason of this intellectual and manual labour that the early monks rendered, as it were incidentally, an immense service to civilisation.

Their aim and purpose was the salvation of their souls, but because the Rule under which they lived declared that labour was one of the means to that salvation, they added many of the merits of the active to those of the contemplative life. The early Benedictines were great missionaries, ardent scholars, enlightened landowners and even energetic statesmen. The early Cistercians made the woods and wildernesses, in which they settled, blossom like a rose. But apart from the social services thus rendered to civilisation, the threefold division of monastic life into prayer, study and labour was vital to monasticism itself, since it afforded the essential element of variety in routine.

The benefits of routine are obvious: any life which exists for the regular performance of specific duties, above all any life which is carried on in a community, must depend very largely upon fixed hours and carefully organised occupations. The Rule of St Benedict made a serious attempt to render monastic life possible and beneficial to the average human being, by the combination of regularity and variety which has been described above. There was constant change of occupation, but there was no waste and no muddle. It is extremely significant that monasticism broke down directly St Benedict's careful adjustment of occupations became upset.

With the growing wealth of the monasteries manual labour became undignified; some orders relied on lay brethren, the majority on servants.

Gone was the day when counts cooked in the kitchens; in the fourteenth century monks and nuns paid large wages to their cooks and even in a small nunnery it was regarded as legitimate cause for complaint not to have a convent servant. Learning also fell away after the growth of the universities in the twelfth century; the poverty of the monastic chronicles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is one witness to the fact; the necessity to send injunctions to nunneries first in French and then in English, as the knowledge of Latin and then of French died out in them, is another. Of the three occupations, learning, manual labour and divine service, only the last was left. Is it surprising that that also began to be looked upon as a weary and monotonous routine, when the monks and nuns came to it, not fresh from the stimulus of study or of labour, but from indolence, or from the worldly pleasures of the tavern, the hunt, the gambling board, the flirtation, the gossip, wherewith they often filled the spare time, which the wise Benedictine Rule would have filled with a change of occupation?

All safeguards against a petrifying routine were now broken down. We are wont to-day to look with disquiet upon the life of a clerk in an office, endlessly adding up rows of figures, with an interval for luncheon; but the clerk has his evenings, his Sundays, his annual holiday, his life as son, or husband, or father. For the medieval monk there was no such relaxation. When the salutary labour of hand and brain ordained by St Benedict no longer found a place in his life, he was delivered over bound to an endless routine of dorter, church, frater and cloister, which stretched from day to night and from night to day again. For nuns the monotony was even greater, for they had lost more completely than monks their early tradition of learning and they could not pa.s.s happy years in study at a university (as a few monks from great abbeys were able to do), nor find some solace in exercising the functions of a priest; moreover women were more apt even than men to enter the religious life without any real vocation for it, since there was hardly any other career for unmarried ladies of gentle birth. It would be an exaggeration to say that this uneventful life was necessarily distasteful. To the majority it was doubtless a happy existence; monotony appears peace to those who love it.

No cruel guard of diligent cares, that keep Crown'd woes awake, as things too wise for sleep: But reverent discipline and religious fear, And soft obedience, find sweet biding here; Silence and sacred rest; peace and pure joys; Kind loves keep house, lie close and make no noise.

Here behind the walls of the convent "a common grayness silvered everything" and all care was remote, save that, never to be escaped by womankind, of making two ends meet.

Nevertheless the danger was there. Only a minority, one may be sure, revolted actively against the duties which are sometimes, most significantly, called "the burthen of religion"[913]. That minority is known to us, for the sinner and the apostate, whether inspired by l.u.s.t or by levity, mere victims to their own weakness, or active rebels against an intolerable dulness, have left their mark in official doc.u.ments. But the number can only be guessed at of those others, who carried in their hearts for all their staid lives the complaint of the Latin song:

Sono tintinnabulum Repeto psalterium, Gratum linquo somnium c.u.m dormire cuperem, Heu misella!

Nichil est deterius tali vita c.u.m enim sim petulans et lasciva[914].

The bell I am ringing, The psalter am singing, And from my bed creeping Who fain would be sleeping, Misery me!

O what can be worse than this life that I dree, When naughty and lovelorn and wanton I be?

"Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room" is a charming justification of the sonnet, but it is neither good psychology nor good history.

It can never be too often repeated that many monks and nuns entered religion as a career while still children, with no particular vocation for the religious life. To such, even though they might experience no longing for the forbidden pleasures of the world, the monotony of the cloister would often be hard to bear. Their young limbs would kick against its restrictions and the changing moods of adolescence would turn and twist in vain within the iron bars of its unadaptable routine. Even to those no longer young happiness would depend at the best upon the fostering of a quick spiritual life, at the worst upon lack of imagination and of vitality. The undaunted daughter of desires, the man in whom religion burned as a strong fire, could find happiness in the life. But lesser brethren could not. Ennui, more deadly even than sensual temptation, was the devil who tormented them. So in the convents of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a sympathetic eye and an understanding mind will diagnose the fundamental disease as reaction against routine by men and women in whom Nature, expelled by a pitchfork, had returned a thousand times more strong.

This reaction from routine took several forms. It is somewhere at the bottom of all the more serious sins, which the pitchfork method of attaining salvation brought upon human creatures with bodies as well as souls. In this chapter, however, we are concerned not with these graver faults of immorality, but with things less gross, and yet in their c.u.mulative effect no less fatal to monastic life. Such was the neglect of that praise of G.o.d, which was the primary _raison d'etre_ of the monk and nun, so that services sometimes became empty forms, to be hurried through with scant devotion, occasionally with scandalous irreverence. Such was the deadly sin of _accidie_, the name of which is forgotten today, though the thing itself is with us still. Such were the nerves on edge, the small quarrels, the wear and tear of communal life; such also the gay clothes, the pet animals and the worldly amus.e.m.e.nts, with which nuns sought to enliven their existence. For all these things were in some sense a reaction from routine.

Carelessness in the performance of the monastic hours was an exceedingly common fault during the later middle ages and often finds a place in episcopal injunctions. Sometimes monks and nuns "cut" the services, as at Peterborough in 1437, when only ten or twelve of the 44 monks came on ordinary days to church[915], or at Nuncoton in 1440, where many of the nuns failed to come to compline, but busied themselves instead in various domestic offices, or wandered idly in the garden[916]. Often they came late to matins, a fault which was common in nunneries, for the nuns were p.r.o.ne to sit up drinking and gossiping after compline, instead of going straight to bed[917]; and these nocturnal carousals, however harmless in themselves, did not conduce to wakefulness at one a.m. Consequently they were somewhat sleepy, _quodammodo sompnolentes_, at matins and found an almost Johnsonian difficulty in getting up early. At Stainfield in 1519 At.w.a.ter found that half an hour sometimes elapsed between the last stroke of the bell and the beginning of the office and that some of the nuns did not sing but dozed, partly because they had not enough candles, partly because they went to bed late; they also performed the offices very negligently[918]. But most often of all the fault of monks and nuns lay in gabbling through the services as quickly as possible in order to get them over. They left out syllables at the beginning and end of words, they omitted the _dipsalma_ or _pausacio_ between two verses, so that one side of the choir was beginning the second half, before the other side had finished the first; they skipped sentences; they mumbled and slurred over what should have been "entuned in their nose ful semely."

Episcopal injunctions not infrequently animadvert against this irreverent treatment of the offices. At Catesby in 1442 Isabel Benet a.s.serted that "divine service is chanted at so great speed that no pauses are made," and at Carrow in 1526 several of the older nuns complained that the sisters sang and said the service more quickly than they ought, without due pauses. A strong injunction sent to Nuncoton in 1531 declares that the hours have been "doon with grete festinacon, haste and without deuocon, contrarye to the good manner and ordre of religion"[919]. Indeed so common was the fault that the Father of Evil was obliged to employ a special devil called t.i.ttivillus, whose sole business it was to collect the dropped syllables and gabbled verses and carry them back to his master in a sack. One rhyme distinguishes carefully between the contents of his sack:

Hii sunt qui psalmos corrumpunt nequiter almos, Dangler, c.u.m jasper, lepar, galper quoque draggar, Momeler, forskypper, forereynner, sic et overleper, Fragmina verborum Tutivillus colligit horum[920].

A holy Cistercian abbot once interviewed t.i.ttivillus; this is the tale as the nuns of Syon read it in their _Myroure of Oure Ladye_:

We rede of an holy Abbot of the order of Cystreus that whyle he stode in the quyer at mattyns, he sawe a fende that had a longe and a greate poke hangynge about hys necke, and wente aboute the quyer from one to an other, and wayted bysely after all letters, and syllables, and wordes, and faylynges, that eny made; and them he gathered dylygently and putte them in hys poke. And when he came before the Abbot, waytynge yf oughte had escaped hym, that he myghte have gotten and put in hys bagge; the Abbot was astoned and aferde of the foulenes and mysshape of hym, and sayde vnto hym. What art thow; And he answered and sayd. I am a poure dyuel, and my name ys Tytyuyllus, and I do myne offyce that is commytted vnto me. And what is thyne offyce sayd the Abbot, he answeryd I muste eche day he sayde brynge my master a thousande pokes full of faylynges, and of neglygences in syllables and wordes, that ar done in youre order in redynge and in syngynge. And else I must be sore beten[921].

Carelessness in the singing of the services was not, however, the most serious result of reaction against routine. If the men and women of sensibility failed to keep intelligence active in the pursuit of spiritual or temporal duties, if they cared no longer to use brain and spirit as they performed the daily round, _accidia_[922], that dread disease, half ennui and half melancholia, which, though common to all men, was recognised as the peculiar menace of the cloister, lay ever in wait for them. Against this sin of intellectual and spiritual sloth all the great churchmen of the middle ages inveigh, recognising in it the greatest menace of religious life, from which all other sins may follow[923]. If _accidia_ once laid hold upon a monk he was lost; ceasing to perform with active mind his religious duties, he would find them a meaningless, endless routine, filling him with irritation, with boredom and with a melancholy against which he might struggle in vain. The fourth century cen.o.bite Ca.s.sian has left a detailed description of the effects of _accidia_ in the cloister, declaring that it was specially disturbing to a monk about the sixth hour "like some fever which seizes him at stated times," so that many declared that this was "the sickness that destroyeth in the noon day," spoken of in the ninetieth psalm[924]. Many centuries later Dante crystallised it in four unsurpa.s.sable lines. As he pa.s.sed through the fifth circle of h.e.l.l he saw a black and filthy marsh, in which struggled the souls of those who had been overcome by anger; but deeper than the angry were submerged other souls, whose sobs rose in bubbles through the muddy water and who could only gurgle their confession in their throats. These were the souls of men who had fallen victims to the sin of _accidia_ in their lives

Fitti nel limo dicon: Tristi fummo Nel' aer dolce che dal sol s' allegra, Portando dentro accidioso fummo: Or ci attristiam nella belletta negra.

Fixed in the slime, they say, "Sullen were we in the sweet air, that is gladdened by the sun, carrying lazy smoke in our hearts; now lie we sullen here in the black mire"[925].

But the working of the poison is most brilliantly described by Chaucer, in his _Persones Tale_:

"After the sinnes of Envie and of Ire, now wol I speken of the sinne of Accidie. For Envye blindeth the herte of a man, and Ire troubleth a man; and Accidie maketh him hevy, thoghtful and wrawe. Envye and Ire maken bitternesse in herte; which bitternesse is moder of Accidie and binimeth him the love of alle goodnesse. Thanne is Accidie the anguissh of a trouble herte.... He dooth alle thing with anoy and with wrawnesse, slaknesse and excusacioun, and with ydelnesse and unl.u.s.t.... Now comth Slouthe, that wol nat sufre noon hardnesse ne no penaunce.... Thanne comth drede to biginne to werke any G.o.de werkes; for certes he that is enclyned to sinne, him thinketh it is so greet an empryse for to undertake to doon werkes of goodnesse.... Now comth wanhope, that is despeir of the mercy of G.o.d, that comth somtyme of to muche outrageous sorwe, and somtyme of to muche drede; imagininge that he hath doon so much sinne, that it wol nat availlen him, though he wolde repenten him and forsake sinne: thurgh which despeir or drede he abaundoneth al his herte to every maner sinne, as seith seint Augustin. Which dampnable sinne, if that it continue unto his ende, it is cleped sinning in the holy gost.... Soothly he that despeireth him is lyk the coward champioun recreant, that seith creant withoute nede.

Allas! allas! nedeles is he recreant and nedeles despeired. Certes the mercy of G.o.d is euere redy to every penitent and is aboven alle hise werkes.... Thanne cometh sompnolence, that is sluggy s...o...b..inge, which maketh a man be hevy and dul in body and in soule; and this sinne comth of Slouthe."

He proceeds to describe further symptoms,

"Necligence or recchelnesse ... ydelnesse ... the sinne that man clepen _Tarditas_" and "Lachesse,"

and concludes thus,

"Thanne comth a manere coldnesse, that freseth al the herte of man.

Thanne comth undevocioun, thurgh which a man is so blent, as seith seint Bernard, and hath swiche langour in soule, that he may neither rede ne singe in holy chirche, ne here ne thinke of no devocioun, ne travaille with his handes in no good werk, that it nis him unsavory and al apalled. Thanne wexeth he slow and s...o...b..y, and sone wol be wrooth, and sone is enclyned to hate and to envye. Thanne comth the sinne of worldly sorwe, swich as is cleped _tristicia_, that sleeth man, as seint Paul seith. For certes swich sorwe werketh to the deeth of the soule and of the body also; for therof comth, that a man is anoyed of his owene lyf. Wherfore swich sorwe shorteth ful ofte the lyf of a man, er that his tyme be come by wey of kinde"[926].

This masterly diagnosis of the sin of spiritual sloth and its branches is ill.u.s.trated by several stories which bear unmistakably the impress of a dreadful truth. Johann Busch's account of his early temptations and doubts has often been quoted. A strong character, he overcame the temptation and emerged stronger[927]. But Caesarius of Heisterbach has two anecdotes of weaker brethren which show how exactly Chaucer described the anguish of a troubled heart. The first is of particular interest to us because it concerns a woman:

"A certain nun, a woman of advanced age, and, as was supposed, of great holiness, was so overcome by the vice of melancholy (_trist.i.tiae_) and so vexed with a spirit of blasphemy, doubt and distrust, that she fell into despair. And she began altogether to doubt those things which she had believed from infancy and which it behoved her to believe, nor could she be induced by anyone to take the holy sacraments; and when her sisters and also her nieces in the flesh besought her why she was thus hardened, she answered "I am of the lost, of those who shall be d.a.m.ned." One day the Prior, growing angry, said to her, "Sister, unless you recover from your unbelief, when you die I will have you buried in a field." And she, hearing him, was silent but kept his words in her heart. One day, when certain of the sisters were to go on a journey I know not whither, she secretly followed them to the banks of the river Moselle, whereon the monastery is situated, and when the ship, which was carrying the sisters, put off, she threw herself from the sh.o.r.e into the river. Those who were in the ship heard the sound of a splash, and looking out thought her body to be a dog, but one of them, desiring (by G.o.d's will) to know more certainly what it was, ran quickly to the place and seeing a human being, entered the river and drew her out. Then when they perceived that it was the aforesaid nun, already wellnigh drowned, they were all frightened, and when they had cared for her and she had coughed up the water and could speak, they asked her, "Why, sister, didst thou act thus cruelly?" and she replied, pointing to the Prior, "My lord there threatened that I should be buried when dead in a field, wherefore I preferred to be drowned in the flood rather than to be buried like a beast in the field." Then they led her back to the monastery and guarded her more carefully. Behold what great evil is born of melancholy (_trist.i.tia_). That woman was brought up from infancy in the monastery. She was a chaste, devout, stern and religious virgin, and, as the mistress [of the novices] of a neighbouring monastery told me, all the maidens educated by her were of better discipline and more devout than others"[928].

The other anecdote tells of an old lay brother, who at the end of a long life fell into despair:

"I know not," says Caesarius, "by what judgment of G.o.d he was made thus sad and fearful, that he was so greatly afraid for his sins and despaired altogether of the life eternal. He did not indeed doubt in his faith, but rather despaired of salvation. He could be cheered by no scriptural authorities and brought back to the hope of forgiveness by no examples. Yet he is believed to have sinned but little. When the brothers asked him, 'What makes you fear, why do you despair?' he answered, 'I cannot pray as I was used to do, and so I fear h.e.l.l.'

Because he laboured with the vice of _trist.i.tia_, therefore he was filled with _accidia_, and from each of these was despair born in his heart. He was placed in the infirmary and on a certain morning he prepared him for death, and came to his master, saying, 'I can no longer fight against G.o.d.' And when his master paid but little attention to his words, he went forth to the fish pond of the monastery near by and threw himself into it and was drowned"[929].

Only a small minority, it is needless to say, was driven to this anguish of despair. For the majority the strain of conventual life found outlet, not in these black moods, but in a tendency to bicker one with another, to get excitement by exaggerating the small events of daily existence into matter for jealousies and disputes. For the strain was a double one; to monotony was added the complete lack of privacy, the wear and tear of communal life; not only always doing the same thing at the same time, but always doing it in company with a number of other people. The beauty of human fellowship, the happy friendliness of life in a close society are too obvious to need description.

For if heuene be on this erthe and ese to any soule, It is in cloistere or in scole by many skilles I fynde; For in cloistre cometh no man to chide ne to fighte, But alle is buxomnesse there and bokes to rede and to lerne, In scole there is scorne but if a clerke wil lerne, And grete loue and lykynge for eche of hem loueth other[930].

But it is necessary also to remember the other side of the picture.

Personal idiosyncrasies were no less apt to jar in the middle ages than they are today; there are unfortunates who are born to be unpopular; there are tempers which will lose themselves; and in conventual life there is no balm of solitude for frayed nerves. These nuns were very human people; a mere accident of birth had probably sent them to a convent rather than to the care of husband and children in a manor-hall; just as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a mere accident of birth made one son the squire, another the soldier and a third the parson. No special saintliness of disposition was theirs and no miracle intervened to render them immune from tantrums when they crossed the convent threshold. Nothing is at once more striking and more natural than the prevalence of little quarrels, sometimes growing into serious disputes, among the inmates of monasteries. Browning's Spanish Cloister was no mere figment of his inventive brain; indeed it is, if anything, less startling than the medieval Langland's description of the convent, where Wrath was cook and where all was far from "buxomnesse." Certainly Langland's indictment is a violent one; the satirist must darken his colours to catch the eye; and, had Chaucer been the painter, we might have had a dispute couched in more courteous terms and more "estatlich of manere." But the satirist's account is significant, because his very office demands that he shall exaggerate only what exists; his words are a smoke which cannot rise without fire. So Langland may speak through the lips of Wrath, with two white eyes:

I have an aunte to nonne and an abbesse bothe, Hir were leuere swowe or swelte an suffre any peyne.

I haue be cook in hir kichyne and e couent serued Many monthes with hem and with monkes bothe.

I was e priouresses potagere and other poure ladyes And made hem ioutes of iangelynge at dame Iohanne was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, And dame Clarice a knightes doughter ac a kokewolde was hire syre, And dame Peronelle a prestes file Priouresse worth she neuere For she had childe in chirityme all owre chapitere it wiste Of wycked wordes I, Wrath here wortes imade, Til "thow lixte" and "thow lixte" lopen oute at ones, And eyther hitte other vnder the cheke; Hadde thei had knyves, by Cryst her eyther had killed other[931].

From "thow lixte" to "Gr-r-r you swine" how little change!

Sober records bear out Langland's contention that Wrath was at home in nunneries. Some of the worst cases have already been described; election disputes, disputes arising from a prioress's favouritism, Margaret Wavere dragging her nuns about the choir by their hair, and screaming insults at them, Katherine Wells. .h.i.tting them on the head with fists and feet[932].

Doubtless quarrels seldom got as far as blows; but bad temper and wordy warfare were common. Insubordination was sometimes at the root of the discord; nuns refused to submit meekly to correction after the proclamation of their faults in chapter, or to obey their superiors. The words of another satirist show that the monastic vow of obedience sometimes sat lightly upon their shoulders:

Also another lady there was That hyght dame dysobedyent And sche set nowght by her priores.

Ans than me thowght alle was schent, For sugettys schulde euyr be dylygent Bothe in worde, in wylle and dede, To plese her souerynes wyth G.o.de entent, And hem obey, ellys G.o.d forbede.

And of alle the defawtes that I cowde se Thorowgh schewyng of experience, Hyt was one of the most that grevyd me, The wantyng of obedyence For hyt schulde be chese in consciens Alle relygius rule wytnesseth the same And when I saw her in no reverence, I myght no lenger abyde for schame, For they setten not by obedyence.

And than for wo myne hert gan blede Ne they hadden her in no reuerence, But few or none to her toke hede[933].

Again the colours are darkened, but the eyes of the satirist had seen.