Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 Part 21

they began to grow merry with wine; they laughed and joked and kissed and not over-modestly neither, till you could hardly hear what was said for the noise they made.... After supper there was dancing and singing of lascivious songs and such doings I am ashamed to speak of, inasmuch as I am much afraid the night hardly pa.s.sed very honestly[1176].

Moreover even if nuns visited their friends for a very short time, staying only one night, or even returning before nightfall to the convent, there was danger that they might join in the various revelries practised among secular folk, and reprobated by the Church as occasions for unseemly and licentious behaviour. Bishop Spofford of Hereford, indeed, found it necessary in 1437 to send a special warning against doing so to the nuns of Lymbrook; the Prioress was to "yife no lycence too noon of hur sustres her after to go to no port townes, no to noon othir townes to comyn wakes or festes, spectacles and othir worldly vanytees, and specially on holy-dayes, nor to be absent lyggying oute by nyght out of thair monastery, but with fader and moder, except causes of necessytee"[1177].

The words which the Good Wife spoke to her daughter come to mind:

Go not to e wrastelings ne schotynge at c.o.k As it were a strumpet or a giggelot, Wone at hom, doughter, and love i work myche[1178].

Clemence Medforde, Prioress of Ankerwyke, went to a wedding at Bromhale[1179]; yet weddings were of all those "comyn wakes and festes"

most condemned by the Church for the unseemly revelries which followed them. _The Christen State of Matrimony_, written in 1543, throws a flood of light upon the subject:

When they come home from the Church, then beginneth excesse of eatyng and dryncking--and as much is waisted in one daye, as were sufficient for the two newe maried Folkes halfe a yere to lyve upon.... After the Bancket and Feast, there begynnethe a vayne, madde and unmanerlye fashion, for the Bryde must be brought into an open dauncynge place.

Then is there such a rennynge, leapynge, and flyngynge among them, then is there suche a lyftynge up and discoverynge of the Damselles clothes and other Womennes apparell, that a Man might thynke they were sworne to the Devels Daunce. Then muste the poore Bryde kepe foote with al Dauncers and refuse none, how scabbed, foule, droncken, rude and shameles soever he be. Then must she oft tymes heare and se much wyckednesse and many an uncomely word; and that noyse and romblyng endureth even tyll supper[1180].

It may be urged that the Brides of Heaven need not necessarily have attended these merry-makings after the ceremony; but the example of Isabel Benet, nun of Catesby, and the tenour of certain episcopal injunctions, show that nuns by no means despised dancing[1181]. The strict disciplinarian's view of weddings is shown in the fact that members of the Tertiary Order of St Francis were forbidden to attend them; and even the civic authorities of London found it necessary to regulate the disorders which were prevalent on such occasions[1182].

Again not only weddings, but also christenings, often involved unseemly revels and this could not fail to affect nuns who, despite canonical prohibition, were somewhat in demand as G.o.dmothers. Christening parties were gay affairs; the gossips would return to the house of the child's parents to eat, drink and make merry: "adtunc et ibidem immediate venerunt in domam suam ad comedendum et bibendum et adtunc sibi revelaverunt de baptismo"[1183]. If Antoine de la Sale's witty account of the "third joy of marriage" has any truth[1184], and it is upheld by more sober doc.u.ments, bishops did well to mislike the christening parties for nuns; Mrs Gamp was quite at home in the middle ages; she was probably a crony of the Wife of Bath. It was in fact forbidden for monks and nuns to become G.o.dparents, not only, as Mr Coulton has pointed out, "because this involved them in a fresh spiritual relationship incompatible with their ideal, but because it entangled them with worldly folk and worldly affairs"[1185]. Thus in 1387 William of Wykeham wrote to the nuns of Romsey: "We forbid you all and singly to presume to become G.o.dmothers to any child, without obtaining our licence to do so, since from such relationships expense is often entailed upon religious houses"[1186]. At Nuncoton in 1440 two nuns asked that their sisters might be forbidden the practice and Alnwick enjoined "that none of yowe have no children at the fount ne confirmyng"[1187] and nearly a century later a similar injunction was sent by Bishop Longland to Studley[1188].

There does indeed seem a certain incongruity in the presence of one who had renounced the world at a wedding or a christening, even had such ceremonies not been accompanied by very worldly revels. But they were less incongruous than was the attendance of Mary, daughter of Edward I, the nun-princess of Amesbury, upon her step-mother Queen Margaret and later upon her niece Elizabeth de Burgh, during their confinements. A king's daughter, however, could not be subjected to ordinary restraints; Mary led a particularly free life, constantly visiting court and going on pilgrimages, and there is no reason to suppose that ordinary nuns shared her privileges[1189].

Naturally occasions when a nun was away from her convent for the night, whether on business or on pleasure, were comparatively rare. For the most part the bishops had to deal with casual absences during the day and it was found extraordinarily difficult to confine such excursions to the "convent business" and "necessary reasons" laid down by the various enactments on enclosure. There seems to have been a great deal of wandering about without any specific purpose. Short errands perhaps took the nuns out for a few hours, or they went simply for air and exercise.

Their rule and their bishops would have had them hear the "smale fowles maken melodye" and tread "the smalle, softe, sweete gra.s.s" within the narrow cloister court, or at least in the privacy of their own gardens[1190]. But the nuns liked highways and hedges, and often in springtime it was farewell their books and their devotion. Certainly the convent often did come out to take the air in its own meadows; John Aubrey (in a much-quoted pa.s.sage) tells of the nuns of Kington in Wiltshire, and how "Old Jacques" could see them from his house

come forth into the nymph-hay with their rocks and wheels to spin: and with their sewing work. He would say that he had told threescore and ten, but of nuns there were not so many, but in all, with lay sisters and widows, old maids and young girls, there might be such a number[1191].

Sometimes, indeed, at the busy harvest-time, when every pair of hands was needed on the manor farm, the nuns even went hay-making in the meadows.

The visitations of Bishop Alnwick provide two instances of this and show also the abuses to which it might give rise, since the fields were full of secular workers. At Nuncoton in 1440 the subprioress deposed that

in the autumn season the nuns go out to their autumn tasks, whereby the quire is not kept regularly[1192], and ... in seed time the nuns clear the crops of weeds in the barns, and there secular folks do come in and unbecoming words are uttered between them and the nuns, wherefrom, as is feared, there are evil consequences[1193].

At Gracedieu the subprioress mentioned that "sometimes the nuns do help secular folk in garnering their grain during the autumn season," but the most amusing revelations concern the conduct of the haughty cellaress Margaret Belers, who, whether on account of her autocratic government or because she was of better birth than they, was regarded by her sisters with the utmost jealousy. Belers, ran one of the _detecta_ to the Bishop,

goes out to work in autumn alone with Sir Henry [the chaplain], he reaping the harvest and she binding the sheaves, and at evening she comes riding behind him on the same horse. She is over friendly with him and has been since the doings aforesaid.

Here was a pretty scandal; the Bishop (hiding, we will hope, a smile) made inquiries; Sir Henry was charged with the heinous crime of going hay-making with Dame Belers. But Sir Henry specifically denied his solitary roaming in the fields with the cellaress; he said however "that he has been in the fields with the others and Belers, carting hay and helping to pile the sheaves in stacks in the barns"; and Alnwick contented himself with enjoining the Prioress "that ye suffre none of your susters to go to any felde werkes but alle onely in your presence"[1194].

Such field work, when it was undertaken, must have afforded not only wholesome exercise, but a very pleasant relaxation from the cramping life of the cloister; and the necessities of harvest overrode all rules.

Whether the nuns took part in farm work at other seasons of the year is more difficult to discover; one is tempted to think that they must sometimes have given a helping hand with their own cattle and poultry, especially at very poor houses. The private c.o.c.ks and hens which occasioned such rivalry at Saint-Aubin[1195], the never-to-be-forgotten donkey of Alfrad[1196], bear witness not only to the sin of _proprietas_, but also to the personal care of the nuns for such livestock. But authority discouraged the practice at a later date, partly because it encouraged private property, partly because it brought the nuns into too close contact with the world[1197]. Nowhere has the att.i.tude been better stated than in the amusing description given in the _Ancren Riwle_ of the anch.o.r.ess' cow:

An anch.o.r.ess that hath cattle appears as Martha was, a better housewife than anch.o.r.ess: nor can she in any wise be Mary, with peacefulness of heart. For then she must think of the cow's fodder and of the herdsman's hire, flatter the heyward, defend herself when her cattle is shut up in the pinfold and moreover pay the damage. Christ knoweth it is an odious thing when people in the town complain of the anch.o.r.esses' cattle. If, however, any one must needs have a cow, let her take care that she neither annoy, nor harm any one, and that her own thoughts be not fixed thereon[1198].

The more human bishops made allowance for a natural instinct by giving the convent permission to go for walks, though as a rule the grounds of the nunnery were specified:

"Let the door be closed at the right time," wrote Archbishop Courtenay to Elstow in 1390, "And let no nun go out without licence of the abbess or other president, yet so that leave of walking for recreation in the orchard or in any other seemly and close place at suitable times be not out of malice denied to the nuns provided that the younger do not go without the society of the elder"[1199].

Bishop Spofford of Hereford went even further; after forbidding any revelries to be held in the nunnery of Lymbrook, he added:

"and what dysport of walkyng forward in dewe tyme and place, so that yee kepe the dewe houres and tymes of dyuyne seruyce with inforth, and with honest company, and with lycence specyally asked and obteyned [from] the pryoresse or suppryoresse in her absence, and at yee be two to geder at the leest, we holde us content" (1437)[1200].

So in 1367 Robert de Stretton, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, forbade any nun of Fairwell to go into Lichfield without the Prioress' leave, ordering that she should be accompanied by two sisters and should "make no vain and wanton delays," but added that "this is not intended to interfere with the laudable custom of the whole or greater part of the convent walking out together on certain days to take the air"[1201]. This forerunner of the schoolgirls' "crocodile" was not, however, what the nuns desired. It was wandering about the roads in twos and threes (sometimes, alas, in ones also) that they really enjoyed, and against this freedom the bishops continually fulminated. It must be remembered that walking in the public streets in the middle ages was very different from what it is today; it is impossible otherwise, as Mr Coulton has pointed out, to explain the extraordinary severity of all rules for the deportment of girls[1202]. The streets were full of rough pastimes, hocking and hoods.n.a.t.c.hing, football and the games of noisy prentices in the town; and in the country villages they resounded with the still more boorish sports of country folk and with the shrill quarrels of alewives and regrateresses and all the good-natured but short-tempered people, whom court rolls show us raising the hue and cry upon each other and drawing blood from each other's noses. There is perhaps solicitude for the nuns in the injunction which Bishop Fitzjames sent in 1509 to the convent of Wix in Ess.e.x, forbidding them to permit "any public spectacles of seculars, javelin-play, dances or trading in streets or open places"[1203]. Manners were free in that age and the nuns would see and hear much that were best hidden from their cloistered innocence. Moreover if once they began to stop and pa.s.s the time of day with their neighbours, religious and secular, or to go into houses for some more private gossip, there was no knowing where such perilous familiarity would end; and the outspokenness with which bishops condemned such conduct by references to Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, leaves no doubt as to what they feared[1204].

But nothing availed to keep the nuns within their cloisters; and hardly a set of episcopal injunctions but bears witness to the freedom with which they wandered about the streets and fields. The nuns of Moxby are not to go out of the precincts of their monastery often, nor at any time to wander about the woods[1205]. Alas, poor ladies:

In somer when the shawes be sheyne, And leves be large and long, Hit is full mery in feyre foreste To here the foulys song.

The nuns of Cookhill are more urban; they are not to wander about in the town (1285)[1206] and the nuns of Wroxall are not to go on foot to Coventry or to Warwick "c.u.m eles ount fet desordement en ces houres"

(1338)[1207]. The nuns of White Hall, Ilchester, "walk through the strets and places of the vill of Ilchester and elsewhere, the modesty of their s.e.x being altogether cast off and they do not fear to enter the houses of secular men and suspected persons" (1335)[1208]. The nuns of Polsloe are not to go without permission into Exeter and are to return at once when their errand is accomplished, instead of "wascrauntes de hostel en hostel, si come eles unt maynte foiz fait, en deshonestete de lur estat et de la Religioun" (1319)[1209]--an echo here of the Good Wife's advice, "and run thou not from house to house, like a St Anthony's pig"[1210], or of the reminiscences of that other Wife of Bath:

For ever yet I lovede to be gay, And for to walke, in March, Averille and May, Fro hous to hous, to here sondry talis[1211].

The nuns of Romsey "enter houses of laymen and even of clerics in the town, eating and drinking with them" (1284)[1212]. The nuns of G.o.dstow "have often access to Oxford under colour of visiting their friends"

(1445)[1213]. The nuns of Elstow are a great trial to their diocesan; Bishop Gynewell finds that "there is excessive and frequent wandering of nuns to places outside the same monastery, whereby gossip and laxity are brought about" (1359)[1214]; Bishop Bokyngham boldly particularises:

We order the nuns on pain of excommunication, to abstain from any dishonest and suspicious conversation with secular or religious men and especially the access and frequent confabulations and colloquies of the canons of the Priory of Caldwell or of mendicant friars, in the monastery or about the public highways and fields adjoining (1387)[1215].

But the sisters of Elstow remain on good terms with their neighbours; Bishop Flemyng forbids the nuns "to have access to the town of Bedford or to the town of Elstow or to other towns or neighbouring places" and straitly enjoins the canons "that no canon of the said priory, under what colour of excuse soever, have access to the monastery of the nuns of Elstow; nor shall the same nuns for any reason whatever be allowed to enter the said priory, save for a manifest cause, from which reproach or suspicion of evil could in no way arise; nor even shall the same canons and nuns meet in any wise one with another, in any separate or private places; nor shall they talk together anywhere one with another, save in the presence and hearing of more than one trustworthy, who shall bear faithful witness of what they say or do" (1421-2)[1216]. The nuns of Nuncoton in the sixteenth century are even more addicted to the society of canons and Bishop Longland writes to them in stern language:

And that ye, lady prioresse, cause and compell all your susters (those oonly excepte that be seke) to kepe the quere and nomore to be absent as in tymes past they haue been wont to use, being content yf vj haue been present, the residue to goo att lybertie where they wold, some att thornton [Augustinian house at Thornton-upon-Humber], some at Newsom [or Newhouse, a Premonstratensian house close to Nuncoton, in the same parish of Brocklesby], some at hull, some att other places att their pleasures, which is in the sight of good men abhomynable, high displeasur to G.o.d, rebuke shame and reproache to religion and due correction to be doon according unto your religion frome tyme to tyme[1217].

Indeed these colloquies with monks and canons in their own monastery were nothing unusual. Bishops and Councils constantly forbade nuns to frequent houses of monks, or to be received there as guests, but the practice continued. Sometimes they had an excuse; the nuns of St Mary's, Winchester, were in the habit of going to St Swithun's monastery to confess to one of the brothers, who was their confessor and in ill-health, and Bishop Pontoise appointed another monk in his place, who should come to the nuns when summoned, thus avoiding the risk of scandal[1218].

Similarly Peckham forbade the nuns of Holy Sepulchre, Canterbury, to enter "any place of religious men or elsewhere, under colour of confessing,"

unless they had no other confessor, in which case they were to return directly their business was accomplished and not to stay eating and drinking there[1219]. But sometimes the nuns had less good reason. At Elstow, as we know, they gossiped in the fields and highways; and if nuns were sometimes frivolous, so were monks. What are we to think of that nun of Catesby (gone to rack and ruin under the evil rule of Margaret Wavere), who

on Monday last did pa.s.s the night with the Austin friars at Northampton and did dance and play the lute with them in the same place until midnight (saltauit et citherauit usque ad mediam noctem) and on the night following she pa.s.sed the night with the Friars preachers at Northampton, luting and dancing in like manner[1220].

There rises to the memory an irresistibly comic sonnet of Wordsworth:

Yet more--round many a convent's blazing fire Unhallowed threads of revelry are spun; There Venus sits disguised like a nun,-- While Bacchus, clothed in semblance of a friar Pours out his choicest beverage high and higher Sparkling, until it cannot choose but run Over the bowl, whose silver lip hath won An instant kiss of masterful desire-- To stay the precious waste. Through every brain The domination of the sprightly juice Spreads high conceits to madding Fancy dear, Till the arched roof, with resolute abuse Of its grave echoes, swells a choral strain, Whose votive burthen is "Our kingdom's here."

Alack, had the nun of Catesby forgotten that "even as the cow which goeth before the herd hath a bell at her neck, so likewise the woman who leadeth the song and dance hath, as it were, the devil's bell bound to hers, and when the devil heareth the tinkle thereof he feeleth safe, and saith he: 'I have not lost my cow yet'"?[1221] Had she forgotten the awful vision of that holy man, to whom the devil appeared in the form of a tiny blackamoor, standing above a woman who was leading a dance, guiding her about as he wished and dancing on her head?[1222] But indeed Isabel (or Venus) Benet was not the woman to care for so slight a matter as the rule of her order or the dreams of holy men[1223]. Her case provides an admirable ill.u.s.tration of the motives which prompted the extreme severity of episcopal attempts to enforce enclosure and to cut nuns off from the society of neighbouring monasteries[1224].

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VII

"Isabel Benet did pa.s.s the night with the Austin friars at Northampton and did dance and play the lute with them." (See page 388.)

The Legend of Beatrice the Sacristan. (See page 511.)

THE NUN WHO LOVED THE WORLD]

Even if they did not often go to such extremes as to spend a night dancing with friars, the nuns foregathered sometimes in the most strange places.

The complaint that priests and monks and canons were tavern-haunters occurs with wearisome iteration in medieval visitation doc.u.ments, but surely a tavern was the last place where one would expect to find a nun; "Deus sit propitius isti potatori," were a strange invocation on lips that prayed to "Our blisful lady, Cristes moder dere." Yet nuns sometimes abused their liberty to frequent such places. Archbishop Rotherham wrote to the Prioress of Nunappleton in 1489 "yat noon of your sistirs use ye alehouse nor ye watirside, wher concurse of straungers dayly resortes"[1225]; and at Romsey in 1492 Abbess Elizabeth Broke deposed that she suspected the nuns of slipping into town by the church door and prayed that they might not frequent taverns and other suspected places, while her Prioress also said that they frequented taverns and continually went to town without leave[1226]. Bald statements, but it is easy to call up a picture of what lies behind them, for of medieval taverns we have many a description touched by master hands. So we shall see nuns at the tunning of Elynour Rummynge, edging in by the back way "over the hedge and pale,"

to drink her noppy ale[1227]. Or again we shall see Beton the Brewster standing in her doorway beneath the ivy bush, hailing Dame Isabel and Dame Matilda, as they patter along upon their "fete ful tendre"; and we shall hear her seductive cry "I have good ale, gossip" (no nun ever despised good ale--only when it was _valde tenuis_ did she object) "I have peper and piones and a pounde of garlike, A ferthyngworth of fenel-seed for fasting days." We shall never--thanks to Langland--have any difficulty in seeing that interior, when the nuns have scuttled through the door, the heat, the smell of ale and perspiring humanity, the babel of voices as all the riff-raff of the village greets the nuns and gives them "with glad chere good ale to hansel"; and the scene that follows, "the laughyng and lowrying and 'let go the cuppe,'" the singing, the gambling, the drinking, the invincible good humour and the complete lack of all decency. We can only hope that Dame Isabel and Dame Matilda left before Glutton got drunk[1228]. But it is consoling to reflect that the alehouses frequented by the nuns of Nunappleton and of Romsey were probably less low places, for it is not easy to picture Chaucer's Prioress on a bench between Clarice of c.o.kkeslane and Peronelle of Flanders. Probably their taverns at the waterside were more like the Chequer-on-the-Hoop, where Madame Eglentyne and the Wife of Bath pledged each other in the hostess'

parlour[1229]; or like the tavern where the good gossips

Elynore, Jone and Margery Margaret, Alis and Cecely

met and feasted, all unknown to their husbands and cherished the heart with muscadel[1230]; or liker still, perhaps, to that lordly tavern kept by Trick, where the city dames come tripping in the morning, as readily as to minster or to market and where he draws them ten sorts of wine, all out of a single cask, crying: "dear ladies, Mesdames, make good cheer, drink freely your good pleasure, for we have leisure enough"[1231]. But however select the house, whether they met there buxom city dames drinking away their husbands' credit, or merely Tim the tinker and twain of his prentices, whether they were quizzed by "those idle gallants who haunt taverns, gay and handsome," or hobn.o.bbed with "travellers and tinkers, sweaters and swinkers," the alehouse was a.s.suredly no place for nuns[1232].