Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 Part 25

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Registers, which are either unpublished or lost.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 chast.i.ty. 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 inst.i.tutions 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 chast.i.ty; 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 s.e.xual as well as religious in their origin, as in their imagery[1371]. The terrible la.s.situde 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 chast.i.ty 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.x was displayed good-humouredly, openly, grossly, by the populace, and with all the subtle charm of chivalry by the upper cla.s.ses. 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 pa.s.sing 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 cla.s.ses, 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 l.u.s.t, 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 doc.u.ments 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 a.s.sisting 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 pet.i.tioned 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 ma.s.s 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 p.r.o.nounced in 1290 against the persons who abducted Agnes of Sheen, a nun of G.o.dstow. The Bishop announces that she and another nun were journeying peacefully towards G.o.dstow 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 G.o.dstow, 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 p.r.o.nounces 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 unchast.i.ty, 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 G.o.d 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 t.i.tchmarsh 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 h.e.l.l must there be added a body in prison? Elizabeth Arundell runs away from Haliwell in 1382, nor will she return. The Prioress thereupon pet.i.tions 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 Middles.e.x and Ess.e.x 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 Auca.s.sin; 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 chast.i.ty, 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 pa.s.sionate hearts could beat beneath a monastic habit and they knew the merry rhyme of c.o.c.kaygne 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 G.o.dstow, 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 G.o.dstow, 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 G.o.dstow[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 a.s.sisting 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, 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 w.i.l.l.ynge, 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 Cap.r.o.n 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 pa.s.sed 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 p.a.w.n 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 G.o.dstow, where Fair Rosamond lay buried in the chapter house. Here, where deathless romance had its dwelling place, it is not strange that the winged G.o.d ever and again took his toll of the nuns. But what sorry subst.i.tutes 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.