Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 Part 39

And whan I sayd, Phyp, Phyp, Than he wold lepe and skyp, And take me by the lyp.

Alas, it wyll me slo, That Phillyp is gone me fro!

_Si in i qui ta tes_, Alas, I was euyll at ease!

_De pro fun dis cla ma vi_, Whan I sawe my sparowe dye!

That vengeaunce I aske and crye, By way of exclamacyon, On all the hole nacyon Of cattes wyld and tame; G.o.d send them sorowe and shame!

That cat specyally That slew so cruelly My lytell prety sparowe That I brought vp at Carowe ...[1704].

It is impossible for a cat-lover to leave the whole nation of cats under this terrific curse. Yet literature will supply no nunnery cat beside the unhappy Gyb and the uncharacterised cat of the _Ancren Riwle_. We must needs turn to the monks, and borrow the truer estimate of feline qualities made in the eighth century by an exiled Irish student, who sat over his books in a distant monastery of Carinthia, and wrote upon the margin of his copy of St Paul's Epistles this little poem on his white cat:

I and Pangur Ban, my cat, 'Tis a like task we are at; Hunting mice is his delight, Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men 'Tis to sit with book and pen; Pangur bears me no ill-will, He, too, plies his simple skill.

'Tis a merry thing to see At our tasks how glad are we, When at home we sit and find Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray In the hero Pangur's way; Oftentimes my keen thought set Takes a meaning in its net.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye Full and fierce and sharp and sly; 'Gainst the wall of knowledge I All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den, O! how glad is Pangur then; O! what gladness do I prove When I solve the doubts I love.

So in peace our task we ply, Pangur Ban, my cat, and I; In our arts we find our bliss, I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made Pangur perfect in his trade; I get wisdom day and night, Turning darkness into light[1705].

O cat! even at the cost of relevancy we have done thee honour.

Two little tragedies of the cloister are concerned with parrots--yet with what different birds and what different mistresses! In the twelfth century Nigel Wireker tells of an ill-bred and ill-fated parrot, kept in a nunnery, who told tales about the nuns and was poisoned by them for his pains:

Saepe mala Psittacus in thalamum domina redeunte puellas Prodit et illorum verba tacenda refert; Nescius ille loqui; sed nescius immo tacere Profert plus aequo Psittacus oris habens.

Hinc avibus crebro miscente aconita puella Discat ut ante mori quam didicisse loqui; Sunt et aves aliae quae toto tempore vitae Religiosorum claustra beata colunt[1706].

Quite other was the fate of Vert-Vert, whose tragedy told with exquisite irony by Gresset in the eighteenth century deserves a place on every shelf and in every heart which holds _The Rape of the Lock_. Vert-Vert was a parrot who belonged to the nuns of Nevers, the most beautiful, most amiable, the most devout parrot in the world. The convent of Nevers spoiled Vert-Vert as no bird has ever been spoiled:

Pas n'est besoin, je pense, de decrire Les soins des soeurs, des nonnes, c'est tout dire; Et chaque mere, apres son directeur, N'aimait rien tant. Meme dans plus d'un coeur, Ainsi l'ecrit un chroniqueur sincere, Souvent l'oiseau l'emporta sur le pere.

Il partageait, dans ce paisible lieu, Tous les sirops dont le cher pere en Dieu, Grace aux bienfaits des nonnettes sucrees, Reconfortait ses entrailles sacrees.

Objet permis a leur oisif amour, Vert-Vert etait l'ame de ce sejour....

Des bonnes soeurs egayant les travaux, Il bequetait et guimpes et bandeaux; Il n'etait point d'agreable partie S'il n'y venait briller, caracoler, Papillonner, siffler, rossignoler; Il badinait, mais avec modestie; Avec cet air timide et tout prudent Qu'une novice a meme en badinant.

He fed in the frater, and between meals the nuns' pockets were always full of bon-bons for his delectation. He slept in the dorter, and happy the nun whose cell he honoured with his presence; Vert-Vert always chose the young and pretty novices. Above all he was learned; he talked like a book, and all the nuns had taught him their chants and their prayers:

Il disait bien son Benedicite, Et _notre mere_, et _votre charite_; ...

Il etait la maintes filles savantes Qui mot pour mot portaient dans leurs cerveaux Tous les noels anciens et nouveaux.

Instruit, forme par leurs lecons frequentes, Bientot l'eleve egala ses regentes; De leur ton meme, adroit imitateur Il exprimait la pieuse lenteur, Les saints soupirs, les notes languissantes Du chant des soeurs, colombes gemissantes.

Finalement Vert-Vert savait par coeur Tout ce que sait une mere de choeur.

Small wonder that the fame of this pious bird spread far and wide; small wonder that pilgrims came from all directions to the abbey parlour to hear him talk. But alas, it was this very fame which led to his undoing. The physical tragedy of Philip Sparrow, an unlearned bird of frivolous tastes, pales before the moral tragedy of Vert-Vert. One day his renown reached the ears of a distant convent of nuns at Nantes, many miles further down the river Loire; and they conceived a violent desire to see him:

Desir de fille est un feu qui devore, Desir de nonne est cent fois pire encore.

They wrote to their fortunate sisters of Nevers, begging that Vert-Vert might be sent in a ship to visit them. Consternation at Nevers. The grand chapter was held; the younger nuns would have preferred death to parting with the darling parrot, but their elders judged it impolitic to refuse and to Nantes must Vert-Vert go for a fortnight. The parrot was placed on board a ship; but the ship

Portait aussi deux nymphes, trois dragons, Une nourrice, un moine, deux Gascons: Pour un enfant qui sort du monastere, C'etait echoir en dignes compagnons.

At first Vert-Vert was confused and silent among the unseemly jests of the women and the Gascons and the oaths of the boatmen. But too soon his innocent heart was acquainted with evil; desiring always to please he repeated all that he heard; no evil word escaped him; by the end of his journey he had forgotten all that he had learned in the nunnery, but he had become a pretty companion for a boatload of sinners. Nantes was reached; Vert-Vert (all unwilling) was carried off to the convent, and the nuns came running to the parlour to hear the saintly bird. But horror upon horrors, nothing but oaths and blasphemies fell from Vert-Vert's beak. He apostrophised sister Saint-Augustin with "la peste te creve," and

Jurant, sacrant d'une voix dissolue, Faisant pa.s.ser tout l'enfer en revue, Les B, les F, voltigeaient sur son bec.

Les jeunes soeurs crurent qu'il parlait grec.

The scandalised nuns dispatched Vert-Vert home again without delay. His own convent received him in tears. Nine of the most venerable sisters debated his punishment; two were for his death; two for sending him back to the heathen land of his birth; but the votes of the other five decided his punishment:

On le cond.a.m.ne a deux mois d'abstinence, Trois de retraite et quatre de silence; Jardins, toilette, alcove et biscuits, Pendant ce temps, lui seront interdits.

Moreover the ugliest lay sister, a veiled ape, an octogenarian skeleton, was made the guardian of poor Vert-Vert, who had always preferred the youngest and coyest of the novices. Little remains to be told. Vert-Vert, covered with shame and taught by misfortune, became penitent, forgot the dragoons and the monk, and showed himself once more "plus devot qu'un chanoine." The happy nuns cut short his penance; the convent kept fete, the dorters were decked with flowers, all was song and tumult. But alas, Vert-Vert, pa.s.sing too soon from a fasting diet to the sweets that were pressed upon him:

Bourre de sucre, et brule de liqueurs Vert-Vert, tombant sur un tas de dragees, En noir cypres vit ses roses changees[1707].

Doubtless so G.o.dly an end consoled the nuns for his untimely death. Yet one hardly knows which to prefer, the regenerate or the unregenerate Vert-Vert. The appreciative reader, remembering the inspired volubility with which (after such short practice) he greeted the nuns of Nantes, is almost moved to regret the destruction of what one of Kipling's soldiers would call "a wonderful gift of language." There is an apposite pa.s.sage in Jasper Mayne's comedy of _The City Match_ (1639), in which a lady describes the missionary efforts of her Puritan waiting-woman:

Yesterday I went To see a lady that has a parrot: my woman While I was in discourse converted the fowl, And now it can speak nought but Knox's works; _So there's a parrot lost_.

NOTE F.

THE MORAL STATE OF LITTLEMORE PRIORY IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

Littlemore Priory, near Oxford, in the early sixteenth century, was in such grave disorder that it may justly be described as one of the worst nunneries of which record has survived. Its state was, as usual, largely due to a particularly bad prioress, Katherine Wells. The following account of it is taken from the record of Bishop At.w.a.ter's visitations in 1517 and 1518, the first held by his commissary Edmund Horde, the second by the bishop in person[1708].

The _comperta_ are that the prioress had ordered the five nuns under her to say that all was well; she herself had an illegitimate daughter, and was still visited by the father of the child, Richard Hewes, a priest in Kent[1709]; that she took the "pannes, pottes, candilsticks, basynes, shetts, pelous, federe bedds etc." the property of the monastery, to provide a dowry for this daughter; that another of the nuns had, within the last year, an illegitimate child by a married man of Oxford; that the prioress was excessive in punishments and put the nuns in stocks when they rebuked her evil life; that almost all the jewels were p.a.w.ned, and that there was neither food, clothing nor pay for the nuns; that one who thought of becoming a nun at Littlemore was so shocked by the evil life of the prioress that she went elsewhere. A few months afterwards the bishop summoned the prioress to appear before him, and after denying the charges brought against her, she finally admitted them; her daughter, she said, had died four years before, but she owned that she had granted some of the plate of the monastery to Richard Hewes. In her evidence she stated that though these things had been going on for eight years, 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. As a punishment she was deposed from the post of prioress, but was allowed to perform the functions of the office for the present, provided that she did nothing without the advice of Mr Edmund Horde.

But some months later when the bishop himself made a visitation "to bring about some reformation," things were as scandalous as ever. The prioress complained that one of the nuns "played and romped (_luctando_)" with boys in the cloister and refused to be corrected.

When she was put in the stocks, three other nuns broke the door and rescued her, and burnt the stocks; and when the prioress summoned aid from the neighbourhood, the four broke a window and escaped to friends, where they remained two or three weeks; that they laughed and played in church during ma.s.s, even at the elevation. The nuns complained that the prioress had punished them for speaking the truth at the last visitation; that she had put one in the stocks without any cause; that she had hit another "on the head with fists and feet, correcting her in an immoderate way," and that Richard Hewes had visited the priory within the last four months. From the evidence it is clear that the state of things was well known in Oxford, where each party seems to have had its adherents.

Several morals may be drawn from this lurid story. It shows how inadequate, in some cases, was the episcopal machinery for control and reform of religious houses. It shows that the "scandalous _comperta_" of Henry VIII's commissioners some sixteen years later were in no way untrue to type. It shows also that Wolsey was not entirely unjustified in his desire to dissolve the house and to use its revenues for educational purposes; he may have been no more disinterested than was his master later, but in the case of Littlemore at least it is difficult not to approve him.

NOTE G.

THE MORAL STATE OF THE YORKSHIRE NUNNERIES IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

It is possible to study in some detail the nunneries in the diocese of York during the first half of the fourteenth century, or roughly between the years 1280 and 1360. The Archbishops' Registers for most of the period have survived, and have either been printed or drawn upon very fully in the admirable accounts of monastic houses given in the _Victoria County History of Yorkshire_. As these accounts are not very widely known and as Yorkshire contained an unusual number of nunneries (twenty-seven) it is worth while to give some description of the state of these houses during a troubled period in their career.

Reasons have been suggested elsewhere for some of the disorder which prevailed among the monastic houses of the North. They were most of them both small and poor and, what is of greater significance, they lay in the border country, exposed to the forays of the Scots, and continually disturbed by English armies or raiders, riding north to take revenge. Life was not easy for nuns who might at any moment have to flee before a raid and whose lands were constantly being ravaged; they grew more and more miserably poor and as usual poverty seemed to go hand in hand with laxity.

Moreover the conditions of life set its stamp upon the character of the ladies from whom convents were recruited. These Percies and Fairfaxes and Mowbrays and St Quintins schooled their hot blood with difficulty to obedience and chast.i.ty and the Yorkshire nunneries were apt to reflect the fierce pa.s.sions of the Border, quick to love and quick to fight. There were no more quarrelsome nunneries in the kingdom, witness their election fights[1710], and none in which discipline was more lax. During these sixty years nineteen out of the twenty-seven houses came before the Archbishop of York's notice, at one time or another, in connection with cases of immorality and apostasy.

It is evident at once, from a study of the registers, that seven houses, i.e., Basedale, Keldholme, Kirklees and Swine of the Cistercian order, Arthington and Moxby of the Cluniac order and St Clement, York, of the Benedictine order were in a serious condition[1711]. At Basedale in 1307 the Prioress Joan de Percy was deprived for dilapidation of the goods of the house and perpetual and notorious misdeeds; whereupon she promptly left the nunnery, taking some of her partisans among the nuns with her.

The Archbishop wrote to his official, bidding him warn them to return and not to go outside the cloister precincts and "in humility to take heed to the salutary monitions of their prioress"; but humility dwelt not in the breast of a Percy and in 1308 Joan was packed off to Sinningthwaite, "as she had been disobedient at Basedale." The troubles of the house were not ended; for the same year Agnes de Thormondby a nun, confessed that she had on three separate occasions allowed herself to be "deceived by the temptations of the flesh," a vivid commentary on the _regime_ of Joan Percy. In 1343 another well-born Prioress is in trouble at the house and the Archbishop issues a commission "to inquire into the truth of the articles urged against Katherine Mowbray and if her demerits required it to depose her, and the commission was repeated two years later, nothing apparently having been done"[1712].