Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 Part 9

The peculiar difficulties suffered in this respect by an important house, which maintained a large body of servants, are best ill.u.s.trated, however, in the case of Romsey Abbey. At this house in 1302 Bishop John of Pontoise ordained

that a useless, superfluous, quarrelsome and incontinent servant and one using insolent language to the ladies shall be removed within a month, ... and especially John Chark, who has often spoken ill and contumaciously in speaking to and answering the ladies, unless he correct himself so that no more complaints be made to the bishop[435].

John Chark possibly learned to bridle his tongue, but the tone among the Romsey servants was not good, for in 1311 Bishop Henry Woodlock ordered that "no women servants shall remain unless of good conversation and honest; pregnant, incontinent, quarrelsome women and those answering the nuns contumaciously, all superfluous and useless servants, [are] to be removed within a month"[436]. In 1387 the difficulties were of another order; writes William of Wykeham:

the secular women servants of the nuns are wont too often to come into the frater, at times when the nuns are eating there, and into the cloister while the nuns are engaged there in chapter meetings, contemplation, reading or praying, and there do make a noise and behave otherwise ill, in a way which beseems not the honesty of religion. And these secular women often keep up their chattering, carolling (_cantalenas_) and other light behaviour, until the middle of the night, and disturb the aforesaid nuns, so that they cannot properly perform the regular services. Wherefore we ... command you that you henceforth permit not the aforesaid things, nor any other things which befit not the observances of your rule, to be done by the said servants or by others, and that you permit not these servants to serve you henceforth in the frater, and a servant or any other secular person who does the contrary shall be expelled from the monastery.

Moreover we forbid on pain of the greater excommunication that any servants defamed for any offence be henceforth admitted to dwell among you, or having been admitted, be retained in your service, for from such grave scandals may arise concerning you and your house[437].

We have spoken hitherto about the regular hired servants of the house; but it must not be forgotten that nuns normally had a larger community dependent in part upon them. From time to time they were wont to hire such additional labour as they required, whether servants in husbandry taken on for the haymaking and harvest season, artificers hired to put up or repair buildings, workers in various branches of the cloth industry to make the liveries of the servants, itinerant candle-makers to prepare the winter dips, or a variety of casual workers hired at one time or another for specific purposes. The nuns of St Radegund's, Cambridge, entered in their accounts a large number of payments besides those to their regular servants. In moments of stress they were wont to fall back upon a paragon named Katherine Rolf. We first meet her in 1449-50 weeding the garden for four days, for the modest sum of 4-1/2_d._; but soon afterwards behold her on the roof, aiding the thatchers to thatch two tenements, at 1-1/2_d._ a day for twelve days. In the next year she is more active still; first of all she is found helping the candle-makers to make up 14 lbs. of tallow candles for the guest-house. Then she combs and cleans a pound of wool for spinning. Then she appears in the granary helping the maltster to thresh and winnow grain. In the midst of these activities she turns an honest penny by selling fat chickens to the convent. The nuns also disburse small sums of money to the man who cleanses the convent privies, to the _slawterman_ for killing beasts for the kitchen, to Richard Gardyner for beating stockfish, to Thomas...o...b..rne for making malt, to Thomas the Smith for providing a variety of iron implements and _cart-clowtes_, for shoeing the horses and for mending the ploughshares, and for "blooding the horses on St Stephen's day" (Dec. 26), to Thomas Boltesham, _cowper_, for mending wooden utensils, to Thomas Speed for helping in the kitchen on fair-day and to John Speed for working in the garden. Besides these they hire various day-labourers to work in the fields during the sowing season, hay-making and harvest, or to lop trees round the convent and hew up firewood, or to prune and tie up the vines (for there were English vineyards in those days). Then there is a long list of carpenters, builders, thatchers, and plumbers engaged in making and repairing the buildings of the convent and its tenants. Finally there are the various cloth workers, spinners, weaver, fuller, shearman, dyer and tailor hired to make the servants' clothes, concerning whom something has already been said[438].

Thus many persons came to depend upon a nunnery for part of their livelihood, who were not the permanent servants of the house, and this goes further than any imagined reverence for the lives and calling of their inmates to explain the anxiety shown in some places for the preservation of nunneries when the day of dissolution came. The convents were not only inns and boarding-houses for ladies of the upper cla.s.s and occasionally schools for their daughters; they were the great employers and consumers of their districts, and though their places must sooner or later be taken by other employers and consumers, yet at the moment many a husbandman and artificer must have seen his livelihood about to slip away from him. The nuns of Sheppey, in their distant and lonely flats, clearly employed a whole village[439]. They could not count on hiring carpenter and thatcher for piece-work when they wanted them in that thinly populated spot, so they must hire them all the year round. Twenty-six hinds and seven women they had in all, working in their domestic offices or on the wide demesne, most of which they farmed themselves, for food was far to buy if they did not grow it. Three shepherds kept their large flock, a cowherd drove their kine and hogs, a horse-keeper looked to their 17 horses. All the other men and women were busy with the beasts and the crops in the field, or with work in the brew house, the "bultyng howse,"

the bakehouse and the dairy. So also at the abbey of Polesworth, where fifteen nuns employed in all thirty-eight persons, women servants, yeomen about the household and hinds. "In the towne of Pollesworth," said the commissioners, who were gentlemen of the district and not minded to lose the house:

ar 44 tenementes and never a plough but one, the resydue be artifycers, laborers and vitellers, and lyve in effect by the said house.... And the towne and nonnery standith in a harde soile and barren ground, and to our estymacions, yf the nonnery be suppressed the towne will shortely after falle to ruyne and dekaye, and the people therin, to the nombre of six or seven score persones, are nott unlike to wander and to seke their lyvyng as our Lorde G.o.de best knowith[440].

So also at St Mary's, Winchester, whose household we have described:

the seid Monastery ... standith nigh the Middell of the Citye, of a great and large Compa.s.se, envyroned with many poore housholdes which haue theyr oonly lyuynge of the seid Monastery, And have no demaynes whereby they may make any prouysion, b.u.t.t lyue oonly by theyr landes, making theyr prouysion in the markettes[441].

The old order changeth, yielding place to new, and a livelihood fulfils itself in many ways; yet many labouring folk as well as gentlemen must have felt like the commissioners at Polesworth and St Mary's, Winchester, when the busy monastic housewives were dispersed and the grain and cattle sold out of barn and byre. There is no-one so conservative as your bread-winner, and for the best of reasons.

CHAPTER V

FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen, six; result, happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds, ought and six; result, misery.

_Mr Micawber._

In the history of the medieval nunneries of England there is nothing more striking than the constant financial straits to which they were reduced.

Professor Savine's a.n.a.lysis of the _Valor Ecclesiasticus_ has shown that in 1535 the nunneries were on an average only half as rich as the men's houses, while the average number of religious persons in them was larger[442]; and yet it is clear from the evidence of visitation doc.u.ments that even the men's houses were continually in debt. It is therefore not to be wondered at that there was hardly a nunnery in England, which did not at one time or another complain of poverty. These financial difficulties had already begun before the end of the thirteenth century and they grew steadily worse until the moment of the Dissolution. The worst sufferers of all were the nunneries of Yorkshire and the North, a prey to the inroads of the Scots, who time after time pillaged their lands and sometimes dispersed their inmates; Yorkshire was full of nunneries and almost all of them were miserably poor. But in other parts of the country, without any such special cause, the position was little better. When Bishop Alnwick visited the diocese of Lincoln in the first half of the fifteenth century, fourteen out of the twenty-five houses which he examined were in financial difficulties. Moreover not only is this true of small houses, inadequately endowed from their foundation and less likely to weather bad times, but the largest and richest houses frequently complained of insufficient means. It is easy to understand the distress of the poor nuns of Rothwell; their founder Richard, Earl of Gloucester, had died before properly endowing the house, and the prioress and convent could expend for their food and clothing only four marks and the produce of four fields of land, in one of which the house was situated[443]. But it is less easy to account for the constant straits of the great Abbey of Shaftesbury, which had such vast endowments that a popular saying had arisen: "If the Abbot of Glas...o...b..ry could marry the Abbess of Shaftesbury, their heir would hold more land than the King of England"[444]. It is comprehensible that the small houses of Lincolnshire and the dangerously situated houses of Yorkshire should be in difficulties; but their complaints are not more piteous than those of Romsey, G.o.dstow and Barking, richly endowed nunneries, to which the greatest ladies of the land did not disdain to retire.

The poverty of the nunneries was manifested in many ways. One of these was the extreme prevalence of debt. On the occasion of Bishop Alnwick's visitations, to which reference has been made above, no less than eleven houses were found to be in debt[445]. At Ankerwyke the debts amounted to 40, at Langley to 50, at Stixwould to 80 marks, at Harrold to 20 marks, at Rothwell to 6 marks. Markyate was "indebted to divers creditors for a great sum." Heynings was in debt owing to costly repairs and to several bad harvests, and about the same time a pet.i.tion from the nuns stated that they had "mortgaged for no short time their possessions and rents and thus remain irrecoverably pledged, have incurred various very heavy debts and are much depressed and brought to great and manifest poverty"[446]. In some cases the prioresses claimed to have reduced an initial debt; the Prioress of St Michael's, Stamford, said that on her installation twelve years previously the debts stood at 20 and that they were now only 20 marks; the Prioress of Gracedieu said that she had reduced debts from 48 to 38; the Prioress of Legbourne said that the debts were now only 14 instead of 63[447]. But from the miserable poverty of some of these houses (for instance Gokewell, where the income in rents was said to be 10 yearly and Langley, where it was 20, less than half the amount of the debts) it may be inferred that the struggle to repay creditors out of an already insufficient income was a hopeless one; and the effort to do so out of capital was often more disastrous still. Nothing is more striking than the lists of debts which figure in the account rolls of medieval nunneries. In thirteen out of seventeen account rolls belonging to St Michael's Stamford[448] and ranging between 1304 and 1410, the nuns end the year with a deficit; and in fourteen cases there is a schedule of debts added to the account. Sometimes the amount owed is small, but occasionally it is very large. In the first roll which has survived (1304-5) the deficit on the account is some 5 odd; the debts are entered as 23. 1_s._ 11_d._ on the present year (which were apparently afterwards paid, because the items were marked "vacat pour ceo ke le deners sount paye") and fifteen items amounting to 52. 3_s._ 8_d._ and described as "nos auncienes dettes estre cest aan"; in fact the debts amount to considerably more than the income entered in the roll[449]. Similarly in 1346-47 the debts amount to 51 odd and in 1376-77 to 53 odd, and in other years to smaller sums. In some cases a list of debts due to the convent is also entered in the account, but in only four of these does the money owed to the house exceed the amount owing by it; and "argent aprompte" or "money borrowed" is a regular item in the credit account.

Similarly the treasuresses' accounts of Gracedieu end with long schedules of debts due by the house[450]. Nor was it only the small houses which got into debt. Tarrant Keynes was quite well off, but as early as 1292 the nuns asked the royal leave to sell forty oaks to pay their debts[451].

G.o.dstow was rich, but in 1316 the King had to take it under his protection and appoint keepers to discharge its debts, "on account of its poverty and miserable state," and in 1335 the profits during vacancy were remitted to the convent by the King "because of its poverty and misfortunes"[452]. St Mary's, Winchester, was a famous house, but it also was in debt early in the fourteenth century[453]. It should be noticed that the last cases (and that of St Michael's Stamford, 1304-5) are anterior to the Black Death, to whose account it has been customary to lay all the financial misfortunes of the religious houses. It is undeniable that the Black Death completed the ruin of many of the smaller houses, and that matters grew steadily worse during the last half of the fourteenth and throughout the fifteenth century; but there is ample evidence that the finances of many religious houses, both of men and of women, had been in an unsatisfactory condition at an earlier date; and even the golden thirteenth century can show cases of heavy debt[454].

In the smaller houses the constant struggle with poverty must have entailed no little degree of discomfort and discouragement. Sometimes the nuns seem actually to have lacked food and clothes, and it seems clear that in many cases the revenues of these convents were insufficient for their support and that they were dependent upon the charity of friends. A typical case is that of Legbourne, where one of the nuns informed Bishop Alnwick (1440) that since the revenues of the house did not exceed 40 and since there were thirteen nuns and one novice, it was impossible for so many of them to have sufficient food and clothing from such inadequate rents, unless they received a.s.sistance from secular friends[455]. Fosse in 1341 was said to be so slenderly endowed that the nuns had not enough to live on without external aid[456]; and in 1440 Alnwick noted "all the nuns complain ever of the poverty of the house and they receive nothing from it save only food and drink"[457]. Of Buckland it was stated that "its possessions cannot suffice for the sustenance of the said sisters with their household, for the emendation of their building, for their clothes and for their other necessities without the help of friends and the offering of alms"[458]. c.o.kehill in 1336 was excused a tax because it was so inadequately endowed that the nuns had not enough to live upon without outside aid[459]. Davington in 1344 was in the same position; although the nuns were reduced to half their former number, they could not live upon their revenues without the charity of friends[460]. Alnwick's visitations, indeed, show quite clearly that in poor houses the nuns were often expected to provide either clothes or (on certain days) food for themselves, out of the gift of their friends[461]. At Sinningthwaite, in the diocese of York, the position appears even more clearly; in 1319 it was declared that the nuns who had no elders, relatives or friends, lacked the necessary clothes and were therefore afflicted with cold, whereupon the Archbishop ordered them to have clothes provided out of the means of the house[462]. The clause of the Council of Oxford which permitted poor houses to receive a sum sufficient for the vesture of a new member was evidently stretched to include the perpetual provision of clothing by external friends, and this is sometimes indicated in the wording of legacies. Thus Roger de Noreton, citizen and mercer of York, left the following bequest in 1390:

I bequeath to Isabel, my daughter, a nun of St Clement's, York, to buy her black flannels (_pro flannelis suis nigris emendis_), according to the arrangement of my wife Agnes and of my other executors, at fitting times, according to her needs, four marks of silver[463].

Sir Thomas c.u.mberworth, dying in 1451, specifically directed that "ye blak Curteyne of lawne be cut in vailes and gyfyn to pore nones"[464].

The nuns were not always able to obtain adequate help from external friends in the matter of food and clothes; and evidence given at episcopal visitations shows that they sometimes went cold and hungry. Complaints are common that the allowance paid to the nuns (in defiance of canon law) for the provision of food and of garments had been reduced or withdrawn; and so also are complaints that the quality of beer provided by the convent was poor, though here the propensity of all communities to grumble at their food has to be taken into account[465]. But more specific information is often given; and though it is clear that financial mismanagement was often as much to blame as poverty, the sufferings of the nuns were not for that reason any less real. The Yorkshire nunnery of Swine is a case in point. It was never rich, but at Archbishop Giffard's visitation in 1268 the nuns complained that the maladministration of their fellow canons[466] had made their position intolerable. Although the means of the house, if discreetly managed, sufficed to maintain them, they nevertheless had nothing but bread and cheese and ale for meals and were even served with water instead of ale twice a week, while the canons and their friends were provided for "abundantly and sumptuously enough"; the nuns were moreover insufficiently provided with shoes and clothes; they had only one pair of shoes each year[467] and barely a tunic in every three and a cloak in every six years, unless they managed to beg more from relatives and secular friends[468]. Fifty years later there was still scarcity at Swine, for the Prioress was ordered to see that the house was reasonably served with bread, ale and other necessities[469]. At Ankerwyke (1441) the frivolous and incompetent Prioress, Clemence Medforde, reduced her nuns to similar discomfort. Margery Kirkby, whose tongue nothing could stop, announced that "she furnishes not nor for three years' s.p.a.ce has furnished fitting habits to the nuns, insomuch that the nuns go about in patched clothes. The threadbareness of the nuns" added the bishop's clerk "was apparent to my lord. (_Patebat domino nuditas monialium._)"

Three of the younger nuns also made complaints; Thomasine Talbot had no bedclothes "insomuch that she lies in the straw," Agnes Dychere "asks that sufficient provision be made to her in clothing for her bed and body, that she may be covered from the cold, and also in eatables, that she may have strength to undergo the burden of religious observance and divine service, for these hitherto had not been supplied to her"; and Margaret Smith also complained of insufficient bedclothes. Poor little sister Thomasine also remarked sadly that she had no kirtle provided for her use[470].

The history of Romsey shows that even the rich houses suffered from similar inconveniences. In 1284 Peckham speaks of a scarcity of food in the house and forbids the Abbess to fare sumptuously in her chamber, while the convent went short[471]; in 1311 it was ordered that the bread should be brought back to the weight, quant.i.ty and quality hitherto used[472]; and in 1387 William of Wykeham rather severely commanded the Abbess and officiaries to provide for the nuns bread, beer and other fit and proper victuals, according to ancient custom and to the means of the house[473].

Campsey was another flourishing house, but in 1532 a chorus of complaint greeted the ears of the visitor, and (as in so many cases) the ills were all put down to the mismanagement of the Prioress, Ela b.u.t.try. She was not too luxurious, but too stingy; Katherine Symon said that n.o.ble guests, coming to the priory, complained of the very great parsimony of the Prioress; Margaret Harmer said that the sisters were sometimes served with very unwholesome food; Isabel Norwich said that the friends of the nuns, coming to the house, were not properly provided for; Margaret Bacton said that dinner was late through the fault of the cook and that the meat was burnt to a cinder; Katherine Grome said that the beef and mutton with which the nuns were served were sometimes bad and unwholesome and that within the past month a sick ox, which would otherwise have died, had been killed for food, and that the Prioress was very sparing both in her own meals and in those with which she provided the nuns; and four other sisters gave evidence to the same effect[474]. One has the impression that the nuns were elderly and fussy, but there was evidently a basis for their unanimous complaint, and it is easy to imagine that food may sometimes have been very bad in convents which (unlike Campsey) were burdened with real poverty[475].

Another sign of the financial distress of the nunneries was the ruinous condition of their buildings. The remark written by a shivering monk in a set of nonsense verses may well stand as the plaint of half the nunneries of England:

Haec abbathia ruit, hoc notum sit tibi, Christe, Intus et extra pluit, terribilis est locus iste.

("This abbey falleth in ruins, Christ mark this well! It raineth within and without; how fearful is this place!")[476]. Time after time visitations revealed houses badly in need of repair and roofs letting in rain or even tumbling about the ears of the nuns; time after time indulgences were granted to Christians who would help the poor nuns to rebuild church or frater or infirmary. The thatched roofs especially were continually needing repairs. It will be remembered how the Abbess Euphemia of Wherwell rebuilt the bell tower above the dorter,

which fell down through decay one night, about the hour of mattins, when by an obvious miracle from heaven, though the nuns were in the dorter, some in bed and some in prayer before their beds, all escaped not only death but any bodily injury[477].

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE IV

Bra.s.s of Ela b.u.t.try, the stingy Prioress of Campsey ([dagger] 1546), in St Stephen's Church, Norwich. Stingy even in death, she has appropriated to her own use the bra.s.s of a 14th century laywoman.]

At Crabhouse in the time of Joan Wiggenhall

the dortour that than was, as fer forthe as we knowe, the furste that was set up on the place, was at so grete mischeef and, at the gate-downe, the Prioresse dredyinge perisschyng of her sistres whiche lay thereinne took it doune for drede of more hermys,

and next year "sche began the grounde of the same dortoure that now stondith and wrought thereupon fulli vij yere betymes as G.o.d wolde sende hir good[478]." The Prioress of Swine was ordered in 1318 to have the dorter covered without delay, so that the nuns might quietly and in silence enter it, without annoyance from storms, and to have the roofs of the other buildings repaired as soon as might be[479]. At St Radegund's Cambridge, in 1373, the Prioress was charged with suffering the frater to remain unroofed, so that in rainy weather the sisters were unable to take their meals there, to which she replied that the nunnery was so burdened with debts, subsidies and contributions, that she had so far been unable to carry out repairs, but would do so as quickly as possible[480]. At Littlemore in 1445 the nuns did not sleep in the dorter for fear it should fall[481]. At Romsey in 1502 the wicked Abbess Elizabeth Broke had allowed the roofs of the chancel and dorter to become defective, "so that if it happened to rain the nuns were unable to remain either in the quire in time of divine service or in their beds and the funds that the abbess ought to have expended on these matters were being squandered on Master Bryce"; the fabric of the monastery in stone walls was also going to decay through her neglect, and so were various tenements belonging to the house in the town of Romsey[482]. Over a hundred and twenty years before, William of Wykeham had found Romsey hardly less dilapidated, with its church, infirmary and nuns' rooms "full of many enormous and notable defects," and the buildings of the monastery itself and of its different manors in need of repair[483]. Of the unfortunate houses within the area of Scottish inroads, Arden, Thicket, Keldholme, Rosedale, Swine, Wykeham, Arthington and Moxby were all ruinous at the beginning of the fourteenth century; the monotonous list includes the church, frater and chapter house of Arden, the cloister of Rosedale, the bakehouse and brewhouse of Moxby, the dorter and frater of Arthington[484].

In the sixteenth century the distress was, as usual, at its worst. At the visitation of the Chichester diocese by Bishop Sherburn in 1521 the cloister of Easebourne needed roofing and Rusper was "in magno decasu"; six years later Rusper was still "aliqualiter ruinosa"[485]. At the Norwich visitations of Bishop Nykke the church of Blackborough was in ruins, and the roofs of cloister and frater at Flixton were defective; while at Crabhouse buildings were in need of repair and the roof of the Lady chapel was ruinous[486]; Joan Wiggenhall must have turned in her grave. Bishop Longland's visitations of the diocese of Lincoln show a similar state of affairs. In 1531 he commanded the Abbess of Elstow "that suche reparacons as be necessarye in and upon the buildinges within the said monasterye, and other houses, tenements and fearmes thereto belonging, be suffycyently doon and made within the s.p.a.ce of oon yere,"

and the Prioress of Nuncoton, "that ye cause your firmary, your chirche and all other your houses that be in ruyne and dekaye within your monastery to be suffycyently repayred within this yere if itt possible may"; and reminded the nuns of Studley that they "muste bestowe lardge money upon suche reparacons as are to be doon upon your churche, quere, dortor and other places whiche ar in grete decaye"[487]. At Goring, also, the nuns all complained that the buildings were utterly out of repair, especially the choir, cloister and dorter[488].

The frequency of fires in the middle ages was probably often to blame for the ruin of buildings. There were then no contrivances for extinguishing flames, and the thatched and wooden houses must have burned like stubble.

Thus it was that "thorow the negligens of woman[489] with fyre brent up a good malt-house with a soler and alle her malt there" at Crabhouse, and Joan Wiggenhall had to repair it at a cost of five pounds[490]. There is a piteous appeal to Edward I from the nuns of Cheshunt, who had been impoverished by a fire and sought "help from the King of his special grace and for G.o.d's sake"; but "_Nihil fiat hac vice_," replied red tape[491]; an undated pet.i.tion in the Record Office says that the house, church and goods of the nuns had twice been burned and their charters destroyed[492].

In 1299 the Abbess of Wilton received permission to fell fifty oaks in the forest of Savernake "in order to rebuild therewith certain houses in the abbey lately burnt by mischance"[493]. At Wykeham, in Edward III's reign, the priory church, cloisters and twenty-four other buildings were accidentally burned down and all the books, vestments and chalices of the nuns were destroyed[494]. Similarly the nuns of St Radegund's, Cambridge, lost their house and all their substance by fire at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and in 1376 their buildings were again said to have been burned; either they had never recovered from their first disaster or a second fire had broken out[495]. The nuns of St Leonard's, Grimsby, apparently lost their granaries in 1311, for they sought licence to beg on the ground that their houses and corn had been consumed by fire, and in 1459 they asked for a similar licence, because their buildings had been burnt, and their land inundated[496]. The convent of St Bartholomew's, Newcastle, gave misfortune by fire as one reason for wishing to appropriate the hospital or chapel of St Edmund the King in Gateshead[497].

Sometimes poverty, misfortune and mismanagement reduced the nuns to begging alms. About 1253 the convent of St Mary of Chester wrote to Queen Eleanor, begging her to confirm the election of a prioress "to our miserable convent amidst its multiplied desolations; for so greatly are we reduced that we are compelled every day to beg abroad our food, slight as it is"[498]. Similarly the starving nuns of Whitehall, Ilchester, were reduced to "begging miserably," after the _regime_ of a wicked prioress at the beginning of the fourteenth century[499]. In 1308 the subprioress and convent of Whiston mentioned, in asking for permission to elect Alice de la Flagge, that the smallness of their possessions had compelled the nuns formerly to beg, "to the scandal of womanhood and the discredit of religion"[500]. In 1351 Bishop Edyndon of Winchester "counted it a merciful thing," to come to the a.s.sistance of the great Abbeys of Romsey and St Mary's Winchester, "when overwhelmed with poverty, and when in these days of increasing illdoing and social deterioration they were brought to the necessity of secret begging"[501]. At Cheshunt in 1367 the nuns declared that they often had to beg in the highways[502]. At Rothwell in 1392 the extreme poverty of the nuns compelled some of them "to incur the opprobrium of mendicity and beg alms after the fashion of the mendicant friars"[503]. In all these cases it is evident that objection was taken to personal begging by the nuns, and it is clear that such a practice, which took the nuns out into the streets and into private houses, was likely to be subversive of discipline. The custom of begging through a proctor was open to no such objection; and it was common for bishops to give to the poorer houses licences, allowing them to collect alms in this manner. Early in the fifteenth century the nuns of Rowney in Hertfordshire pet.i.tioned the Chancellor for letters patent for a proctor to go about the country and collect alms for them, and their request was granted[504]. Many such licences to beg occur in episcopal registers; Bishop Dalderby of Lincoln granted them to Little Marlow (1300 and 1311)[505], St Leonard's Grimsby (1311)[506], and Rothwell (1318)[507]; and St Michael's Stamford (1359) and Sewardsley (1366) received similar licences from his successors[508]. The distinction between begging by the nuns and begging by a proctor is clearly drawn in the licence granted by Bishop Dalderby to Rothwell. Addressing the clergy in the Archidiaconates of Northampton and Buckingham he writes:

Pitying, with paternal affection, the want of the poor nuns of Rothwell in our diocese, who are oppressed by such scarcity that they are obliged to beg the necessities of life, we command and straitly enjoin you, that when there shall come to you suitable and honest secular proctors or messengers of the same nuns (not the nuns themselves, that they may have no occasion for wandering thereby), to seek and receive the alms of the faithful for their necessities, ye shall receive them kindly and expound the cause of the said nuns to the people in your churches, on Sundays, and feast days during the solemnisation of ma.s.s, and promote the same by precept and by example once every year for the next three years, delivering the whole of whatever shall be collected to these proctors and messengers[509].

The Bishops sought to relieve necessitous convents by offering particular inducements to the faithful to give alms, when they were thus requested.

Along with mending roads and bridges, ransoming captives, dowering poor maidens, building churches and endowing hospitals, the a.s.sistance of impecunious nunneries was generally recognised as a work of Christian charity, and indulgences were often offered to those who would aid a particular house[510]. The same Bishop Dalderby, for instance, granted indulgences for the a.s.sistance of Cheshunt, Flamstead[511], Sewardsley, Catesby, Delapre[512], Ivinghoe[513], Fosse[514], St James' outside Huntingdon and St Radegund's, Cambridge[515]. Archbishop Kemp of York granted an indulgence of a hundred days valid for two years to all who should a.s.sist towards the repair of Arden (1440) and of Esholt (1445), and Archbishop William Booth (1456) granted an indulgence of forty days to penitents contributing to the repair of Yedingham[516]; indeed it is probable that the money for the much needed work of roofing a building could be collected only by means of such special appeals. The Popes also sometimes granted indulgences; Boniface IX did so to penitents who on the feasts of dedication visited and gave alms towards the conservation of the churches and priories of Wilberfoss, St Clement's, York, and Handale[517].

The history of St Radegund's, Cambridge, will serve to ill.u.s.trate the method by which the Church thus organised the work of poor-relief in the middle ages; and it will be noticed that this nunnery was an object of care to Bishops of other dioceses beside that of Ely[518]. In 1254 Walter de Suffield, Bishop of Norwich, granted a relaxation of penance for twenty-five days to persons contributing to the aid of the nuns; in 1268 Richard de Gravesend, Bishop of Lincoln, ordered collections to be made in the churches of the Archidiaconates of Northampton and Huntingdon on their behalf; in 1277 Roger de Skerning, Bishop of Norwich, ordered collections to be made in his diocese for the repair of the church; in 1313 the Official of the Archdeacon of Ely wrote to the parochial clergy of the diocese recommending the nuns to them as objects of charity, having lost their house and goods by fire, and in the same year Bishop Dalderby granted an indulgence on their behalf for this reason[519]; while in 1314 John de Ketene, Bishop of Ely, confirmed the grants of indulgence made by his brother bishops to persons contributing to their relief and to the rebuilding of the house. The next indulgence mentioned is one of forty days granted by Thomas Arundel, Bishop of Ely, in 1376, also on the occasion of a fire; in 1389 Bishop Fordham of Ely granted another forty days indulgence for the repair of the church and cloister and for the relief of the nuns[520], and in 1390 William Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury, made a similar grant, mentioning that the buildings had been ruined by violent storms; finally in 1457 Bishop Grey of Ely granted a forty days indulgence for the repair of the bell-tower and for the maintenance of books, vestments and other church ornaments[521]. There is no need to suppose that St Radegund's was in any way a particularly favoured house; and such a list of grants shows that the Church fulfilled conscientiously the duty of organising poor-relief and that the objects for which indulgences were granted were not always as unworthy as has sometimes been supposed[522].

The financial straits to which the smaller convents were continually and the greater convents sometimes reduced grew out of a number of causes; and it is interesting to inquire what brought the nuns to debt or to begging and why they were so often in difficulties. A study of monastic doc.u.ments makes it clear that a great deal of this poverty was in no sense the fault of the nuns. Apart from obvious cases of insufficient endowment, the medieval monasteries suffered from natural disasters, which were the lot of all men, and from certain exactions at the hands of men, which fell exclusively upon themselves. Of natural disasters the frequency of fires has already been mentioned. Another danger, from which houses situated in low lying land near a river or the sea were never free, was that of floods. The inundation of their lands was declared one of the reasons for appropriating the church of Bradford-on-Avon to Shaftesbury in 1343; and in 1380 the nuns were allowed to appropriate another church, in consideration of damage done to their lands by encroachments of the sea and losses of sheep and cattle[523]. In 1377 Barking suffered the devastation by flood of a large part of its possessions along the Thames and never recovered its former prosperity[524]; and in 1394 Bishop Fordham of Ely granted an indulgence for the nuns of Ankerwyke, whose goods had been destroyed by floods[525]. In the north the lands of St Leonard's, Grimsby, were flooded in 1459[526]; in 1445 the nuns of Esholt suffered heavy losses from the flooding of their lands near the river Aire, which had been cultivated at great cost and from which they derived their maintenance[527]; and in 1434 Archbishop Rotherham appealed for help for the nuns of Thicket, whose fields and pasturages had been inundated and who had suffered much loss by the death of their cattle[528]. Heavy storms are mentioned as contributing to the distress of Shaftesbury in 1365[529] and of St Radegund's, Cambridge, in 1390[530]. Moreover some houses suffered by their situation in barren and unproductive lands.

Easebourne in 1411 complained of "the sterility of the lands, meadows and other property of the priory, which is situated in a solitary, waste and th.o.r.n.y place"[531]; Heynings put forward the same plea in 1401[532]; and Flamstead in 1380[533].

But far more terrible than fire and flood were those two other scourges, with which nature afflicted the men of the middle ages, famine and pestilence. The Black Death of 1348-9 was only one among the pestilences of the fourteenth century; it had the result of "domesticating the bubonic plague upon the soil of England"; for more than three centuries afterwards it continued to break out at short intervals, first in one part of the country and then in another[534]. The epidemics of the fourteenth century were so violent that in forty years the chroniclers count up five great plagues, beginning with the Black Death, and Langland, in a metaphor of terrible vividness, describes the pestilence as "the rain that raineth where we rest should." The Black Death was preceded by a famine pestilence in 1317-8, when there was "a grievous mortalitie of people so that the sicke might vnneath burie the dead." It was followed in 1361 by the Second Plague, which was especially fatal among the upper cla.s.ses and among the young. The Third Plague in 1368-9 was probably primarily a famine sickness, mixed with plague. The Fourth plague broke out in 1375; and the Fifth, in 1390-1 was so prolonged and so severe as to be considered comparable with the Black Death itself. Moreover these are only the great landmarks, and scattered between them were smaller outbreaks of sickness, due to scarcity or to spoiled grain and fruit. The pestilences continued in the fifteenth century (more than twenty-one are recorded in the chronicles), but, except perhaps for the great plague of 1439, they were seldom universal and came by degrees to be confined to the towns, so that all who could used to flee to the country when the summer heat brought out the disease in crowded and insanitary streets. But if country convents escaped the worst disease, those situated in borough towns ran a heavy risk.

Often enough these plagues were preceded and accompanied by famines, sometimes local and sometimes general. The English famines had long been notorious and were enshrined in a popular proverb: "Tres plagae tribus regionibus appropriari solent, Anglorum fames, Gallorum ignis, Normannorum lepra"[535]. The three greatest outbreaks took place in 1194-6, in 1257-9 and in 1315-6 (before the plague of 1318-9). The dearth which culminated in the last of these famines had begun as early as 1289; and the misery in 1315 was acute:

"The beastes and cattell also," says Stow, translating from Trokelowe, "by the corrupt grane whereof they fed, dyed, whereby it came to pa.s.se that the eating of flesh was suspected of all men, for flesh of beasts not corrupted was hard to finde. Horse-flesh was counted great delicates the poore stole fatte dogges to eate; some (as it was sayde) compelled through famine, in hidden places did eate the flesh of their owne children, and some stole others, which they devoured. Theeves that were in prisons did plucke in peeces those that were newly brought among them and greedily devoured them halfe alive."

There was another severe famine in 1322, and in 1325 a great drought, so that the cattle died for lack of water. Famine accompanied the pestilences of 1361, 1369, 1391 and 1439; and these are only the more outstanding instances. Here again, however, the fourteenth century was on the whole worse off than the fifteenth; almost every year was a year of scarcity and the average price of wheat during the period 1261 to 1400 was nearly six shillings (i.e. nearly six pounds of modern money)[536]. Moreover the ravages of murrain among cattle and sheep were hardly intermittent from the end of the thirteenth to the middle of the fifteenth century[537]. The fatal years 1315-9 included not only a famine and a plague but also (1318-9) a murrain among the cattle, which was so bad that dogs and ravens, eating the dead bodies, were poisoned and died, and no man dared eat any beef. In the year of the Black Death also there was "a great plague of sheep in the realm, so that in one place there died in pasturage more than five thousand sheep and so rotted that neither beast nor bird would touch them"; and murrains accompanied the four other great plagues of the century. Indeed dearth, murrain and pestilence went hand in hand, in that unhappy time we call the "good old days."

These natural disasters could not but have an adverse effect upon the fortunes of the monastic houses; and many charters and pet.i.tions contain clauses which specifically attribute the distress of this or that nunnery to one of the three causes described above. During the famine years of 1314-5 Walter Reynolds, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to the Bishop of Winchester, urging him to take some steps for the relief of the nuns of Wintney, who were dispersing themselves in the world, because no proper provision was made for their food[538], and about the same time the convent of Clerkenwell addressed a pet.i.tion to Queen Isabel, stating that they were "moet enpouerees par les durs annez" and begging her to procure for them the King's leave to accept certain lands and rents to the value of twenty pounds[539]. In 1326 (after the great drought) the nuns of King's Mead, Derby, begged the King to take them under his special protection, granting the custody of the house to two _custodes_, on the ground that, owing to the badness of past years and the unusually heavy mortality among cattle their revenues were reduced and they were unable to meet the claims made by guests upon their hospitality[540]. The ravages of the Black Death were most severe of all and many houses never recovered from it[541]. In the diocese of Lincoln the nunnery of Wothorpe lost all its members save one, whom the Bishop made Prioress; and in 1354 it was annexed to St Michael's Stamford[542]. Greenfield Priory, when he visited it in 1350, "per tres menses stet.i.t et stat priorisse solacio dest.i.tuta"[543]; and other houses in this large diocese which lost their heads were Fosse, Markyate, Hinchinbrooke, Gracedieu, Rothwell, Delapre, Catesby, Sewardsley, Littlemore and G.o.dstow[544]. In the diocese of York the prioresses of Arthington, Kirklees, Wallingwells and St Stephen's Foukeholm died; the latter house, like Wothorpe, failed to recover and is never heard of again[545]. Other parts of the country suffered in the same way. At Malling Abbey in Kent the Bishop made two abbesses in succession, but both died and only four professed nuns and four novices remained, to one of whom the Bishop committed the custody of the temporalities and to another that of the spiritualities, because there was no fit person to be made Abbess[546]. At Henwood, in August 1349, there was no Prioress, "and of the fifteen nuns who were lately there, three only remain"[547].