CHAPTER XI

“Margarete countesse de Cornewaille,” says the chronicle of Sempringham, “La femme Sire Hugh Daudelee, e la niece le roi, fu ordinee a demorer en guarde a Sempringham entre les nonaignes, a quel lieu ele vint le xvi jour de Mai (1322) e la demorra”[1333].

In the same year the Abbess of Barking was ordered “to cause the body of Elizabeth de Burgo, late wife of Roger Damory, within her abbey, to be kept safely and not to permit her to go outside the abbey gates in any wise until further orders”[1334]. In 1324 another rebel, Roger Mortimer, broke his prison in the Tower and escaped across the sea to France. But three poor children, his daughters, could not escape, and on April 7th of the same year the sheriff of Southampton received an order to cause Margaret, daughter of Roger Mortimer of Wygmore, to be conducted to the Priory of Shouldham, Joan, his second daughter, to the Priory of Sempringham, and Isabella, his third daughter, to the Priory of Chicksand, “to be delivered to the priors of those places (all were Gilbertine houses) to stay amongst the nuns in the same priories.” The Prior of Shouldham had 15d.weekly for Margaret’s expenses and a mark yearly for her robe, and each of the other two little girls received 12d.weekly for expenses and a mark for her robe[1335]. The she-wolf of France bided her time, and when the game was hers she was no less swift to avenge her wrongs; to Sempringham (where her lover’s daughter had gone two years before) now went the two daughters of the elder Hugh Despenser, to pray for the souls of a father and brother done most dreadfully to death[1336]. The perennial wars with Scotland also found their echo in the nunneries. In 1306 the Abbess of Barking was ordered “to deliver Elizabeth, sister of William Olifard [? Olifaunt] Knight, who is in their custody by the King’s permission to Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, the King having granted her to the said Henry”[1337]; she was doubtless a relative of that “Hugh Olyfard, a Scot, the King’s enemy and rebel,” who together with one “William Sauvage the King’s approver” had broken his prison at Colchester some three years before, and fled into sanctuary in the convent church[1338]. Barking was a favourite prison, doubtless on account of its situation, and in 1314 the sheriffs of London were ordered “to receive Elizabeth, wife of Robert de Brus, from the Abbess of Berkyngg, with whom she had been staying by the King’s order and to take herunder safe custody to Rochester and there deliver her to Henry de Cobham, constable of the castle”[1339].

The mention of the Scot Hugh Olyfard, who took sanctuary in the church of Barking, recalls another reason for which the world might break into the cloister. The terrified fugitive from justice would take sanctuary in a convent church if it lay nearest to him, and the peace of chanting nuns would be rudely broken, when that unkempt and desperate figure sprang up the choir between them and flung itself upon their altar steps. The hand of a master has drawn for us what the trembling novices saw, peeping from their stalls:

... the breathless fellow at the altar foot,Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting thereWith the little children round him in a rowOf admiration, half for his beard and halfFor that white anger of his victim’s sonShaking a fist at him with one fierce arm,Signing himself with the other because of Christ(Whose sad face on the cross sees only thisAfter the passion of a thousand years),Till some poor girl, her apron o’er her headWhich the intense eyes looked through, came at eveOn tiptoe, said a word, dropped in a loaf,Her pair of ear-rings and a bunch of flowersThe brute took growling, prayed and then was gone[1340].

But sometimes more than a momentary disturbance was occasioned to the nunnery; in 1416, for instance, Edith Wilton, Prioress of Carrow, was attached, together with one of her nuns, on the charge of harbouring in sanctuary the murderers of William Koc of Trowse, at the appeal of his widow Margaret. She was arrested, imprisoned and called to answer at Westminster, but after the court had adjourned many times she was acquitted[1341]. An abbess of Wherwell was involved in a lawsuit over a case of sanctuary for somewhat different reasons; she claimed the right of seizing chattels of fugitives in the hundred of Mestowe[1342], a right which was disputed by the crown officials. One Henry Harold of Wherwell had killed his wife Isabel and fled to the church of Wherwell and the Abbess had promptly seized his chattels to the value of over £35, by the hands of her reeve[1343].

These cases of violence will lead us to the consideration of breaches of enclosure which were in no sense the fault of the unhappy nuns. Visits from their peaceful friends they welcomed; the sojourn of great folk they bore; but they would fain have passed their days undisturbed by war’s alarms and by the assault and battery of private feuds. But it was not to be. Alarums and excursions sometimes shattered their peace and, especially in the Northern counties, violent attacks at the hands of robbers, lawless neighbours, or enemies of the realm were only too common.Disorder was general and grew worse in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The nunnery of Markyate was once assaulted in the night by fifty robbers and the nuns pillaged and robbed of everything valuable[1344], and in 1408 the Bishop of Ely gave an indulgence for the relief of the nuns of Rowney, “whose chalices, books, ornaments and other goods have been stolen by evil men, so that they have not the wherewithal to perform the divine office”[1345].

Neighbourly disagreements sometimes developed into petty warfare, as the Paston Letters show, and an almost exact parallel to the dispute between John Paston and Lord Molynes over the manor of Gresham is to be found in a complaint made in 1383 by the Prioress of Brodholme, who asserted that a gang of men (whom she named)

“had broken her close at Brodholme, felled her trees and underwood, dug in her soil, carried off earth, trees, underwood and other goods, depastured her corn and grass, assaulted her servants and besieged her and her nuns in the Priory and threatened them with death”[1346].

Such instances might be multiplied[1347]. Sometimes the presence of secular boarders led to unpleasant experiences for the nuns. The Lincoln registers record two such cases, which incidentally furnish an additional reason why the reception of boarders was frowned upon by the Church. In 1304 certain

“satellites of Satan whose names we know not” (Bishop Dalderby informs his official), “lately came in great numbers to the monastery of the nuns of Goring, where they boldly laid violent hands upon Henry, chaplain of the parish church and brother John le Walleys, lay brother of the same place (from whom they drew blood) and upon certain nuns of the house who struggled to guard their monastery, and then they entered and rode their horses up to the high altar of the church, polluting that holy place shamefully with the footprints and dung of their horses.”

Their object was apparently to seize a certain Isabella de Kent, a married woman then dwelling in the nunnery, and they pursued her to the belfry, where she had taken refuge and dragged heraway with them[1348]. An even worse disturbance took place at Rothwell in 1421-2. A gang of ruffians broke open the cloister and doors, seized one Joan (a boarder) and carried her away to a lonely house, where their leader forcibly violated her, with every circumstance of brutality. She escaped back to the priory, whereupon the leader

entering the same priory a second time, like a tyrant and pirate with a far greater multitude of like henchmen and people untamed and savage in his company, with naked swords and other sorts of divers weapons of offence, fell ... upon the same woman, who was then in the presence of the prioress and the nuns in the hall of the said priory and ... daringly laid wicked, sacrilegious and violent hands, notwithstanding the worship both of their persons and of the place, upon the prioress and nuns of the said place, honourable members of the church and persons hallowed to God accordingly—who endeavoured gently to appease their baseness and savagery, so far as their sex as women allowed—and cudgelled them with cruel strokes, threw them down on the ground and, trampling on them with their feet, mercilessly kicked them and violently dragged off their garments of their habits over their heads, and even as robbers, having caught their prey, carried off the said woman, dragging her with them out of the priory[1349].

Even more significant is the licence granted to the Abbess and Convent of Tarrant Keynes in 1343 to cut down two hundred acres of under-wood in their demesne land, “on their petition setting forth that their house and possessions in the county of Dorset had been burned and destroyed by an invasion of the king’s enemies in those parts”[1350]; or the permission given to the Abbess of Shaftesbury in 1367 to crenellate her Abbey, presumably for purposes of defence[1351]. The south coast was a constantprey to pirates, and it was still within the memory of man that, at the beginning of the French war

the Normayns Pycardes and Spanyerdes entred into the toune (of Southampton) and robbed and pilled the toune, and slewe dyvers and defowled maydens, and enforced wyves, and charged their vessels with the pyllage and so entred agayne into their shyppes[1352].

The sanctity which attached to the person of a nun was apt to be forgotten in the brutal warfare of the day and the Abbess might well fear for her flock. The English nunneries did not, indeed, experience anything to compare with the unimaginable sufferings endured by French convents during the hundred years’ war[1353]. But they were by no means immune from the effects of civil war; Wilton, Wherwell and St Mary’s, Winchester, were all burned during the struggle between Stephen and Matilda[1354], and during the Wars of the Roses the nuns of Delapré were unwilling witnesses of the Battle of Northampton (1460), which was held “in the medowys beside the Nonry”; after the fight was over the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London rested at the nunnery and many of the slain were buried in its churchyard[1355].

The most striking example of the effect of warfare upon monastic houses in England is, however, provided by the history of the northern monasteries, which were throughout their history (but especially during the first part of the fourteenth century) in danger from the inroads of the Scots. So great was the destruction wrought in 1318 that it was necessary to make a new assessment of church property for purposes of taxation, in part of the province of York[1356]. Nor was the trouble purely material, thoughthe poverty of the nunneries (in particular) was sometimes abject and the harrying of their lands must have made prosperity at all times a vain hope. The moral results of such disorder were even more serious. It was almost impossible to maintain an ordinary communal life, when at any moment it might be necessary to disperse the nuns and quarter them in other houses out of the line of the marauders’ march. Even in houses which were never actually attacked, the prevalent unrest, the lawlessness which is naturally engendered by border warfare, must have been disorganising and demoralising. It is easy to understand why cases of immorality and grave disorder are more prevalent in the convents of the north of England than in those of any other district.

In 1296 the chronicler of Lanercost describes thus the first great raid of the Scots:

In this raid they surpassed in cruelty all the fury of the heathen; when they could not catch the strong and young people, who took flight, they imbrued their arms, hitherto unfleshed, with the blood of infirm people, old women, women in childbed and even children two or three years old, proving themselves apt scholars in atrocity, insomuch that they raised little span-long children pierced on pikes, to expire thus and fly away to the heavens. They burnt consecrated churches; both in the sanctuary and elsewhere they violated women dedicated to God [i.e. nuns] as well as married women and girls, either murdering them or robbing them, after gratifying their lust. Also they herded together a crowd of little scholars in the schools of Hexham and having blocked the doors set fire to that pile [so] fair [in the sight of God]. Three monasteries of holy collegiates were destroyed by them, Lanercost, of the Canons Regular; and Hexham of the same order and [that] of the nuns of Lambley; of all of these the devastation can by no means be attributed to the valour of warriors, but to the dastardly conduct of thieves, who attacked a weaker community, where they would not be likely to meet with any resistance[1357].

Some allowance must be made for the indignation of a canon of Lanercost, whose own house had been burnt; but even so it is plain that the religious houses must have endured terrible things at the hands of the Scots; and the peril of the nuns was to honour as well as to life and home.

In several cases record of the actual dispersal of the nuns hasbeen preserved, though such dispersal lasted only for a short time. The priory of Holystone, which lay right upon the border, was in a particularly exposed position and in 1313, when Bruce was devastating the northern counties, a letter from the Bishop of Durham bears vivid testimony to its miserable plight:

“The house of the said nuns,” he says, “situated in the March of England and Scotland, by reason of the hostile incursions which daily and continually increase in the March, is frequently despoiled of its goods and the nuns themselves are often attacked by the marauders, harmed and pursued and, put to flight and driven from their home, are constrained miserably to experience bitter suffering. Wherefore we make these things known to you, that you may compassionate their poverty, which is increased by the memory of happier things, and that your pity and benevolence may be shown them, lest (to the disgrace of their estate) they be forced publicly to beg”[1358].

The expiration of the truce with Scotland in 1322 was followed by another raid and by Edward II’s unsuccessful campaign, in the course of which the Scots overran Yorkshire and very nearly captured the King at Byland Abbey. The canons of Bridlington (whither he fled) departed with all their valuables to Lincolnshire, sending an envoy to purchase immunity from Bruce at Melton. The poor nuns of Moxby and Rosedale did not escape so easily. In November Archbishop Melton wrote to the Prioress of Nunmonkton, ordering her to receive two nuns of the house of Moxby, which had been “destroyed and devastated by the Scots”; the Prioress tried to excuse herself, on the plea that it was unseemly for Austin nuns to be received in a Benedictine convent and that her house barely sufficed to support herself and her sisters; but the Archbishop sternly replied that he was sending the nuns for a time only and that it behoved the convent of Nunmonkton to receive them, in order to avoid their being dispersed in the world. He added that he had placed a like burden upon other nunneries in his diocese which had escaped the horrors of the invasion, and a note in his Register shows that two nuns were sent to Nunappleton, two to Nunkeeling and two to Hampole, while the Prioress went to Swine. Three days later he boarded out the nuns of Rosedale, who had receivedsimilar injuries at the hands of the Scots, sending one to each of the houses of Nunburnholme, Sinningthwaite, Thicket, Wykeham and Hampole[1359]. The dispersal of the nuns of Rosedale did not extend beyond six months and the nuns of Moxby probably returned about the same time, for they were back in their own house in 1325, when their Prioress resigned “super lapsu carnis”[1360]. The moral record of both houses—and indeed of the majority of Yorkshire nunneries—is bad at this period, and at least part of the responsibility must be laid at the door of the Scottish invasions.

Yorkshire also suffered in the invasion which ended with the Battle of Neville’s Cross (1346), when the Scots

went forth brenning and destroying the county of Northumberland; and their currours ran to York and brent as much as was without the walls and returned again to their host within a days journey, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne[1361].

One of these marauding bands (“the most outrageoust people in all the country,” Froissart calls them) came galloping into that lonely and beautiful dale, where the nunnery of Ellerton stands beside the brown torrent of Swale. They entered the house and carried away seven charters and writings, so the nuns complained later[1362]; what else they did in that quiet spot and whether the nunnery of Marrick on the hill above escaped them history will not tell us. Such disasters were common enough in the north. The records of Armathwaite in Cumberland show that an unlucky proximity to the border might hamper a conventthroughout the whole of its career. In 1318 pasture for cattle in Inglewood Forest was granted to “the poor nuns of Armathwaite, who had been totally ruined by the Scots”; in 1331 they were excused a payment of ten pounds for the same reason; and in 1474 they were obliged to apply for a ratification of their possessions, because their house had been almost destroyed by the Scots, who had not only spoiled them of their church ornaments, books, relics and jewels, but also of all their charters and evidences[1363]. The obscure little nunnery of Lambley on Tyne suffered in the same way, for in the Receiver’s Account made at its dissolution in 1536 there occurs, under the headingDecasus Redditus, the entry of a tenement in Haltwhistle called Redepath, “eo quod comburatum (sic) per Scottos”[1364].

But the most horrible story of outrage suffered by a nunnery in time of war is that strange tale reported by the anonymous monk of St Albans, who wrote aChronicon Angliaebetween the years 1376 and 1379[1365]. The suffering of French nunneries at the hand of Free Companies and English was not more terrible than the fate of these English nuns at the hand of their own countrymen. In 1379 an army was mustered in England to replace Duke John of Brittany upon his throne, which had been annexed by Charles V of France. The main army, under John FitzAlan of Arundel, Marshal of England (the same who had “two and fiftie new sutes of apparell of cloth of gold or tissue”) was delayed in England for some months, first by a difficulty in raising the money to equip it, and then by contrary winds, and it was December before Sir John was ready to sail. Complaints came from all hands of the depredations committed along the coast by the lawless soldiers, but their other misdeeds were insignificant compared with the crime recorded in the St Albans Chronicle:

“When,” says the chronicler, “Sir John Arundel and his companions were come to the sea and no breeze favoured them, he ordered that a more favourable wind should be awaited. Meanwhile he proceeded to a certain monastery of virgin nuns, which stood not far away, and entering with his men, he asked the mother of the monasteryto permit his fellow soldiers, engaged on the king’s service, to lodge there. But the nun, considering in her mind that danger might arise from such guests and that his request was absolutely contrary to religion, pointed out to him with due reverence and humility that many of his followers were young and might easily be moved to commit an inexpiable crime, which would not only bring ill fame upon the place but would also be a danger and an evil to himself and his men, who should shun not only an offence against chastity but all manner of crimes, if they acted as befitted men about to go to the wars. But he began to insist with great fervour, declaring that her suspicions were false and her imaginings without truth, whereupon she prostrated herself on the ground before him, and answered, ‘My lord, I know that your men are unbridled and fear not even God. It is expedient neither for us nor for you that they should enter our cloister. Wherefore I beseech and counsel you with clasped hands, that you give up this intention and seek other hosts (who abound in the neighbourhood) for yourself and for your men.’ But he persisted and, contemptuously bidding her arise, swore that he would in no wise give up his determination to have hospitality for his people there. Wherefore he straightway ordered his men to enter the building and to occupy the public and private rooms until the time came for setting sail. And they, inspired (it is thought) by a devil, burst into the cloister of the monastery, and as is the wont of such an undisciplined mob, broke the one into this, the other into that room, wherein the maidens, daughters of the neighbouring gentry, were lodged to be taught; and many of these were already prepared to take upon them the habit of holy religion and had set their mind on the purpose of virginity. These, scorning reverence for the place and casting aside the fear of God, the men oppressed and violated by force. Nor did their lust rage against these alone, for they feared not to pollute the widow’s continence and the conjugal tie. For many widows had gathered there to receive hospitality, as is customary in such abbeys, either for lack of property or in order the more perfectly and safely to preserve their chastity. They forced into public adultery the married women who had gathered there for the same reasons, and not content (it is said) with these misdeeds they subjected the nuns themselves to their lust. Whereupon at first those who suffered the injury, and soon all who dwelt in the neighbourhood and who heard the news of so great a crime, heaped very horrible curses upon their heads and called down upon them whatever misfortune and whatever adversity God might be able to raise against them.”

The chronicler goes on to relate how, undeterred and indeed encouraged by Sir John Arundel, the men spread over the country-side and pillaged it, carrying off a bride and stealing plate from the altar of a church, for which sacrilege they were solemnly excommunicated. At last, however, Sir John (in spiteof the protests of the shipman who was to carry him) decided to set sail. His men carried off with them the stolen bride and a number of wives, widows and virgins from the abbey, forced the wretched women on board and put to sea. But a storm came on and the ships were driven out into the Atlantic. In the midst of the roaring tempest the guilty soldiers seemed to see a spectre, more awful than death itself, which stalked among them on the deck and foretold the loss of all who sailed upon Sir John Arundel’s ship. Even more pitiable was the condition of the women:

“Hard it is to relate,” says the chronicler, “what clamour, what lamentation, what groans, what tears, arose among the women, who by force or of their own will had boarded the ship, when buffeted by the winds and waves they rose to the skies and descended to the depths; for now they saw not the spectre of death, but death itself among them, and could not doubt that they must die. What mental anguish, what bodily fear, what remorse and anxiety assailed the conscience of the men, who to satisfy their lust had dragged these women into the peril of the seas, they were best able to describe who, although sharers in so great a crime, were nevertheless permitted by God’s mercy to reach a port of safety. Wherefore the men were doubtful what to do in the midst of the clamour, for on the one hand the wind and storm, on the other the tears and cries of the women, urged them to action. First, therefore, they tried to lighten the vessel, throwing overboard first the worthless baggage, then precious things, that perchance a hope of safety might arise. But when they perceived their desperate plight to be rather increased than diminished, they cast the blame of their misfortune upon the women, and in a spirit of madness they seized hold of them (with the same hands wherewith before they had sweetly caressed them, the same arms wherewith they had lustfully embraced them) and threw them into the sea, to be devoured by fishes and sea beasts, to the number (it is said) of sixty women. But not even thus was the tempest stayed, but rather it grew greater so that it deprived them of all hope of escaping the danger of death.”

The story is soon ended. The ships were driven onto the coast of Ireland, Sir John Arundel’s vessel ran upon a rock, and he was drowned, with all his suits of apparel, his goods and his horses; and twenty-five other vessels of the ill-fated expedition, laden with soldiers and horses and baggage, also went down in the storm. Public opinion did not fail to attribute these disasters to the crimes of which Sir John and his troops had been guilty; and so, with dramatic fitness, ends this tale of thegolden days of chivalry[1366]. Side by side with it must be set another episode, drawn from an earlier age and from an epic instead of a chronicle. It was part of the chivalrous convention to show a special respect to nunneries, in their double character of religious and aristocratic institutions. Yet the most striking account of a nunnery in the twelfth century, when this convention was at its height, has for subject a brutal sacrilege committed by a great baron upon a church of nuns. This is the famous episode of the burning of Origny in thechanson de geste“Raoul de Cambrai.” The writer of the poem makes Raoul’s knights recoil in shame from a crime in which their allegiance has made them unwilling partners, and manifests the utmost horror and pity at this action so opposed to all the ideals of chivalry; but it is only one of the many proofs that the golden idol had feet of clay. Whether or not the account was founded upon an actual incident is unknown; but it deserves quotation because itillustrates all too clearly the fate of nuns when their quiet houses stood in the way of warring knights. It represents one side of chivalry as truly as “Queen Guenever in Almesbury, a nun in white clothes and black” represents another. In the same century that produced “Raoul de Cambrai” a chronicler, writing of the wars of Stephen and Matilda in England, records, “Burnt also was the abbey of nuns of Wherwell by a certain William of Ypres, an evil man, who respected neither God nor man, because certain supporters of the Empress had taken refuge therein”; and another:

The famous town [of Winchester] was given to the flames, wherein a convent of nuns with its offices, and more than twenty churches, with the greater part of the town and the monastery of St Grimbald’s and the dwellings attached to it, were reduced to ashes[1367].

What these bald statements mean thechanson de gestecan tell us better.

Raoul de Cambrai, the greatest villain who ever led knights to war, had in his train a young knight Bernier. One day he set out to pillage Origny, in which town was a famous convent, where Bernier’s fair mother Marcens had retired to end her days in peace. But as he hurled himself, with four thousand men, upon the town, the gates of the convent opened

and the nuns came forth from the church, gentle ladies, each with her psalter, for there they did the service of God. Marcens was there, who was Bernier’s mother. “Mercy, Raoul, in the just God’s name! You do great sin if you allow harm to come to us, for easily can we be driven forth.” In her hand she held a book of the time of Solomon and she was saying an orison to God.

After a tender inquiry for her son, Marcens proceeded to plead with Raoul to raise the siege; clearly the burgesses regarded the abbess of the great convent as their leader and a fit person to negotiate with their enemy.

“Sir Raoul,” she said, “shall I beseech you in vain to withdraw you? We be nuns, by all the saints of Bavaria; we shall never hold lance nor banner, nor by our hand shall any man be brought to his grave.”

But Raoul answered her with a stream of coarse abuse, showing even less respect for her sex and calling than Sir John Arundelshowed to the abbess who refused him lodging[1368]. Marcens put aside his charges with a word of dignified denial and proffered him terms of truce:

“Sir Raoul, we know not how to wield arms; easily can you destroy us and put us to flight. We have neither shield nor lance for our defence. All our livelihood we have from this altar and within this town; noble men hold this place dear and send us silver and pure gold. Therefore do you grant us a truce for hearth and church and go you and take your ease in our meadows; of our own substance we will feed you and your knights and your squires shall have corn and oats and plenty to eat for your steeds.” “By the body of St Richier,” answered Raoul, “For love of you and since you ask it, I will grant you the truce, whoever may dislike it.”

But Raoul de Cambrai had no regard for his knightly word; he quarrelled with the townsfolk and swore to burn Origny about their ears.

“The rooms burn,” thechansoncontinues, “The ceilings crumble: the barrels catch fire and their hoops burst. Woe and sin it is, for the children burn too. Evil has Count Raoul done, for the day before he gave his faith to Marcens that they should not lose so much as a fold of silk; and on the morrow he burned them in his wrath. In Origny, that great and rich town, the sons of Herbert, who love the place had put Marcens, Bernier’s mother, and a hundred nuns to pray to God. Count Raoul, the hot-heart, sets fire to the streets; the houses burn, the ceilings melt, the wine spills and the cellars flow with it; the bacon burns, the larders fall, the fat makes the great fire burn more fiercely. It strikes up to the tower and to the high belfry and the roofs fall in, so great is the blaze between the two walls. The nuns are burnt, all hundred of them are burnt (woe it is to tell); burnt is Marcens that was Bernier’s mother, and Clamados the daughter of Duke Renier. The smell of burning flesh rises from the flames and the brave knights weep for pity. When Bernier sees the fire grow worse, he is near mad with grief. Could ye but have seen him sling on his shield! With drawn sword he comes to the church and sees the flames pouring from the doors; no man can come withina shaft’s throw of the fire. Bernier sees a rich marble pavement, and upon it lies his mother, with her tender face laid on the ground and her psalter burning upon her breast. Then says the boy, ‘I am on a foolish errand. Never will any succour avail her now. Ha! sweet mother, yesterday you kissed me; you have but a poor heir in me, for I can neither aid nor help you. God, who will judge the world, keep your soul!’”[1369]

So ends this terrible episode; but that chivalry in this matter at least suffered no change from the twelfth to the fourteenth century Froissart’s account of the burning of this same Origny-Saint-Benoît by the peerless John of Hainault and his troops in 1339 will show[1370]. If the code of knighthood and the fear of God could not save the nuns from mischances such as these, it is plain that no injunctions against the breach of their enclosure could have done so. These were the risks of war, which nuns shared in common with all unhappy women. But the siege of Origny and even the outrage at Goring were still exceptional events; and the Church found its chief problem not in these unwelcome incursions, but in the number of welcome visitors who hung about the nunneries. “The Lord deliver them from their friends” was in effect the bishop’s prayer. The expulsion of these friends was a necessary corollary to the enclosure movement; and, like the injunctions to nuns to keep within their cloister, the injunctions to lay folk to keep outside remained a dead letter. John of Ayton’s conclusion is true here also:

Why, then, did the holy fathers thus labour to beat the air? Yet indeed their toil is none the less to their own merit; for we look not to that which is, but to that which of justice should be.

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.

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 chastity. 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 institutions 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. Thefocariaor 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 andchaplains, sometimes attached to some church, chantry or great man’s chapel, sometimes unattached, filled the country with an “ecclesiastical proletariat,” all vowed to chastity; 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 sexual as well as religious in their origin, as in their imagery[1371]. The terrible lassitude and despair ofaccidiagrew 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 chastity 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 sexual impulses. The lightheartedChansons 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:

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 sex was displayed good-humouredly, openly, grossly, by the populace, and with all the subtle charm of chivalry by the upper classes. 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 passing clerk at a street corner,

Western wind, when wilt thou blow,The small rain down can rain?Christ, if my love were in my armsAnd 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 itto 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 classes, 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 Lust, Dame Wanton and Dame Nice,” who haunted the imaginary convent of the poemWhy I can’t be a Nun, are all well known, as are the seriousexempla, 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 documents are particularly useful. Where fulldetectaare 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 assisting 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 andLincoln, 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 petitioned 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 mass 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 aSponsa 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 pronounced in 1290 against the persons who abducted Agnes of Sheen, a nun of Godstow. The Bishop announces that she and another nun were journeying peacefully towards Godstow 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 Godstow, 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 pronounces 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 BullPericuloso; 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 moreseverely than that of unchastity, 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 God 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 ofHali Meidenhadnamed 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 institutions, 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 Titchmarsh and Ermentrude Newark, for some time nuns professed in the house of St Mary in the Meadows (Delapré), 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 summonthem 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 hell must there be added a body in prison? Elizabeth Arundell runs away from Haliwell in 1382, nor will she return. The Prioress thereupon petitions 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]. Thesheriffs of London and Middlesex and Essex 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 itin 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 nowsub 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 anddespair 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 Aucassin; 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 aSponsa Deiwas 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 isClericus 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 chastity, 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, thenuns 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 visitationcompertashow. Nor were cloistered monks proof against temptation. They knew only too well what passionate hearts could beat beneath a monastic habit and they knew the merry rhyme of Cockaygne land, where every monk had his nun. It has already been shown that nuns and monksmet 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 (aliasPeryaliasNorthampton) 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 Godstow, 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

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