Chapter 25

“The curse of Jesus on him who made me a nun! All unwillingly say I vespers and compline; more fain were I to lead a happy life of gaiety and love.I feel the delicious pangs beneath my bosom. The curse of God on him who made me be a nun!She cried, God’s curse on him who put me in this abbey. But by our Lady I will flee away from it and never will I wear this gown and habit.I feel, etc.I will send for him whose love I am and bid him come seek me in this abbey. We will go to Paris and lead a gay life, for he is fair and I am young.I feel, etc.When her lover heard her words, he leapt for joy and his heart beat fast. He came to the gate of that abbey, and stole away his darling love.I feel, etc.”

In the other song the setting is the same;

L’autrier un lundi matinm’an aloie ambaniant;s’antrai an un biau jardin,trovai nonette seant.ceste chansonettedixoit la nonette“longue demoreefaites, frans moinnes loialzSe plus suis nonette,ains ke soit li vespres,je morai des jolis malz”[1558].

“Lately on a Monday morn as I went wandering, I entered into a fair garden and there I found a nun sitting. This was the song that the nun sang: ‘Long dost thou tarry, frank, faithful monk. If I have to be a nun longer I shall die of the pains of love before vespers.’”

The end hardly ever varies. The nun is either taken away by a lover (as in the first of these songs), or finds occasion to meet one without leaving her house (as in the second); or else she runs away in the hope of finding one like the novice of Avernay in Deschamps’ poem, who had learned nothing during her sojourn “fors un mot d’amourette,” and who wanted to have a husband “si comme a Sebilette.”

Adieu le moniage:Jamaiz n’y entreray.Adieu tout le mainageEt adieu Avernay!Bien voy l’aumosne est faitte:Trop tart me suy retraitte,Certes, ce poise my,Plus ne seray nonnette(Oez de la nonnetteComme a le cuer joly:S’ordre ne ly puet plere)[1559].

“Farewell nunhood, never shall I enter thy state. Farewell all the household and farewell Avernay! The alms are given, too late have I left the world. Of a truth this wearies me; I will be a nun no more. (Hear this tale of the nun, whose heart was gay and whose order could not please her).”

It is but rarely that the singer’s sympathy is against the prisoned nun; and although one or two charming songs may be found which convey a warning, the moral sits all awry. A Gascon air (intended, like so many, to accompany a dance and having the favourite refrain “Va léger, légère, va légèrement”) threatens an altogether inadequate punishment for a nun who enjoys the sweets of this world.

“Down in the meadow, there is a convent. In it a nun lies ill.” “Tell me, little nun, for what do you hunger?” “For white apples and for a young lad.” “Do not eat, little nun, they will bury you not in the church, nor even in the convent, but out in the graveyard with the poor people”[1560].

A Provençal song with a haunting air tells how the Devil carried off a nun who rebelled against her imprisonment:

Dedins Aix l’y a’no moungeto,Tant pourideto,Di que s’avie soun bel amicSera la reino dou pays....

“In Aix there is a little nun, a wicked little nun; she says that with her handsome lover she will be queen of all the land. She weeps and weeps, that wicked little nun, and every day she grows thinner and thinner, because she may not put off her habit. But her father has sent her a message, a solemn message, that she cannot do as she would, that in the convent she must stay. The little nun has cursed her father, who made her leave her handsome lover and take the veil and habit. The little nun has cursed the trowel that made the church and the mason who built it and the men who worked for him. The little nun has cursed the priest who said mass and the acolytes who served him and the congregation who listened to him. The little nun has cursed the cloth which made the veil and the cord of St Francis and the vow of poverty. One day when she was all alone in her room, the devil appeared to her. ‘Welcome, my love!’ ‘I am not your love whom you desire, my pretty. I am the devil, don’t you see? I am come to rescue you from the convent.’ ‘You must first ask my father and also my mother and my friends and my kinsmen, to see if they will consent.’ ‘No, I will not ask your father, nor yet your mother, nor your friends nor your kinsmen. Now and at once we will go.’ ‘Farewell, my sister nuns, so little and young, do not do as I did, but praise God well in the convent.’ The devil has taken the little nun, the wicked little nun; he has carried her high up into the sky and then he has hurled her down into hell, down, down into hell”[1561].

There is a moral here to be sure, but it is the moral of a fairy tale, not of a sermon. As to the many variants of the “Clericus et Nonna” theme in which sometimes the nun makes love to a clerk and is repulsed and sometimes the clerk makes love to a nun and is repulsed[1562]it is possible that the Church had a hand in them all. Wandering clerks and cloistered monks were capable of the most unabashed love-poetry; but sometimes they chose to set themselves right with heaven.

In England the theme of the nun unwillingly professed is not found in popular songs, such as abound in France, Italy and Germany. It received, however, a literary expression towards the close of the fourteenth century. In the pseudo-ChaucerianCourt of Lovethe lover sees among those who do sacrifice to the King and Queen of Love a wailing group of priests and hermits, friars and nuns:

This is the courte of lusty folke and gladde,And wel becometh hire abite and arraye;O why be som so sory and so sadde,Complaynyng thus in blak and white and graye?Freres they ben, and monkes, in gode faye:Alas for rewth! grete dole it is to sene,To se hem thus bewaile and sory bene.Se howe thei crye and wryng here handes white,For thei so sone wente to religion!And eke the nonnes with vaile and wymple plight,Here thought is, thei ben in confusion.“Alas,” thay sayn, “we fayne perfeccion,In clothes wide and lake oure libertieBut all the synne mote on oure frendes be.For, Venus wote, we wold as fayne do ye,That ben attired here and wel besene,Desiren man and love in oure degreeFerme and feithfull right as wolde the quene:Oure frendes wikke in tender youth and grene,Ayenst oure wille made us religious;That is the cause we morne and waylen thus.”········And yet agaynewarde shryked every nonne,The pange of love so strayneth hem to cry:“Now woo the tyme” quod thay “that we be boune!This hatefull order nyse will done us dye!We sigh and sobbe and bleden inwardlyFretyng oure self with thought and hard complaynt,That ney for love we waxen wode and faynt”[1563].

A kindred poem,The Temple of Glas, by Lydgate (who seems himself to have become a monk of Bury at the age of fifteen) contains the same idea. Among the lovers in the Temple are some who make bitter complaint, youth wedded to age, or wedded without free choice, or shut in a convent:

And riȝt anon I herd oþer crieWith sobbing teris and with ful pitous soune,To fore þe goddes, bi lamentacioun,That were constrayned in hir tender youþeAnd in childhode, as it is ofte couþe,Y-entred were into religioun,Or þei hade yeris of discresioun,That al her life cannot but complein,In wide copis perfeccion to feine,Ful couertli to curen al hir smert,And shew þe contrarie outward of her hert.Thus saugh I wepen many a faire maide,That on hir freendis al þi wite þei liede[1564].

The same idea is also repeated in King James I of Scotland’s poem,The King’s Quair[1565], and later (with more resemblance to the continental songs) in the complaint of the wicked Prioress in Sir David Lyndesay’s morality play,Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits[c. 1535]:

I gif my freinds my malisounThat me compellit to be ane Nun,And wald nocht let me marie.It was my freinds greadinesThat gart me be ane Priores:Now hartlie them I warie.Howbeit that Nunnis sing nichts and dayisThair hart waitis nocht quhat thair mouth sayis;The suith I ȝow declair.Makand ȝow intimatioun,To Christis CongregatiounNunnis ar nocht necessair.Bot I sall do the best I can,And marie sum gude honest man,And brew gude aill and tun.Mariage, be my opinioun,It is better ReligiounAs to be freir or Nun[1566].

The concentrated bitterness ofThe Court of Loveand the social satire of Lindesay are only a literary expression of the theme treated more lightheartedly in the popularchansons de nonnes. The songs are one side of the popular view of asceticism, the gay side. The serious side may be found in the famous story ofThe Nun who Loved the World:

Some time there was a nun that hight Beatrice, a passing fair woman, and she was sacristan of the kirk, and she had great devotion unto our Lady; and ofttimes men desired her to sin. So at last she consented unto a clerk to go away with him when compline was done, and ere she departed she went unto an altar of our Lady and said unto her; “Lady, as I have been devout unto thee, now I resign unto thee these keys, for I may no longer sustain the temptation of my flesh.” And she laid the keys on the altar and went her ways unto the clerk. And when he had defouled her, within a few days he left her and went away; and she had nothing to live on and thought shame to gang home again unto her cloister and she fell to be a common woman. And when she had lived in that vice fifteen years, on a day she came unto the nunnery gate, and asked the porter if he knew ever a nun in that place that hight Beatrice, that was sacristan and keeper of the kirk. And he said he knew her on the best wise and said she was a worthy woman and a holy from when she was a little bairn, “and ever has kept her clean and in good name.” And she understood not the words of this man and went her ways. And our Lady appeared unto her and said: “Behold, I have fulfilled thine office these fifteen years and therefore turn again now into thy place and be again in thine office as thou wast, and shrive thee and do thy penance, for there is no creature here that knows thy trespass, for I have ever been for thee in thy clothing and in thine habit.” And anon she was in her habit and went in and shrove her and did her penance and told all that was happened unto her[1567].

This tale is interesting, because it is much more than a piece of naïve piety. The story of Beatrice is intimately connected with thechansons de nonnes; it is the serious, as they are the gay, expression of a whole philosophy of life. The songs are, indeed, purely materialistic and do not attempt (how should the spinsters and the knitters in the sun attempt it?) to give a philosophical justification for their attitude. The miracle is simple and seems on the surface to draw no moral, save that devotion to the Virgin will be rewarded. Nevertheless the philosophy and the moral are there; they are those of the most famous of all medieval songs,Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus. The theme of the miracle and of the songs alike is the revolt against asceticism, the revolt of the body, which knows how short its beauty and its life, against the spirit which lives forever, and yet will not allow its poor yokefellow one little hour. The fact that the story of Beatrice takes the form of a Mary-miracle is itself significant. For the “Nos habebit humus” argument can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand stands the human multitude, gathering rosebuds while it may, crying up and down the roads of the world to all who pass to rejoice today, for “ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuere?” On the other hand stands the moralist, singing the same song:

—but drawing how different a moral,

Often for long stretches at a time the wandering clerks and the singers were willing to leave to the moralist this heaven which was to be won by despising earthly beauty; they were content to go to hell singing with Aucassin and Nicolete and all the kings of the world. But at other times they ached for heaven too and would not believe that they might win there only by the narrow path of righteousness. So they invented a philosophical justification for their way of life. The Church had forgotten the love which sat with publicans and sinners; the people rediscovered it, and attributed it not to the Son but to the Mother. At one blow they outwitted the moralist by inventing the cult of the Virgin Mary[1569]. In their hands this Mary worship became more than the worship of Christ’s mother; it became almost a separate religion, a religion under which jongleurs and thieves, fighters and tournament-haunters and the great host of those who loved unwisely found a mercy often denied to them by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The people created a Virgin to whom justice was nothing and law less than nothing, but to whom love of herself was all. “Imperatrix supernorum,supernatrix infernorum,” hell was emptied under her rule and heaven became a new place, filled with her disreputable, faulty, human lovers. She was not only the familiar friend of the poor and humble, she was also the confidante of the lover, of all the Aucassins and Nicoletes of the world. It is not without significance that so great a stress was always laid upon her personal loveliness. Her cult became the expression of mankind’s deep unconscious revolt against asceticism, their love of life, their passionate sense of “beauty that must die.” The story of Beatrice has kept its undiminished attraction for the modern world largely because in it, more than in all the other Mary-miracles, life has triumphed and has been justified of heaven[1570]. Even the cold garb given to it by ecclesiastics such as Caesarius of Heisterbach cannot conceal its underlying idea that all love is akin, the most earthy to the most divine; the idea which Malory expressed many years later, when he wrote of Queen Guinevere “that while she lived she was a true lover and therefore she had a good end.” The theme most familiar to us in the didactic literature of the middle ages is the theme of the soul “here in the body pent”; for the moralist has his deliberate purpose and sets down his idea more directly and with more point than do the story-teller and the singer, who have no aim but to say and speak and tell the tale. But when we have been moved by the theme of the soul, let us not fail also to recognise when we meet it—whether in the wandering scholar’sGaudeamusor in the miracle of the nun wholoved the world—the theme of the body, despised and maimed and always beautiful, crying out for its birthright. Even in the middle ages the Greeks had not lived in vain.

The miracle of Sister Beatrice leads to the consideration of another type of popular literature, which throws much light on convent life. Sometimes the people grow tired of singing to themselves; they want to be told stories, which they can repeat in the long evenings, when the sun goes down and the rushlight sends its wan uneven flicker over the floor. Even in the households of rich men story-telling round the fire is the favourite after-dinner occupation[1571]. These stories come from every conceivable source, from the East, from the Classics, from the Lives of the Fathers, from the Legends of the Saints, from the Miracles of the Virgin, from the accumulated experience of generations of story-tellers. At first their purpose is simply to amuse, and the jongleur can always get a hearing for hisfabliau; from village green to town market, from the ale house to the manor and the castle hall he passes with his repertoire of grave, gay, edifying, ribald, coarse or delightful tales and when he has gone his enchanted audience repeats and passes on all that he has said[1572]. Then another professional story-teller begins to compete with the jongleur, a story-teller whose object is to point a moral rather than to adorn a tale. The Church, observing that attentive audience, adopts the practice. Preachers vie with jongleurs in illustrating their sermons by stories, “examples” they call them. Often they use the same tales; anything so that the congregation keep awake; and though the examples are sometimes very edifying, they are sometimes but ill-disguised buffoonery, and moralists cry out against the preacher, who instead of the Gospel passes off his own inventions, jests and gibes, so that the poor sheep return from pasture wind-fed[1573].But the greatest preachers win many souls by a judicious use of stories[1574], and diligent clerks make huge collections of suchexempla, wherein the least skilled sermon-maker may find an illustration apt to any text[1575]. Didactic writers and theologians also adopt the practice; they trust to example rather than to precept; their ponderous tomes are alive with anecdotes, but one half-pennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack[1576]. Then the literary men begin to seize upon thefabliauxandexemplafor the purpose of their art; they borrow plots from this bottomless treasure-house; and so come the days of Boccaccio andLes Cent Nouvelles Nouvellesand the short story is made at last[1577].They all, jongleurs, preachers, theologians and men of letters repeat each other, for a tale once told is everyone’s property; the people repeat them; and so the stories circulate from lip to lip through the wide lands of Europe and down the echoing centuries. And since these tales deal with every subject under the sun (and with many marvels which the sun never looked upon), it is not surprising that several of them deal with nuns.

Across six centuries we can, with the aid of a sympathetic imagination, slip into the skins of these inquisitive and child-like folk, and hear some of the stories to which they lent such an absorbed attention. Let us

Forget six counties overhung with smoke,Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,Forget the spreading of the hideous town;Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,And dream of London, small and white and clean,The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.

Or rather, let us imagine not London but some other little English town, on just such an April morning as moved Chaucer and his fellow-voyagers to seek the holy blissful martyr by way of the Tabard Inn. Having sloughed the film of those six hundred years from off our eyes, we can see more clearly the shadowy forms of our fathers that begat us. We can see a motley crowd gathered in the market place, chiefly made up of women. There are girls, demure or wistful or laughing, fresh from their spinning wheels or from church; there are also bustling wives, in fine well-woven wimples and moist new shoes, arm in arm with their gossips. By craning a neck we may see that flighty minx Alison, the carpenter’s wife, “long as a mast and upright as a bolt,” casting about her with her bold black eyes and looking jealously at the miller’s wife from across the brook, who is as pert as a pye and considers herself a lady. There is a good wife of beside Bath, with a red face and ten pounds’ weight of kerchiefs on her head; a great traveller and a great talker she is—we can hear her chattering right across the square; it is a pity she is so deaf. There, under her own sign-board, is the inn-keeper’s ill-tempered dame, who bullies her husband and ramps in his face if her neighbours do not bow low to her in church; and there is the new-made bride of yonder merchant with the forked beard—they say she is a shrew too. There is Rose theRegrater, who also weaves woollen cloth and cheats her spinsters. There is Dame Emma, who keeps the tavern by the river—our neighbour Glutton’s wife would like to scratch out her eyes, for Glutton always has to be carried home from that inn. There also are Elinor, Joan and Margery, Margaret, Alice and Cecily, merry gossips, their hearts well cherished with muscadel. Mingled with these good wives of the town we see, as we look about us, other folk; portly burgesses, returning from a meeting of the borough court, full of wine and merchant law; a couple of friars, their tippets stuffed with knives and pins, and a fat monk, with a greyhound slinking at his heel; an ale-taster, reeling home from duties performed too well; a Fleming or two, ever on the lookout for snarls and sharp elbows from the true-born native craftsmen; several pretty supercilious ladies “with browen blissful under hood,” squired by a gay young gentleman, embroidered all over with flowers; two giggling curly-haired clerks (Absolon and Nicholas must be their names) ogling the carpenter’s wife and sniggering at their solemn faced companion—that youth there, with the threadbare courtepy and a book of Aristotle under his arm; a bailiff buying tar and salt for the home farm and selling his butter and eggs to the townsmen; numbers of beggars and idlers and children; and on the outskirts of the crowd little sister Joan from St Mary’s Convent, who ought not to be out alone, but who cannot resist stopping to hear the sermon.

For we have all come running together in this year of our Lord 1380 to hear a sermon[1578]. We look upon sermons as an excellent opportunity “for to see and eek for to be seen”; in the same spirit, compact one-third of sociability, one-third of curiosity and one-third of piety, we always crowd

To vigilies and to processiouns,To preaching eek and to thise pilgrimages,To pleyes of miracles and mariages[1579].

There is the preacher under the stone market cross. He is bidding us shun the snares of the world; if we cannot shut ourselves up in a cloister (which is best), he says, we must make our hearts a cloister, where no wickedness will come. He will have to tell us a story soon, for we are restless folk and do not love to sit still on the cobbles at his feet, but with a story he can always hold us. Sure enough he has left his theme now and is giving us an example:

Jacobus de Vetriaco tells how some time there was a mighty prince that was founder of a nunnery that stood near hand him; and he coveted greatly a fair nun of the place to have her unto his leman. And not withstanding neither by prayer nor by gift he could overcome her; and at the last he took her away by strong force. And when men came to take her away, she was passing feared and asked them why they took her out of her abbey, more than her other sisters. And they answered her again and said, because she had so fair een. And anon as she heard this she was fain and she gart put out her een anon and laid them in a dish and brought them unto them and said: “Lo, here is the een that your master desires and bid him let me alone and lose neither his soul nor mine.” And they went unto him therewith and told him and he let her alone; and by this mean she kept her chastity. And within three years after she had her een again, as well as ever had she, through grace of God[1580].

A shudder of horror and admiration runs through us, but the preacher continues with a second example:

“How different,” he says, “Was this most chaste and wise virgin from that wretched nun who was sought by a noble knight, that he might seduce her, and her abbess hid her in a certain very secret place in the monastery. And when that knight had sought her in all the offices and corners of the monastery and could in no wise find her he grew at length weary and tired of the quest and turned to depart. But she, seeing that he had stopped looking for her, because he had been unable to find her, began to call ‘Cuckoo!’, as children are wont to cry when they are hidden and do not wish to be found. Whereupon the knight, hearing her, ran to the place, and having accomplished his will departed therefrom, deriding the miserable girl”[1581].

“See how evil are the ways of the world,” says our preacher; “how much better to be simple and unworldly, like that nun of whom you may read in the book of the wise Caesarius which he wrote to instruct novices. I will tell you of her,”

In the diocese of Trèves is a certain convent of nuns named Lutzerath, wherein by ancient custom no girl is received, but at the age of seven years or less; which constitution hath grown up for the preservation of that simplicity of mind, which maketh the whole body to shine. There was lately in that monastery a maiden full-grown in body, but such a child in worldly matters that she scarce knew the difference twixt a secular person and a brute beast, since she had had no knowledge of secular folk before her conversion. One day a goat climbed upon the orchard wall, which when she saw, knowing not what it might be, she said to a sister that stood by her: “What is that?” The other, knowing her simplicity, answered in jest to her wondering question, “That is a woman of the world,” adding, “when secular women grow old they sprout to horns and beards.” She, believing it to be the truth, was glad to have learned something new[1582].

All this time the preacher has been illustrating his sermon with any story that came into his head. But he has been doing more; he has been describing for the information of posterity the raw material (so utterly different in different individuals), out of which the unchanging pattern of the nun had to be moulded. However we are not (for the moment) posterity; and we grow weary of this praise of austerity and simplicity. But, brother John, we say (interrupting) here are we, living in the world; you would not have us tear out our eyes when our husbands would be fondling us? You would not have us take our good Dame Alison for a goat, which is (heaven save us) but a brute beast and no Christian? and what if we cry cuckoo sometimes, we girls, for a lover? there are some we know that have married five husbands at the church door, and still think themselves right holy women, and make pilgrimages to St James beyond the sea, and will ever go first to the offering on Sunday. What have your nuns to do with us? Tell us rather what we young fresh folk may do to be saved; or how we good housewives should bear ourselves day by day. And that I will (says thepreacher with some acerbity). Shame upon you, with your chattering tongues. You cannot even keep quiet at mass; and at home it is well known to me how ye pester your husbands, with your screeching and scolding, and how ye chatter all day to your gossips, not minding what lewd words ye speak. Remember therefore holy St Gregory’s example of the nun who spake naughty words, which brother Robert of Brunne of the order of Sempringham found in the French book and set into fair English rhymes:

Seynt Gregori of a nunne tellysÞat ȝede to helle for no þyng ellysBut for she spake ever vyleynyAmong her felaws al ahy.Þys nunnë was of dedys chaste,But þat she spake wurdys wasteShe madë many of here felawysÞenke on synnë for here sawys.

And then she died, and she was buried at the steps of the altar; and in the night the sacristan of the place was awakened by a great crying and weeping, and beheld fiends around that wretched nun, who burnt half her body and left the other half unscathed:

Seynt Gregorye seyþ þat hyt was syngeÞat half here lyfë was nat dygne;for þoghe here dedys werë chaste,Here wurdys were al vyle and waste.······See how her tungge madë here slaynand foulë wurdys broghte here to payn[1583].

Mind therefore your tongues, and do not whisper so lightly among yourselves when you sit in the tavern (unknown to your husbands, fie upon you!), and stuff yourselves with capons and Spanish wine. Nay more, have a care that greed does not destroy you.Gula, he is one of the seven sins that be most deadly. Look to it lest you one day receive the devil into your bodies, with a mouthful of hot spices:

For the same blessed Gregory “telleth of a certain nun who omitted to make the sign of the cross when she was eating a lettuce, and the devil entered into her; and when he was ordered by a holy man tocome forth he replied: ‘What fault is it of mine and why do you rebuke me? I was sitting upon the lettuce and she did not cross herself and so ate me with it’”[1584]. How different, now, was the reward of that saintly nun of whom Caesarius telleth. For when “a pittance, to wit fried eggs, was being distributed by the cellaress to the whole convent, she was by some chance neglected. But indeed I deem not that it befel by chance, but rather by divine ordering, that the glory of God might be manifest in her. For she bore the deprivation most patiently, rejoicing in the neglect, and therefore, when she was returning thanks to God, that great Father-Abbot set before her an invisible pittance; whereof the unspeakable sweetness so filled her mouth, her throat and all her body, that never in her life had she felt aught like to it. This was bodily sweetness, but next God visited her mind and soul so copiously with spiritual sweetness ... that she desired to go without pittances for all the days of her life”[1585].

Thus our preacher might be supposed to speak, but all nun tales are not so edifying; the ribald jongleur was fond of them too. A good example of the nun theme used as aconte grasis Boccaccio’s famous tale of the abbess, who went in the dark to surprise one of her nuns with a lover; but having, when aroused, had with her in her own cell a priest (brought thither in a chest) she inadvertently put upon her head instead of her veil the priest’s breeches. She called all her nuns, seized the guilty girl and came to the chapter house to reprimand her; and

“the girl happened to raise her eyes, when she saw what the abbess bore upon her head, and the laces of the breeches hanging down on each side of her neck, and being a little comforted with that, as she conjectured the fact, she said: “Please, madam, to button your coif, and then tell me what you would have.” “What coif is it that you mean,” replied she, “you wicked woman, you? Have you the assurance to laugh at me? Do you think jests will serve your turn in such an affair as this?” The lady said once more, “I beg, madam, that you would first button your coif and then speak as you please.” Whereupon most of the sisterhood raised up their eyes to look at the abbess, and she herself put up her hand. The truth being thus made evident, the accused nun said, “The abbess is in fault likewise,” which obliged the mother to change her manner of speech from that which she had begun, saying that it was impossible to resist the temptations that assail the flesh. Therefore she bade them, as heretofore, secretly to make the best possible use of their time”[1586].

Another famous tale of Boccaccio’s concerns the young man who pretended to be dumb and was made gardener at a nunnery[1587].

In a different category from these stories sacred and profane are the didactic works, wherein churchmen set down the reasons for which a conventual life was to be preferred to all others, or the spirit in which such a life was to be lived. In this class fall poems and treatises in praise of virginity and books of devotion or admonition addressed to nuns. The former are fairly common in the middle ages[1588]and, since they throw little light on the actual life of a professed nun, need not be considered at great length. Among the most graceful are a series of little German songs, probably composed by clerks and generally classed with folk-songs, though they are as different as possible from the popularNonnenklagen. The longest of these poems tells of a fair and noble lady who walked in a garden and cried out at the beauty of the flowers, vowing that could she but see theartist who created so much loveliness, she would thank him as he deserved. At that moment a youth entered the garden and greeted her courteously, answering her cry of surprise by saying that neither stone walls nor doors could withstand him, and that all the lovely flowers in the garden were his and he made them, for “I am called Jesus the flower-maker.” Then the lady was stirred to the heart and cried: “O my dearest lord, with all my faith I love thee and I will ever be true to thee till my life ends.” But “the youth withdrew himself and went his way to a convent which lay close by, and by reason of his great power he entered speedily into it.” The lady did not linger, but fled after him to the convent and in great woe knocked upon the gates, crying, “Ye have shut him in who is mine only joy.” Then the nuns in the convent bespake her wrathfully saying:

“Why dost thou lament so loudly? thou speakest foolishness. Our convent is locked and no man entered therein. If thou hast lost him, the loss is thine and thou must bear it.” “Ye have let in the man to whom I am vowed. With mine own eyes I saw him pass through the gate. Ye have let in mine own dear lord. Were the whole world mine I would give it up ere I gave up him. Ye have let in the man to whom I am vowed and truly I say to you that I will have him again. I will keep the vow which I sware to him and never shall my deathless loyalty fail.”

Then the maidens in the convent became wroth and they said:

“Thou spakest foolish things and against our honour. Our convent is shut and no man is allowed therein and the dear Lord Jesus knoweth well that this is true.” “How little ye know him,” said the lovely lady, “Ye have spoken the name of mine own dear lord. Ye have named him and well is he known to me; he is also called Jesus the flower-maker.”

The maidens in the convent deemed then that her words were of God and marvelled thereat:

“Let Jesus our beloved lord stay with us for ever, for all who are in this convent have vowed themselves to him.” “If all ye who are in the convent have vowed yourselves to him, then will I stay with you all my days and I will keep the troth I plighted with him and never will I waver in my firm faith in him”[1589].

Another song contrasts the love of the lord of many lands with that of the lord of life, to the disparagement of the former[1590]. A similar contrast between earthly and heavenly love is themotifof the beautiful English poem calledA Luue Ron, made by the Franciscan Thomas of Hales at the request of a nun[1591]; of a somewhat similar (though poetically inferior) poem entitledClene Maydenhod[1592]; and of a coarse and brutal treatise in praise of virginity known asHali Meidenhad[1593]. This alliterative homily of the thirteenth century is startlingly different from the two other contemporary works in middle English, with which its subject would cause it to be compared. It has none of the delicate purity of theLuue Ron, nor even of the mystical, ascetic visions of Mary of Oignies, Luitgard of Tongres, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and the many saints and song writers who realised the marriage of the soul with Christ in the concrete terms of human passion[1594]. Neither, on the other hand, has it the moderation and urbanity of theAncren Riwle, though the same hand was once supposed to have written both treatises. The author ofHali Meidenhadpersuades his spiritual daughter to vow her virginity to God by no better means than a savage and entirely materialistic attack upon the estate of matrimony. He admits that wedlock is lawful for the weak, for

this the wedded sing, that through God’s goodness and mercy of his grace, though they have driven downwards, they halt in wedlock and softly alight in the bed of its law, for whosoever falleth out of the grace of maidenhood, so that the curtained bed of wedlock hold them not, drive down to the earth so terribly that they are dashed limb from limb, both joint and muscle[1595].

And again:

of the three sorts, maidenhood and widowhood and thirdly wedlockhood, thou mayst know by the degrees of their bliss, which and byhow much it [maidenhood] surpasses the others. For wedlock has its fruit thirtyfold in heaven, widowhood sixtyfold; maidenhood with a hundredfold overpasses both. Consider then, hereby, whosoever from her maidenhood descended into wedlock, by how many degrees she falleth downward[1596].

This comparative moderation of tone does not, however, last long and the author proceeds to draw a picture of the discomforts of wifehood and of motherhood so gross and so entirely one-sided that it is difficult to imagine any sensible girl being converted by it:

Ask these queens, these rich countesses, these saucy ladies, about their mode of life. Truly, truly, if they rightly bethink themselves and acknowledge the truth, I shall have them for witnesses that they are licking honey off thorns. They buy all the sweetness with two proportions of bitter.... And what if it happen, as the wont is, that thou have neither thy will with him [thy husband] nor weal either and must groan without goods within waste walls and in want of bread must breed thy row of bairns?... or suppose now that power and plenty were rife with thee and thy wide walls were proud and well supplied and suppose that thou hadst many under thee, herdsmen in hall, and thy husband were wroth with thee, and should become hateful, so that each of you two shall be exasperated against the other, what worldly good can be acceptable to thee? When he is out thou shalt have against his return sorrow, care and dread. While he is at home, thy wide walls seem too narrow for thee; his looking on thee makes thee aghast; his loathsome voice and his rude grumbling fill thee with horror. He chideth and revileth thee and he insults thee shamefully; he beateth thee and mawleth thee as his bought thrall and patrimonial slave. Thy bones ache and thy flesh smarteth, thy heart within thee swelleth of sore rage, and thy face outwardly burneth with vexation[1597].

Then, after an unquotable passage, the author considers the supposed joys of maternity and gives a brutal and painfully vivid account of the troubles of gestation and childbirth and of the anxieties of the mother, who has a young child to rear. He seems to feel that some apology is needed for his brutality, for he adds:

Back to Index Next