Read Ebook: Viimeinen Ateenalainen by Rydberg Viktor Tudeer O E Translator

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Ebook has 3068 lines and 137809 words, and 62 pages

Robbery and violence 422

Border raids in Durham and Yorkshire 425

The strange tale of Sir John Arundel's outrage on a nunnery 429

Nuns and the celibate ideal 436

Sources of evidence for the moral state of the English nunneries 439

Apostate nuns 440

Nuns' lovers 446

Nuns' children 450

Disorder in two small houses, Cannington and Easebourne 452

Disorder in the great abbeys of Amesbury and Godstow 454

Moral state of the nunneries in the diocese of Lincoln at two periods 456

Attempted statistical estimate of cases of immorality in Lincoln , Norwich and Chichester dioceses 460

Punishment of offenders 462

General conclusions 471

The chapter meeting 475

Reform by external authorities: a parent house 478 the chapter general of the order 481 the bishop of the diocese 482

The episcopal visitation and injunctions 483

How far was this control adequate? concealment of faults 488 visitation too infrequent 490 difficulty of enforcing injunctions 492

Value of visitation documents to the historian 493

Value of literary evidence 499

Autobiographies and biographies of nuns 500

Popular poetry 502

Popular stories 515

Didactic works addressed to nuns 523

Satires and moral treatises 533

Secular literature in general 555

APPENDICES

BIBLIOGRAPHY 693

INDEX 704

LIST OF PLATES

PLATE

TO FACE PAGE

II Abbess receiving the pastoral staff from a bishop 44 v? and 90v?, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.)

VI Dominican nuns in quire 286

MAP

Map showing the English Nunneries in the later middle ages AT END

MEDIEVAL ENGLISH NUNNERIES

THE NOVICE

An analysis of the incomes and numerical size of English nunneries at the dissolution gives interesting and somewhat startling results. Out of 106 houses for which information is available only seven had in 1535 a gross annual income of over ?450 a year. The richest were Syon and Shaftesbury with ?1943 and ?1324 respectively; then came Barking with ?862, Wilton with ?674, Amesbury with ?595, Romsey with ?528 and Dartford with ?488. Five others had from ?300 to ?400; nine others had from ?200 to ?300. Twelve had between ?100 and ?200 and no less than 73 houses had under ?100, of which 39 actually had under ?50; and it must be remembered that the net annual income, after the deduction of certain annual charges, was less still. An analysis of the numerical size of nunneries presents more difficulties, for the number of nuns given sometimes differs in the reports referring to the same house and it is doubtful whether commissioners or receivers always set down the total number of nuns present at the visitation or dissolution of a house; while lists of pensions paid by the crown to ex-inmates after dissolution are still more incomplete as evidence. A rough analysis, however, leaves very much the same impression as an analysis of incomes. Out of 111 houses, for which some sort of numerical estimate is possible, only four have over thirty inmates, viz. Syon , Amesbury , Wilton and Barking . Eight have from 20 to 30; thirty-six have from 10 to 20 and sixty-three have under 10. These statistics permit of certain large generalisations. First, that the majority of English nunneries were small and poor. Secondly, that, as has already been pointed out, the largest and richest houses were all in London and south of the Thames; only four houses north of that river had gross incomes of over ?200 and only three could boast of more than 20 inmates. Thirdly, the nunneries during this period owned land and rents to the annual value of over ?15,500 and contained perhaps between 1500 and 2000 nuns.

To understand the history of the English nunneries during the later middle ages it is necessary not only to understand the smallness and poverty of many of the houses and the high repute of others; it is necessary also to understand what manner of women took the veil in them. From what social classes were the nuns drawn, and for what reason did they enter religion? What function did monasticism, so far as it concerned women, fulfil in the life of medieval society?

It has been shown that the proportion of women who became nuns was very small in comparison with the total female population. It has indeed been insufficiently recognised that the medieval nunneries were recruited almost entirely from among the upper classes. They were essentially aristocratic institutions, the refuge of the gently born. At Romsey Abbey a list of 91 sisters at the election of an abbess in 1333 is full of well-known county names. The names of Bassett, Sackville, Covert, Hussey, Tawke and Farnfold occur at Easebourne; Lewknor, St John, Okehurst, Michelgrove and Sidney at Rusper, the two small and poor nunneries in Sussex. The return of the subsidy in 1377 enumerates the sisters of Minchin Barrow and, as their historian points out, "among the family names of these ladies are some of the best that the western counties could produce". The other Somerset houses were equally aristocratic, and an examination of the roll of prioresses for almost any medieval convent in any part of England will give the same result, even in the smallest and poorest nunneries, the inmates of which were reduced to begging alms. These ladies appear sometimes to have had the spirit of their race, as they often had its manners and its tastes. For 21 years Isabel Stanley, Prioress of King's Mead, Derby, refused to pay a rent due from her house to the Abbot of Burton; at last the Abbot sent his bailiff to distrain for it and she spoke her mind in good set terms. "Wenes these churles to overlede me," cried this worthy daughter of a knightly family, "or sue the lawe agayne me? They shall not be so hardy but they shall avye upon their bodies and be nailed with arrows; for I am a gentlewoman, comen of the greatest of Lancashire and Cheshire, and that they shall know right well". A tacit recognition of the aristocratic character of the convents is to be found in the fact that bishops were often at pains to mention the good birth of the girls whom, in accordance with a general right, they nominated to certain houses on certain occasions. Thus Wykeham wrote to the Abbess of St Mary's Winchester, bidding her admit Joan Bleden, "quest de bone et honeste condition, come nous sumes enformes". More frequently still the candidates were described as "domicella" or "damoysele". At least one instance is extant of a bishop ordering that all the nuns of a house were to be of noble condition.

The fact that the greater portion of the female population was unaffected by the existence of the outlet provided by conventual life for women's energies is a significant one. The reason for it--paradoxical as this may sound--lies in the very narrowness of the sphere to which women of gentle birth were confined. The disadvantage of rank is that so many honest occupations are not, in its eyes, honourable occupations. In the lowest ranks of society the poor labourer upon the land had no need to get rid of his daughter, if he could not find her a husband, nor would it have been to his interest to do so; for, working in the fields among his sons, or spinning and brewing with his wife at home, she could earn a supplementary if not a living wage. The tradesman or artisan in the town was in a similar position. He recognised that the ideal course was to find a husband for his growing girl, but the alternative was in no sense that she should eat out her heart and his income during long years at home; and if he were too poor to provide her with a sufficient dower, he could and often did apprentice her to a trade. The number of industries which were carried on by women in the middle ages shows that for the burgess and lower classes there were other outlets besides marriage; and then, as now, domestic service provided for many. But the case of the well-born lady was different. The knight or the county gentleman could not apprentice his superfluous daughters to a pursemaker or a weaver in the town; not from them were drawn the regrateresses in the market place and the harvest gatherers in the field; nor was it theirs to make the parti-coloured bed and shake the coverlet, worked with grapes and unicorns, in some rich vintner's house. There remained for him, if he did not wish or could not afford to keep them at home and for them, if they desired some scope for their young energies, only marriage or else a convent, where they might go with a smaller dower than a husband of their own rank would demand.

To say that the convents were the refuge of the gently born is not to say that there was no admixture of classes within them. The term gentleman was becoming more comprehensive in the later middle ages. It included the upper class proper, the families of noble birth; and it included also the country gentry. The convents were probably at first recruited almost entirely from these two ranks of society, and a study of any collection of medieval wills shows how large a proportion of such families took advantage of this opening for women. A phrase will sometimes occur which shows that it was regarded as the natural and obvious alternative to marriage. Sir John Daubriggecourt in 1415 left his daughter Margery 40 marks, "if she be wedded to a worldly husband, and if she be caused to receive the sacred veil of the order of holy nuns" ten pounds and twenty shillings rent, and Sir John le Blund in 1312 bequeathed an annuity to his daughter Ann, "till she marry or enter a religious house". The anxiety of the upper classes to secure a place for their children in nunneries sometimes even led to overcrowding. At Carrow the Prioress was forced to complain that "certain lords of England whom she was unable to resist because of their power" forced their daughters upon the priory as nuns, and in 1273 a papal bull forbade the reception of more inmates than the revenues would support. Archbishop William Wickwane addressed a similar mandate to two Yorkshire houses, Wilberfoss and Nunkeeling, which public rumour had informed him to be overburdened with nuns and with secular boarders "at the instance of nobles"; and in 1327 Bishop Stratford wrote to Romsey Abbey that the house was notoriously burdened with ladies beyond the established number, and that he had heard that the nuns were being forced to receive more "damoyseles" as novices, which he forbade without special licence. A very strong personal connection must in time have been established between a nunnery and certain families from which, in each generation, it received a daughter or a niece and her dower. Such was the connection between Shouldham and the Beauchamps and between Nunmonkton and the Fairfaxes. A close link bound each nunnery to the family of its patron. Thus we find a Clinton at Wroxall and a Darcy at Heynings; nor is it unlikely that these noble ladies sometimes expected privileges and homage more than the strict equality of convent life would allow, if it be permissible to generalise from the behaviour of Isabel Clinton and from the fact that Margaret Darcy received a rather severe penance from Bishop Gynewell in 1351 and a special warning against going beyond the claustral precincts or speaking to strangers, while in 1393 there occurs the significant injunction by Bishop Bokyngham that no sister was to have a room to herself except Dame Margaret Darcy "on account of the nobility of her race"; an old lady of firm will and a somewhat sycophantic prelate.

It is worthy of notice that Chaucer has drawn an unmistakable "lady" in his typical prioress. There is her delicate behaviour at meals:

At mete wel ytaught was she with-alle; She leet no morsel from her lippes falle, Ne wette hir fingres in hir sauce depe. Wel coude she carie a morsel, and wel kepe, That no drope ne fille upon hir brest. In curteisye was set ful muche hir lest. Hir over lippe wyped she so clene, That in hir coppe was no ferthing sene Of grece, whan she drunken hadde hir draughte. Ful semely after hir mete she raughte.

"Gardez vous, Dames, bien acertes," "Qu'au mengier soiez bien apertes; C'est une chose c'on moult prise Que l? soit dame bien aprise. Tel chose torne ? vilonie Que toutes genz ne sevent mie; Se puet cil tost avoir mespris Qui n'est cortoisement apris."

And sikerly she was of greet disport, And ful plesaunt, and amiable of port, And peyned her to countrefete chere Of court, and been estatlich of manere, And to be holden digne of reverence.

Her pets are the pets of ladies in metrical romances and in illuminated borders; "smale houndes," delicately fed with "rosted flesh, or milk and wastel-bread." Her very beauty

conforms to the courtly standard. Only the mention of her chanting of divine service differentiates her from any other well-born lady of the day; and if Chaucer had not told us whom he was describing, we might never have known that she was a nun. It was in these ideals and traditions that most of the inmates of English convents were born and bred.

This social amalgamation between the country gentry and the "new gentlemen," who had made their money in trade, was naturally reflected in the nunneries. The wills of London burgesses, which were enrolled in the Court of Husting, show that the daughters of these well-to-do citizens were in the habit of taking the veil. There is even more than one trace of the aristocratic view of religion as the sole alternative to marriage. Langland, enumerating the good deeds which will win pardon for the merchant, bids him "marie maydens or maken hem nonnes". At Ludlow the gild of Palmers provided that:

If any good girl of the gild of marriageable age, cannot have the means found by her father, either to go into a religious house or to marry, whichever she wishes to do, friendly and right help shall be given her out of our common chest, towards enabling her to do whichever of the two she wishes.

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