Eileen Power

“ They would force me into a convent. Nevermore then shall I see the grass grow green and the green clover flowers, nevermore hear the little birds sing. Woe it is, and dead is my joy, for they would part me from my true love, and I die of sorrow. Alas, alas for my grief, which I must bear in secret! Sisters, dear sisters, must we be parted from the world? Deepest woe it is, since I may never wear the bridal wreath and must make moan for my sins, when I would fain be in the world and would fain wear a bright wreath upon my hair, instead of the veil that the nuns wear. ”

“ His prosperity has blossomed out into exquisitely ornate decoration. A band of carving runs along the front of the house, and from the curved stem of it branch out a hundred charming devices--leaves, tendrils, strange flowers, human heads, Tudor roses, a crowned king and queen lying hand in hand, a baby diving with a kick of fat legs into the bowl of an arum lily, and in the midst the merchant's mark upon a shield and the initials of the master of the house. ”

“ Why do the people see a nun only as a love-bird shut within a cage and beating its wings against the bars? Partly, no doubt, because such songs always “dally with the innocence of love”; the folk are capable of a deep melancholy, as of a gaiety which is light as thistledown; but Love is and was their lord and king, and so even the nun must be in love when they sing her. It may be, however, that there is a deeper meaning in the chansons de nonnes. The nunneries were aristocratic; the ideal of the religious life was out of the reach of women who lived among fields and beasts of the field. ”

“ They slake their nostalgia a little in the presence of that enfant perdue of a lost civilization.
For this is the world of Gregory of Tours, of which you may read in his History of the Franks. The rule under which it lives is the rule of the horrible Merovingian kings. Side by side with the villas barbarism spreads and flourishes like a jungle growth. Learning is dying--hardly the ghost of a university is left--and Gregory himself who came of a great Gallo-Roman family and was a bishop bewails his ignorance of grammar. The towns are shrinking, crouched behind their defences. ”

“ The ballad-man has his own pithy judgment in the guise of an artless rhyme. The teacher has his admonitions, whence may be learnt what men conceived to be the nun’s ideal and purpose in this cloistered life. The moralist has his satire, to show wherein she fell short of such lofty heights. And the poet himself will hold his mirror up to nature, that we may see after five hundred years what he saw with his searching eyes, when Madame Eglentyne rode to Canterbury, or when the nuns of Poissy feasted a cavalcade from court. ”

“ They gave him everlasting fame; for all through the Middle Ages the legend of Charlemagne grew, and he shares with our King Arthur the honour of being the hero of one of the greatest romance-cycles of the Middle Ages. Every different century clad him anew in its own dress and sang new lays about him. What the monkish chroniclers in their cells could never do for Charlemagne, these despised and accursed minstrels did for him: they gave him what is perhaps more desirable and more lasting than a place in history-they gave him a place in legend. ”

“ It can never be too often repeated that many monks and nuns entered religion as a career while still children, with no particular vocation for the religious life. To such, even though they might experience no longing for the forbidden pleasures of the world, the monotony of the cloister would often be hard to bear. Their young limbs would kick against its restrictions and the changing moods of adolescence would turn and twist in vain within the iron bars of its unadaptable routine. ”

“ For it reminds a cotton-spinning, iron-working generation that the greatness of England was built up, not upon the flimsy plant which comes to her to be manufactured from the Far East and West of the world, nor upon the harsh metal delved from her bowels, but upon the wool which generation after generation has grown on the backs of her black-faced sheep. ”

“ Apostasy, accidia, quarrels, all rose in part from monotony. The majority of nuns were probably content with their life, but they strove to bring some excitement and variety into it, not only unconsciously by cliques and contentions, but also by a conscious aping of the worldly amusements which enlivened their mothers and sisters outside the convent walls. The châtelaine or mistress of a manor, when not busied with the care of an estate, amused herself in the pursuit of fashion; even the business-like Margaret Paston hankered after a scarlet robe. ”

“ Today the historian is interested in the social life of the past and not only in the wars and intrigues of princes. To the modern writer, the fourteenth century, for instance, is not merely the century of the Hundred Years' War and of the Black Prince and Edward III; more significantly it is for him the era of the slow decay of villeinage in England, a fact more epoch-making, in the long run, than the struggle over our French provinces. We still praise famous men, for he would be a poor historian who could spare one of the great figures who have shed glory or romance upon the page of history ”

“ When the scholars come to school on Sunday, we cannot describe to you how many tears are shed there. The stewardess and I have to console the other sisters, but we are the rather in need of someone to console us. When we look on your places in choir and frater and dorter, then we grow sad and weep, saying, “O God, if only Bronopia were where Heiningen is, five miles away from us, then we might often visit each other, which now we cannot do, for we are forty miles away. We are as it were dead to each other at the two ends of the earth.” ”

“ It is only because we can look back from the vantage point of a much later age that we can see the inexorable pattern which events are forming, so that we long to cry to these dead people down the corridor of the ages, warning them to make a stand before it is too late, hearing no answering echo, 'Physician, heal thyself!' They suffered from the fatal myopia of contemporaries. ”

“ Do they dare to claim to be as good lovers as we, who have ever had the usage and maintenance of love? Their bodies, clad in wool, are not of such lordship as to be compared to ours and grave shame were it if a man knew not how to choose the highest. Bold and foolish grey-robes, great ill have you done. Without your importunities and officious advances no great lord or knight or man of honour would think of you. ”

“ Nor was Kinsai alone and unmatched in all its wonder and beauty, for a three days' journey from it stood Sugui, which today we call Suchow, lying also on the great canal, with its circumference of twenty miles, its prodigious multitudes swarming the streets, its physicians, philosophers, and magicians; Sugui, with the ginger which was so common that forty pounds of it might be bought for the price of a Venetian silver groat, the silk which was manufactured in such vast quantities that all the citizens were dressed in it and still ships laden with it sailed away ”

“ O poor heart, that must die a death so bitter! Fare you well, abbess of this convent, and all the nuns therein. Pray for me when I am dead, but never tell my thought to my true love. Fare you well, father and mother and all my kinsfolk; you made me a nun in this convent; in life I shall never have any joy ”

“ In the foreground water winds, narrowing and expanding, among verdant knolls and lawns, joined here and there by little wooden bridges; and the water is fed by torrents that plunge down among pine-woods from crags of fantastic form, glowing with hues of lapis-lazuli and jade; under towering peaks are luxuriant valleys, groves with glimpses of scattered deer, walled parks, clumps of delicate bamboo, and the distant roofs of some nestling village. Here and there is a pavilion by the water in which poet or sage sits contemplating the beauty round him. ”

“ So when she might speak, she called ladies and gentlewomen to her, and said, Ye marvel, fair ladies, why I make this fare. Truly, she said, it is for the sight of yonder knight that yonder standeth: wherefore, I pray you all, call him to me. When Sir Launcelot was brought to her, then she said to all the ladies, Through this man and me hath all this war been wrought, and the death of the most noblest knights of the world; for through our love that we have loved together is my noble lord slain. Therefore, Sir Launcelot, wit thou well I am set in such a plight to get my soul’s health ”

“ Darkness fell again and swallowed up Peking and Hangchow, the great ports, the crowding junks, the noble civilization. No longer was the great trade route sichurissimo, and no longer did Christian friars chant their Masses in Zaiton. The Tartar dynasty fell and the new rulers of China reverted to the old anti-foreign policy; moreover, Islam spread its conquests all over central Asia and lay like a rampart between the far east and west, a great wall of intolerance and hatred stronger by far than the great wall of stone which the Chinese had once built to keep out the Tartars. ”

“ Thou art carried throughout the world by land and sea, but thou goest to the wealthiest men; in England art thou born, but it is said that thou art but ill governed, for Trick, who hath much money, is made regent of thy staple; at his will he taketh it to foreign lands, where he purchaseth his own gain to our harm. O fair, O white, O delightful one, the love of thee stings and binds, so that the hearts of those who make merchandise of thee cannot escape. ”

“ But now the grey nuns are stealing our lovers from us. They are easy mistresses, exacting neither many attentions nor long service and sometimes men are base enough to prefer them to us. We demand justice. Punish their insolence, that henceforward they may not raise their eyes to those who were created for us and for whom we alone are made.”
Venus then bids a grey nun speak and the grey nun’s words are dry and to the point:
Has not nature made us too for love? ”

“ And we have firm hope in God and in your great bounty that you will not take it ill that this thing be not done to the peril of our souls; for to entertain and to begin such a new charge in such a small place, a charge which would endure and would be demanded for ever afterwards, would be too great a danger to your soul, my Lady, in the sight of God, wherefrom God by His grace defend you! Our most blessed Lady, may God give you a long and happy life, to His pleasure and to the aid and solace of ourselves and of other poor servants of God on earth ”

“ Rents and services are only outside things; an estate book only describes routine. It would be idle to try to picture the life of a university from a study of its lecture list, and it is equally idle to try and describe the life of Bodo from the estate book of his masters. It is no good taking your meals in the kitchen if you never talk to the servants. This is true, and to arrive at Bodo's thoughts and feelings and holiday amusements we must bid goodbye to Abbot Irminon's estate book, and peer into some very dark corners indeed ”

“ The historian who wishes to reach beyond accuracy to truth must warm those invisible writings of his at the flame of literature, as well as at his own life. He must vitalise the visitation reports for himself (it is not difficult, they move and live almost without him) ; but he must make use also of the life of writers long since dead. There is hardly a branch of literature which has not its contribution for him. ”

“ The staple where thou dwellest is never free of fraud and trickery, wherewith man wounds his conscience. O wool, Christians no less than pagans and Saracens seek to have thee and confess thee. O wool, we should not be silent about thy doings in strange lands; for the merchants of all countries, in time of peace, in time of war, come to seek thee by reason of their great love, for whoever else hath enemies thou art never without good friends, who have given themselves to thy profitable service. ”

“ 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. ”