Eileen Power

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is perhaps not surprising that abbesses and prioresses should have found it hard to change the way of life, which they had led before they took the veil and which they saw all around them, when they rode about in the world. Carousings, gay garments, pet animals, frivolous amusements, many guests, superfluous servants and frequent escapes to the freedom of the road, are found not only at the greater houses but even at those which were small and poor. The diverting history of the flea and the gout shows that the luxurious abbess was already a byword early in the thirteenth century. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ When the salutary labour of hand and brain ordained by St Benedict no longer found a place in his life, he was delivered over bound to an endless routine of dorter, church, frater and cloister, which stretched from day to night and from night to day again. For nuns the monotony was even greater, for they had lost more completely than monks their early tradition of learning and they could not pass happy years in study at a university (as a few monks from great abbeys were able to do) , nor find some solace in exercising the functions of a priest ”

“ 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 ”

“ The artisans and labourers on her land lived by her patronage. All along the muddy highroads the beggars coming to town passed word to each other that there stood a nunnery in the meadows, where they might have scraps left over from the convent meals and perhaps beer and a pair of shoes. The head of a house, indeed, was an important person from many points of view, as a neighbour, as a landlord and as a philanthropist. ”

“ They ought to sit at home, spinning and sewing and mending their wimples: instead they hurry from stall to stall, spending their money on fine cloths and collars. The Pope would do well if he enclosed them. The young nuns are the worst of all; they are forever pestering their abbesses for leave to go out; they will have all their elders at their will, cellaress, treasuress, subprioress. Everything is topsy-turvy now and all are in the same rank, those who are lettered and those who are not; the young desire to have a finger in every pie. Even their vow of poverty these nuns will not keep. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Your grace, your elegance, your fine manners will always bring you lovers; keep them, but do not drive from my court these modest nuns, who serve me with so much constancy and whose hearts burn for me the more ardently, owing to the constraint under which they live. You are finer and know better, perhaps, how to entertain; but sometimes the labourer’s humble hackney goes further than the palfrey of the knight. It lies with yourselves alone to [Pg 541] keep your lovers. Imitate your rivals and be gentle and gracious as they are and you will not have to fear for the fidelity of a single lord. ”

“ The early Benedictines were great missionaries, ardent scholars, enlightened landowners and even energetic statesmen. The early Cistercians made the woods and wildernesses, in which they settled, blossom like a rose. But apart from the social services thus rendered to civilisation, the threefold division of monastic life into prayer, study and labour was vital to monasticism itself, since it afforded the essential element of variety in routine. ”

“ Serious charges of immorality are mingled with trivialities, much as the chroniclers of the period mingle battles, monastic gossip and sea monsters cast upon the shore. The beer is too light; swine do come into the churchyard and root up the earth and befoul the churchyard; all corrections are made with so great harshness and so much ado that charity and loving-kindness are banished from the house; the nuns do hold drinkings of evenings in the guestchamber, even after Compline; the prioress has pawned the jewels of the house ”

“ If the community concerned were other than a nunnery ostensibly following a strict rule, we should hardly consider the faults to be faults at all. The immorality, bad temper and financial mismanagement revealed at some houses would be reprehensible in all communities at all ages; but in themselves boarders, pretty clothes, pet dogs and attendance at christenings are not heinous crimes. It is necessary, in dealing with medieval nuns as with all other subjects, to preserve a sense of proportion and a firm hold upon human nature. ”

“ Other instances of nunnery disputes may be quoted, among which Peckham’s letter to the Holy Sepulchre, Canterbury, is a good example: “If there be any nun above you who is quarrelsome and sharp and is of custom unbearable towards her sisters, we order her to be separated from the communion of the convent according to the form of the rule, and to be kept in some solitary place (so that meanwhile no man or woman have conversation with or access to her) until she shall be brought back to humility of spirit and show herself amiable and devout to all. ”

“ It is strange that in England there is no record of any house which can compare with Gandersheim, Hohenburg or Helfta; no record of any nun to compare with the learned women and great mystics who have been mentioned. ”