ROUTINE AND REACTION

St Benedict’s common sense is nowhere more strikingly shown than in his division of the routine of monastic life between the three occupations of divine service, manual labour and reading. Not only has this arrangement the merit of developing the different sides of men’s natures, spirit, body and brain, but it fulfils a deep psychological necessity. The essence of communal life is regularity, but no human being can subsist without a further ingredient of variety. St Benedict knew well enough that unless he provided the stimulus of change within the Rule, outraged nature would seek for it outside. Hence the careful adjustment of occupations to combine variety with regularity. The services were the supreme joy and duty of the monk and nun and the life of the convent was centred in its church. But these services were not excessively long and were divided from each other by periods of sleep by night and of work, or study, or meditation by day, after the manner which Crashaw inimitably set forth in his Description of a Religious House and Condition of Life:

A hasty portion of prescribÈd sleep;
Obedient slumbers, that can wake and weep,
And sing, and sigh, and work, and sleep again;
Still rolling a round sphere of still-returning pain.
Hands full of hearty labours; pains that pay
And prize themselves; do much, that more they may,
And work for work, not wages; let tomorrow’s
New drops wash off the sweat of this day’s sorrows.
A long and daily-dying life, which breathes
A respiration of reviving deaths.The monastic day was divided into seven offices and the time at which these were said varied slightly according to the season of the year. The night office began about 2 a.m., when the nuns rose from their beds and entered their choir, where Matins were said, followed immediately by Lauds. The next service was Prime, said at 6 or 7 a.m., and then throughout the day came Tierce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline, with an interval of about three hours between them. The time of these monastic Hours (as they were called) changed gradually after the time of St Benedict, and later None, which should have been at 3 p.m., was said at noon, leaving the nuns from about 12 midday to 5 p.m. in the winter and 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. in the summer for work. Compline, the last service of all, was said at 7 p.m. in winter and at 8 p.m. in summer, after which the nuns were supposed to retire immediately to bed in their dorter, where (in the words of the Syon Rule) “none shal jutte up on other wylfully, nor spyt up on the stayres, goyng up or down, nor in none other place repreuably, but yf they trede it out forthwyth”![907] They had in all about eight hours sleep, broken in the middle by the night service; and they had three meals, a light repast of bread and beer after Prime in the morning, a solid dinner to the accompaniment of reading aloud, and a short supper immediately after vespers at 5 or 6 p.m.[908]

Except for certain specified periods of relaxation, strict silence was supposed to be observed for a large part of the day, and if it were necessary for the nuns to communicate with each other, they were urged to do so in an abbreviated form, or by signs. Thus in 1319 Bishop Stapeldon of Exeter wrote to the nuns of Polsloe

The nuns of Syon had a table of signs drawn up for them by Thomas Betsone, one of the brethren of the house, a person of extraordinary ingenuity and no sense of humour[910]. The sort of dumb pandemonium which went on at the Syon dinner table must have been more mirth provoking than speech. The sister who desired fish would “wagge her hande displaied sidelynges in manere of a fissh taill,” she who wanted milk would “draw her left little fynger in maner of mylkyng”; for mustard one would “hold her nose in the uppere part of her righte fiste and rubbe it,” and another for salt would “philippe with her right thombe and his forefynger ouere the left thombe”; another, desirous of wine, would “meue her fore fynger vp and downe vpon the ende of her thombe afore her eghe”; and the guilty sacristan, struck by the thought that she had not provided incense for the mass, would “put her two fyngers vnto her nose thirles (nostrils).” There are no less than 106 signs in the table and on the whole it is not surprising that the Rule enjoins that “it is never leful to use them witheoute some reson and profitable nede, ffor ofte tyme more hurt ethe an euel sygne than an euel worde, and more offence it may be to God”[911].

PLATE VI

DOMINICAN NUNS IN QUIRE

The time set apart in the monastic day for work was divided between brain work and manual labour. In the golden days of monasticism the time devoted to reading enabled the monasteries to become homes of learning; splendid libraries were collected for the use of the monks and in the scriptorium men skilled in writing and in illumination copied books and maintained the great series of chronicles, in which the middle ages live again. The nuns of certain Anglo-Saxon houses, and of certain continental houses at a later date, had some reputation for learning. In early days, too, the hours devoted to labour were spent in the fields, or more often in the workshops of the house; and those who had been skilled in crafts in the world continued to exercise them. The nuns of Anglo-Saxon England were famed for the needlework executed during the hours of work. Besides this labour the Rule ordained that the monks and nuns should take it in turns to serve their brethren in the kitchen every week and an eleventh century chronicler records “in the monasteries I saw counts cooking in the kitchens and margraves leading the pigs out to feed”[912]. It was by reason of this intellectual and manual labour that the early monks rendered, as it were incidentally, an immense service to civilisation. Their aim and purpose was the salvation of their souls, but because the Rule under which they lived declared that labour was one of the means to that salvation, they added many of the merits of the active to those of the contemplative life. 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.

The benefits of routine are obvious: any life which exists for the regular performance of specific duties, above all any life which is carried on in a community, must depend very largely upon fixed hours and carefully organised occupations. The Rule of St Benedict made a serious attempt to render monastic life possible and beneficial to the average human being, by the combination of regularity and variety which has been described above. There was constant change of occupation, but there was no waste and no muddle. It is extremely significant that monasticism broke down directly St Benedict’s careful adjustment of occupations became upset. With the growing wealth of the monasteries manual labour became undignified; some orders relied on lay brethren, the majority on servants. Gone was the day when counts cooked in the kitchens; in the fourteenth century monks and nuns paid large wages to their cooks and even in a small nunnery it was regarded as legitimate cause for complaint not to have a convent servant. Learning also fell away after the growth of the universities in the twelfth century; the poverty of the monastic chronicles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is one witness to the fact; the necessity to send injunctions to nunneries first in French and then in English, as the knowledge of Latin and then of French died out in them, is another. Of the three occupations, learning, manual labour and divine service, only the last was left. Is it surprising that that also began to be looked upon as a weary and monotonous routine, when the monks and nuns came to it, not fresh from the stimulus of study or of labour, but from indolence, or from the worldly pleasures of the tavern, the hunt, the gambling board, the flirtation, the gossip, wherewith they often filled the spare time, which the wise Benedictine Rule would have filled with a change of occupation?

All safeguards against a petrifying routine were now broken down. We are wont to-day to look with disquiet upon the life of a clerk in an office, endlessly adding up rows of figures, with an interval for luncheon; but the clerk has his evenings, his Sundays, his annual holiday, his life as son, or husband, or father. For the medieval monk there was no such relaxation. 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; moreover women were more apt even than men to enter the religious life without any real vocation for it, since there was hardly any other career for unmarried ladies of gentle birth. It would be an exaggeration to say that this uneventful life was necessarily distasteful. To the majority it was doubtless a happy existence; monotony appears peace to those who love it.

No cruel guard of diligent cares, that keep
Crown’d woes awake, as things too wise for sleep:
But reverent discipline and religious fear,
And soft obedience, find sweet biding here;
Silence and sacred rest; peace and pure joys;
Kind loves keep house, lie close and make no noise.

Here behind the walls of the convent “a common grayness silvered everything” and all care was remote, save that, never to be escaped by womankind, of making two ends meet.

Nevertheless the danger was there. Only a minority, one may be sure, revolted actively against the duties which are sometimes, most significantly, called “the burthen of religion”[913]. That minority is known to us, for the sinner and the apostate, whether inspired by lust or by levity, mere victims to their own weakness, or active rebels against an intolerable dulness, have left their mark in official documents. But the number can only be guessed at of those others, who carried in their hearts for all their staid lives the complaint of the Latin song:

Sono tintinnabulum
Repeto psalterium,
Gratum linquo somnium
Cum dormire cuperem,
Heu misella!
Nichil est deterius tali vita
Cum enim sim petulans et lasciva[914].
The bell I am ringing,
The psalter am singing,
And from my bed creeping
Who fain would be sleeping,
Misery me!
O what can be worse than this life that I dree,
When naughty and lovelorn and wanton I be?

“Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room” is a charming justification of the sonnet, but it is neither good psychology nor good history.

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. Even to those no longer young happiness would depend at the best upon the fostering of a quick spiritual life, at the worst upon lack of imagination and of vitality. The undaunted daughter of desires, the man in whom religion burned as a strong fire, could find happiness in the life. But lesser brethren could not. Ennui, more deadly even than sensual temptation, was the devil who tormented them. So in the convents of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a sympathetic eye and an understanding mind will diagnose the fundamental disease as reaction against routine by men and women in whom Nature, expelled by a pitchfork, had returned a thousand times more strong.

This reaction from routine took several forms. It is somewhere at the bottom of all the more serious sins, which the pitchfork method of attaining salvation brought upon human creatures with bodies as well as souls. In this chapter, however, we are concerned not with these graver faults of immorality, but with things less gross, and yet in their cumulative effect no less fatal to monastic life. Such was the neglect of that praise of God, which was the primary raison d’Être of the monk and nun, so that services sometimes became empty forms, to be hurried through with scant devotion, occasionally with scandalous irreverence. Such was the deadly sin of accidie, the name of which is forgotten today, though the thing itself is with us still. Such were the nerves on edge, the small quarrels, the wear and tear of communal life; such also the gay clothes, the pet animals and the worldly amusements, with which nuns sought to enliven their existence. For all these things were in some sense a reaction from routine.

Carelessness in the performance of the monastic hours was an exceedingly common fault during the later middle ages and often finds a place in episcopal injunctions. Sometimes monks and nuns “cut” the services, as at Peterborough in 1437, when only ten or twelve of the 44 monks came on ordinary days to church[915], or at Nuncoton in 1440, where many of the nuns failed to come to compline, but busied themselves instead in various domestic offices, or wandered idly in the garden[916]. Often they came late to matins, a fault which was common in nunneries, for the nuns were prone to sit up drinking and gossiping after compline, instead of going straight to bed[917]; and these nocturnal carousals, however harmless in themselves, did not conduce to wakefulness at one a.m. Consequently they were somewhat sleepy, quodammodo sompnolentes, at matins and found an almost Johnsonian difficulty in getting up early. At Stainfield in 1519 Atwater found that half an hour sometimes elapsed between the last stroke of the bell and the beginning of the office and that some of the nuns did not sing but dozed, partly because they had not enough candles, partly because they went to bed late; they also performed the offices very negligently[918]. But most often of all the fault of monks and nuns lay in gabbling through the services as quickly as possible in order to get them over. They left out syllables at the beginning and end of words, they omitted the dipsalma or pausacio between two verses, so that one side of the choir was beginning the second half, before the other side had finished the first; they skipped sentences; they mumbled and slurred over what should have been “entuned in their nose ful semely.”

Episcopal injunctions not infrequently animadvert against this irreverent treatment of the offices. At Catesby in 1442 Isabel Benet asserted that “divine service is chanted at so great speed that no pauses are made,” and at Carrow in 1526 several of the older nuns complained that the sisters sang and said the service more quickly than they ought, without due pauses. A strong injunction sent to Nuncoton in 1531 declares that the hours have been “doon with grete festinacon, haste and without deuocon, contrarye to the good manner and ordre of religion”[919]. Indeed so common was the fault that the Father of Evil was obliged to employ a special devil called Tittivillus, whose sole business it was to collect the dropped syllables and gabbled verses and carry them back to his master in a sack. One rhyme distinguishes carefully between the contents of his sack:

Hii sunt qui psalmos corrumpunt nequiter almos,
Dangler, cum jasper, lepar, galper quoque draggar,
Momeler, forskypper, forereynner, sic et overleper,
Fragmina verborum Tutivillus colligit horum[920].

A holy Cistercian abbot once interviewed Tittivillus; this is the tale as the nuns of Syon read it in their Myroure of Oure Ladye:

Carelessness in the singing of the services was not, however, the most serious result of reaction against routine. If the men and women of sensibility failed to keep intelligence active in the pursuit of spiritual or temporal duties, if they cared no longer to use brain and spirit as they performed the daily round, accidia[922], that dread disease, half ennui and half melancholia, which, though common to all men, was recognised as the peculiar menace of the cloister, lay ever in wait for them. Against this sin of intellectual and spiritual sloth all the great churchmen of the middle ages inveigh, recognising in it the greatest menace of religious life, from which all other sins may follow[923]. If accidia once laid hold upon a monk he was lost; ceasing to perform with active mind his religious duties, he would find them a meaningless, endless routine, filling him with irritation, with boredom and with a melancholy against which he might struggle in vain. The fourth century cenobite Cassian has left a detailed description of the effects of accidia in the cloister, declaring that it was specially disturbing to a monk about the sixth hour “like some fever which seizes him at stated times,” so that many declared that this was “the sickness that destroyeth in the noon day,” spoken of in the ninetieth psalm[924]. Many centuries later Dante crystallised it in four unsurpassable lines. As he passed through the fifth circle of hell he saw a black and filthy marsh, in which struggled the souls of those who had been overcome by anger; but deeper than the angry were submerged other souls, whose sobs rose in bubbles through the muddy water and who could only gurgle their confession in their throats. These were the souls of men who had fallen victims to the sin of accidia in their lives

But the working of the poison is most brilliantly described by Chaucer, in his Persones Tale:

He proceeds to describe further symptoms,

and concludes thus,

This masterly diagnosis of the sin of spiritual sloth and its branches is illustrated by several stories which bear unmistakably the impress of a dreadful truth. Johann Busch’s account of his early temptations and doubts has often been quoted. A strong character, he overcame the temptation and emerged stronger[927]. But Caesarius of Heisterbach has two anecdotes of weaker brethren which show how exactly Chaucer described the anguish of a troubled heart. The first is of particular interest to us because it concerns a woman:

The other anecdote tells of an old lay brother, who at the end of a long life fell into despair:

Only a small minority, it is needless to say, was driven to this anguish of despair. For the majority the strain of conventual life found outlet, not in these black moods, but in a tendency to bicker one with another, to get excitement by exaggerating the small events of daily existence into matter for jealousies and disputes. For the strain was a double one; to monotony was added the complete lack of privacy, the wear and tear of communal life; not only always doing the same thing at the same time, but always doing it in company with a number of other people. The beauty of human fellowship, the happy friendliness of life in a close society are too obvious to need description.

For if heuene be on this erthe · and ese to any soule,
It is in cloistere or in scole · by many skilles I fynde;
For in cloistre cometh no man · to chide ne to fi?te,
But alle is buxomnesse there and bokes · to rede and to lerne,
In scole there is scorne · but if a clerke wil lerne,
And grete loue and lykynge · for eche of hem loueth other[930].But it is necessary also to remember the other side of the picture. Personal idiosyncrasies were no less apt to jar in the middle ages than they are today; there are unfortunates who are born to be unpopular; there are tempers which will lose themselves; and in conventual life there is no balm of solitude for frayed nerves. These nuns were very human people; a mere accident of birth had probably sent them to a convent rather than to the care of husband and children in a manor-hall; just as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a mere accident of birth made one son the squire, another the soldier and a third the parson. No special saintliness of disposition was theirs and no miracle intervened to render them immune from tantrums when they crossed the convent threshold. Nothing is at once more striking and more natural than the prevalence of little quarrels, sometimes growing into serious disputes, among the inmates of monasteries. Browning’s Spanish Cloister was no mere figment of his inventive brain; indeed it is, if anything, less startling than the medieval Langland’s description of the convent, where Wrath was cook and where all was far from “buxomnesse.” Certainly Langland’s indictment is a violent one; the satirist must darken his colours to catch the eye; and, had Chaucer been the painter, we might have had a dispute couched in more courteous terms and more “estatlich of manere.” But the satirist’s account is significant, because his very office demands that he shall exaggerate only what exists; his words are a smoke which cannot rise without fire. So Langland may speak through the lips of Wrath, with two white eyes:

I have an aunte to nonne · and an abbesse bothe,
Hir were leuere swowe or swelte · Þan suffre any peyne.
I haue be cook in hir kichyne · and Þe couent serued
Many monthes with hem · and with monkes bothe.
I was Þe priouresses potagere · and other poure ladyes
And made hem ioutes of iangelynge · Þat dame Iohanne was a bastard,
And dame Clarice a kni?tes dou?ter · ac a kokewolde was hire syre,
And dame Peronelle a prestes file · Priouresse worth she neuere
For she had childe in chirityme · all owre chapitere it wiste ·
Of wycked wordes I, Wrath · here wortes imade,
Til “thow lixte” and “thow lixte” lopen oute at ones,
And eyther hitte other · vnder the cheke;
Hadde thei had knyves, by Cryst · her eyther had killed other[931].

From “thow lixte” to “Gr-r-r you swine” how little change!

Sober records bear out Langland’s contention that Wrath was at home in nunneries. Some of the worst cases have already been described; election disputes, disputes arising from a prioress’s favouritism, Margaret Wavere dragging her nuns about the choir by their hair, and screaming insults at them, Katherine Wells hitting them on the head with fists and feet[932]. Doubtless quarrels seldom got as far as blows; but bad temper and wordy warfare were common. Insubordination was sometimes at the root of the discord; nuns refused to submit meekly to correction after the proclamation of their faults in chapter, or to obey their superiors. The words of another satirist show that the monastic vow of obedience sometimes sat lightly upon their shoulders:

Also another lady there was
That hy?t dame dysobedyent
And sche set now?t by her priores.
Ans than me thow?t alle was schent,
For sugettys schulde euyr be dylygent
Bothe in worde, in wylle and dede,
To plese her souerynes wyth gode entent,
And hem obey, ellys god forbede.
And of alle the defawtes that I cowde se
Thorow? schewyng of experience,
Hyt was one of the most that grevyd me,
The wantyng of obedyence
For hyt schulde be chese in consciens
Alle relygius rule wytnesseth the same
And when I saw her in no reverence,
I my?t no lenger abyde for schame,
For they setten not by obedyence.
And than for wo myne hert gan blede
Ne they hadden her in no reuerence,
But few or none to her toke hede[933].Again the colours are darkened, but the eyes of the satirist had seen.

At St Mary’s, Winchester, insubordination was evidently the chief fault. William of Wykeham writes to the Abbess:

neglect the rule of St Benedict and other due observances. The Abbess is warned to punish the nuns and to enforce the rule more firmly than heretofore and to furnish the Bishop with the names of rebels. At the same time he addresses a letter to the nuns bidding them show obedience to their superiors and receive correction humbly “henceforth blaming no one therefore nor altercating one with another, saying that these or those were badly or excessively punished”[934]. It would seem that discipline had become lax in the convent and that the Bishop’s attempt to introduce reform by the agency of the abbess was meeting with opposition from unruly nuns. Visitors were forced constantly to make the double injunction that nuns should show obedience to their superiors and that those superiors should be equable and not harsh in correction:

Also we enioyne you, pryoresse, ... that oftentymes ye come to the chapitere for to correcte the defautes of your susters, and that as wele then as att other tymes and places ye treyte your said susters moderlie wyth all resonable fauour; and that ye rebuke ne repreue thaym cruelly ne feruently at no tyme, specyally in audience of seculeres, and that ye kepe pryvye fro seculeres your correccyons and actes of your chapitere.... Also we enioyne yowe of the couent and eueryche oon of yowe vndere peyn of imprisonyng, that mekely and buxumly ye obeye the prioresse procedyng discretely in hire correccyone, and also that in euery place ye do hire dewe reuerence, absteynyng yowe fro all elacyone of pryde and wordes of disobeysaunce or debate[935].