Eileen Power

THE MACHINERY OF REFORM

And whan they had resceyuede [t]her charge They spared nether mud ne myer, But roden over Inglonde brode and large, To seke owte nunryes in every schyre. Why I can’t be a Nun (15th century).

A community, living together under a somewhat rigid rule and obliged to concern itself with a large measure of temporal business, has to face many difficulties and abuses. The strictness of its discipline and the prosperity of its affairs will necessarily depend very largely upon the character and intelligence of the individuals who compose it. A diseased limb may corrupt the whole body politic; or on the other hand a low state of vitality in the body politic may render the limb liable to corruption. Again rule and routine inevitably tend in the course of time to become slackened, as human nature wins its way against the austerity of a primitive ideal. Every community, therefore, needs some sort of machinery on the one hand for keeping itself up to the mark and on the other for the external inspection and regulation of its affairs. The monastic houses of the middle ages were provided with internal machinery for self-reform in the daily meeting of the whole convent in the chapter house, to transact business and to denounce and punish faults. The external machinery was provided by an elaborate system of visitation by ecclesiastical authorities, sometimes by a parent house, sometimes by the chapter-general of the order, sometimes by the bishop of the diocese; by means of such visitation breaches of discipline and morality could be rectified and the temporal business of the house could be scrutinised for evidence of mismanagement.

The daily routine of the chapter house is too well known to need a detailed description here. The whole monastic community was bound by the rule to meet every day, usually after Prime, in the chapter house on the east side of the cloister, with the head of the house (to use modern terminology) in the chair. At this meeting a chapter of the Rule was solemnly read, after which the corporate business of the house was discussed. Leases, sales, and corrodies were approved or disapproved, and the common seal of the convent was affixed to letters and grants, in the presence of all the monks or nuns. The neglect to transact common business by common advice in chapter was not infrequently a legitimate source of complaint by a convent against its superior. Besides temporal business of this kind, the moral and spiritual welfare of the convent was considered. Wrongdoers publicly accused themselves of fault, or were publicly accused by their fellows, and correction was administered by a “discipline,” or by some other penance. By means of the chapter, a convent of reasonable seriousness and goodwill could keep up its own standard of life and control its own backsliders.

Undoubtedly the chapter was a useful instrument of self-reform, but its efficacy obviously depended entirely on whether the convent as a whole were desirous of keeping the Rule and punishing black sheep. If the number of sheep who were black, or even grey, preponderated and if laxity were general in the community, the chapter would not concern itself to raise its own standard. From the frequent injunctions of medieval bishops that the daily meeting in the chapter should not be omitted, it would appear that not only the public transaction of business, but also the public confession and punishment of faults was sometimes neglected. Moreover, unless entered into with modesty and a sense of responsibility, the right of every member to charge another with fault was a sure source of discord, for it certainly provided ample opportunity for frail human nature to exhibit malice. The younger nuns were apt to indulge in what their elders regarded as impudent criticism; private grudges found an opportunity to vent themselves; and rival cliques sometimes turned the meeting into an unseemly hubbub. It was perhaps for this reason that the Abbot of St Albans, visiting Sopwell in 1338, decreed that

for the avoidance of evils and for the promotion and maintenance of peace and charity, but three voices shall henceforth be heard in chapter, to wit those of the president, of the subprioress or of another official of the order, and of her who shall be challenged or accused of a fault[1495].

Another common abuse was the gossip to which such revelations in chapter sometimes gave rise, gossip which was not confined to the ears of the nuns. Bishop Flemyng’s injunction to Elstow in 1421-2 “that the Abbess shall narrowly espy what secrets of chapter be in any way disclosed, punishing severely also those who trangress in this matter”[1496] is only one of many similar injunctions; and visitation reports sometimes show considerable interference by lay folk in cloister disputes. During the election quarrel which raged at Nunkeeling from 1316 to 1319 Archbishop Melton accused certain nuns of revealing the secrets of the chapter to seculars and adversaries outside, and during a similar quarrel at Keldholme a number of laymen were cited, together with certain nuns, for obstructing the appointment of a new prioress in 1308[1497]. One is left with the impression that the nuns called in the support of their friends and kinsfolk in the world, if they found themselves at odds with their Prioress. In the feud between the wicked Prioress of Littlemore and her nuns (1518) both parties had adherents in Oxford: the Prioress brought in her friends to subdue the nuns and the nuns fled to theirs, when they could no longer bear the Prioress[1498]. At Hampole, where Archbishop Bowet found the Prioress and nuns out of all charity with each other in 1411, he even had to ordain that no nun, having any complaint against the Prioress, was to ignore the Archbishop’s authority and call in the aid of any secular or regular person. If any sister wished to complain and could find another to join with her, she was to have access to the Archbishop, the necessary expenses being given her by the Prioress. If the Prioress refused leave or delayed it beyond three days, the two nuns were to have access to the Archbishop, without incurring the charge of apostasy[1499]. Sometimes the revelation of convent secreta was made in a spirit of pure gossip, rather than with the object of obtaining external aid; the complaint of the nuns of Catesby in 1442 that the Prioress’ mother “knows well the secrets of the chapter and publishes them in the town; so also does the Prioress publish them,” and that of the nuns of Gracedieu in 1440-1 that “the Prioress makes the secrets of their religious life common among the secular folk that sit at table with her” are typical of many others[1500].

The meeting of the chapter, therefore, though a useful instrument of self-reform, when the necessary goodwill was present, was liable to abuses. It was apt to be neglected; it gave rise to ill-feeling; and it sometimes led to undesirable gossip, both inside and outside the house. It is obvious, moreover, that a measure of external control was necessary to keep up the standard of life in the many monastic houses of Europe and to reform common breaches of discipline. This external control was exercised in the middle ages by three distinct authorities: (1) a parent house, (2) the chapter general of the Order and (3) the diocesan of the see.

Certain houses, which had founded other houses as offshoots or colonies, retained the right to visit and reform their daughter-houses. Some monasteries had small outlying priories, known as “cells,” founded originally to look after distant estates of the house; sometimes such cells contained only one or two monks, living in an ordinary dwelling house, and had no real existence apart from the parent house. Sometimes, however, the cells grew and achieved an independent existence, though still maintaining their connection with their founders. This frequently happened to the English cells of foreign houses, and certain cells of English houses also grew into independent priories. Among nunneries, originally founded as cells of foreign houses, may be mentioned Lyminster in Sussex. Few English nunneries had cells; but Seton in Coupland was a cell of Nunburnholme. The connection between mother house and cell is illustrated by a licence granted by Archbishop Greenfield to the Prioress of Nunburnholme in 1313 to visit, “your cell of Seton in Coupland, which is subject to your monastery,” taking with her two honest nuns of the house, in order to visit the nuns of Seton, and returning without delay[1501]. The visitation of the cell was usually included in that of the mother house and the larger independent cells were often subject to episcopal visitation.

Rather different in origin from a cell was a house founded by a monastery, less as a colony than as a distinct but dependent institution. The most interesting example of this is provided by the great Abbey of St Albans, which founded two nunneries, St Mary de PrÉ and Sopwell. Both the nunneries were always very dependent on St Albans and are often mentioned in the chronicles of that house. St Mary de PrÉ, having been founded in the twelfth century as a hospital for leprous women living under a rule, became later an ordinary nunnery, containing nuns, and both lay sisters and lay brothers; in the time of Abbot Thomas de la Mare (1349-96) the rank of sister was abolished and a higher standard of education was insisted upon for the nuns, who were to profess the rule of St Benedict[1502]. Sopwell was also founded in the twelfth century as a Benedictine nunnery[1503]. In both houses nuns were admitted only by consent of the Abbot of St Albans, who also claimed the right to appoint their prioress. In both the temporal affairs of the convent were administered by wardens, appointed by the Abbot from among the monks of the abbey[1504]. The close connection was not always maintained without friction. At Sopwell the nuns more than once tried to elect their own prioress and seem to have found the Abbot somewhat high-handed[1505]. In 1481 Abbot Wallingford sent the archdeacon and subprior of the house to remove the prioress from office on account of her age and infirmities and to put Elizabeth Webbe in her place, but some years later the archdeacon deposed Elizabeth, whereupon she brought an action against him in the Court of Arches and was reinstated. Thereupon “two monks of St Albans, sent by the archdeacon, came to the nunnery, broke down Elizabeth’s door with an iron bar, beat her and put her in prison,” after which she appealed to Archbishop Morton as Chancellor[1506]. She may have been at the bottom of the famous letter written by Morton to the Abbot of St Albans in 1490, accusing him of changing prioresses at PrÉ and at Sopwell as he pleased and deposing good and religious persons for the benefit of the evil and vicious, and stating that the Prioress of St Mary de PrÉ, Helen Germyn, was a married woman who had left her husband for a lover and that she and some of her nuns were leading immoral lives with monks of St Albans[1507]. The same letter accused the monks put in as wardens of using their opportunities to dissipate the goods of the house, and the turbulent Prioress of Sopwell, Elizabeth, is found complaining to the Chancellor that a deed of lease by the convent had been secretly altered to their disadvantage by their “keeper” and his clerk, who had been bribed by a tenant[1508].

It is difficult to say how much truth there was in these charges and they certainly do not seem to show overmuch care for the reform of the daughter houses by their august parent. But it would not be fair to judge St Albans by this quarrel at the end of its career, and there is evidence to show that past abbots tried conscientiously to maintain good order in the dependent nunneries. Among other rights the abbot possessed that of visitation, and chance has fortunately preserved an interesting set of injunctions sent by Abbot Michael to Sopwell, after a visitation held in 1338[1509]. The orders given to the Warden of Sopwell by Abbot Thomas (1349-96) have also been preserved in the Gesta Abbatum[1510].

Another nunnery founded by a famous abbey of monks was St Michael’s, Stamford, founded by William of Waterville, Abbot of Peterborough in 1155; and this house remained for long dependent upon its parent abbey[1511]. In its early years it was customary for the prioress in the name of the chapter to pay an annual pension of a mark of silver to the Abbot and to make formal recognition of subjection, once every year, on the morrow of the Feast of St Michael. The Abbot had the right of receiving the profession of the sisters and his consent was necessary to the election of the prioress. He also had the appointment of the warden or prior, who looked after the temporalities of the house. In 1270 Bishop Gravesend sanctioned the personal visitation of the house once a year by the abbot and two or three monks, with power to correct and reform, and the Register of the Abbey records such visitations in 1297, 1300, 1303 and 1323. The tendency was, however, for the diocesan to oust the abbey from the control of the house; from time to time he claimed and exercised the right of instituting the warden, and from the end of the thirteenth century he regularly instituted the prioress. From this time the bishops’ registers show that the regulation and reform of the house were in the hands of the bishop and it was duly visited by Alnwick in the fifteenth century. The accounts of St Michael’s, Stamford, show that the nuns still had dealings with the Abbey; but Peterborough did not retain over this nunnery the exclusive rights of appointment and visitation, which St Albans, owing to its exemption from diocesan control, exercised to the end over Sopwell and St Mary de PrÉ. There is no mention of either of these houses in the episcopal registers.

Nunneries subject to visitation by a parent abbey were highly exceptional. Another exceptional method of external control was visitation by the chapter-general of the order, to which the nunnery belonged. Nuns as well as monks were constantly legislated for by these chapters-general, but they were very rarely visited, because (as we shall see) they were almost all subject to visitation by the bishop of their diocese. A trace of visitation by order of the chapter-general seems to survive in a letter from the Abbot of Stratford (4 December, 1491), preserved among the Cistercian documents in the archives at Dijon[1512]. The Abbot relates that he had visited Cokehill, found it in a very unsatisfactory condition and tried in vain to depose the prioress; at other times, however, Cokehill was visited by the Bishops of Worcester. The Cistercian order claimed exemption from episcopal visitation for male houses and we shall see that it made occasional attempts to exert its right over nunneries too.

By far the most common method of reforming nunneries from outside was by means of the control of the bishop of the diocese[1513]. It is an interesting fact that not even the greatest and most important Benedictine abbeys of women, such as Shaftesbury, Amesbury and Romsey, succeeded in obtaining an exemption from episcopal jurisdiction such as was enjoyed by St Albans and some other houses; and nunneries belonging to “exempt” orders were invariably under episcopal control. Bishops, who would never have dreamed of interfering with houses of Cistercian or Cluniac monks, visited the nuns of those orders as a matter of course and no objection was as a rule raised by the houses or by the orders. There is, it is true, one extremely interesting case in which this right of visitation was contested. In 1276 the nuns of Sinningthwaite contested the right of Archbishop Giffard of York to visit them and appealed against him to the Pope. Unfortunately the papal decision is not recorded, but as they were regularly visited until their dissolution, it was evidently against them. They possibly acted in collusion with the Cistercian abbots of their diocese, for in the same year Archbishop Giffard ordered them to have Friars Minor as their confessors, in spite of the inhibition of Cistercian abbots, who had no jurisdiction over them[1514]. The Cokehill case quoted above may represent a similar attempt of the Cistercian chapter-general to control a nunnery belonging to the order. For the historian of the English nunneries it is an exceedingly fortunate thing that the diocesans enjoyed this unchallenged right of visitation over almost all the nunneries in the kingdom; for the episcopal registers are the best source of monastic history and an exempt house (save when it was a famous abbey with a chronicle) is not infrequently a house without history, because without visitation records.

Since the periodical visitation by the diocesan was not only the main method of external control and reformation, but also incidentally gave rise to the records on which so much of this history of nunneries is based, it is worth while to study what exactly happened when a bishop, or his commissioners, came to inspect a nunnery. A regular routine was followed, which can easily be reconstructed from such full records as those kept by Bishop Alnwick of Lincoln[1515]. A formal summons was sent by the bishop to the house to be visited, warning the convent to hold itself in readiness for visitation by himself, or by one or more commissioners (named). On the appointed day he rode up to the house, accompanied by his clerks, and was met at the door of the church by the convent and conducted to the high altar. Here high mass was celebrated and the bishop, his clerks and the convent then adjourned to the chapter house for the business of visitation. The proceedings began with the preaching of a sermon by one of the bishop’s clerks; in houses of monks this was given in Latin until the end of our period, but knowledge of Latin had died out in nunneries before the fifteenth century and at Alnwick’s visitation the sermon was always preached in the vulgar tongue, on some such text as “Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion and behold king Solomon” (Cant. iii. 11), “Present your bodies a living sacrifice ... unto God” (Rom. xii. 1), or others less specifically appropriate to nuns. When this had been finished, the head of the house was required to present a certificate of receipt of the summons to visitation, which had to be drawn up according to a common form; and this not infrequently caused some delay in nunneries, where the inmates were often too ignorant of Latin to draw up the document correctly, unless they could call in the help of a clerk[1516]. The head of the house then produced the certificate of her election, confirmation by the diocesan and installation. Here again there was sometimes a delay, for prioresses were occasionally all at sea over documents and the necessary certificates were apt to be lacking at the last minute. Thus Dame Alice Dunwyche, the incompetent old Prioress of Gracedieu, was unable to produce any evidence of her confirmation in 1440 and the bishop had to appoint a special commissary to inquire into the matter; three months later the commissary examined two laymen brought by her as witnesses to her confirmation and installation[1517]. Meanwhile the visitation would continue; and the last formality to be observed was the production by the prioress of the foundation charter of the house, and the financial balance sheet (or status domus) for the year, this last an important item, since it enabled the bishop to see at a glance whether the financial affairs of the convent were in a satisfactory condition[1518]. This completed the preliminary business.

There now followed the main business of the visitation, the verbal examination of the nuns, in order to detect what abuses might stand in need of reform. Some abuses were patent to the eyes of the bishop; he could see garments in holes, and veils spread wide to show fair foreheads; he might have caught the scuttle of little dogs round corners as he rode in at the gates, or the whisk of a boarder’s murrey-coloured skirts behind a pillar. But the bulk of his information had to be obtained by careful cross-examination. The chapter house was cleared and he proceeded to question the nuns separately and in private, beginning with the prioress. Experience would teach him what were the most common breaches of discipline about which to make specific inquiry, but the nuns were encouraged to complain freely and the bishop’s clerks were kept busy scribbling notes of what each shrill tale-bearer told, to be written out afterwards under her name as detecta, or things discovered to the bishop.These detecta are an amusing commentary on life in a community and grist (it must be admitted) to the cynic’s mill. 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; sister so-and-so is defamed with sir so-and-so, sometime chaplain in that place and did conceive of him and bear a child; the buildings and tenements of the priory are dilapidated and many have fallen to the ground because of default in repairs; secular persons do lie in the dorter near the nuns; the nuns wear silken veils and robes; in the prioress’ default six nuns have now left the house in apostasy; the nuns frequent taverns and continually go into town without leave; silence is not observed in due places; the nuns do help secular folk in garnering their grain during the autumn season; the nuns are somewhat sleepy and come late to matins; the prioress does not render an account. Besides this infinite variety of complaint, the detecta exhibit also an infinite variety of motive, ranging from the disciplinarian’s zeal for reform to the private grudge of one individual against another. Sometimes the prioress and the nuns engage in mutual recriminations: she is harsh, or autocratic, or incompetent, they are lax or disobedient. Sometimes, on the other hand, a whole convent declares omnia bene. About some houses there still hangs a gentle atmosphere of peace and goodwill, others are rent with feud and petty bickering, others are in a condition of very lax morality. Human nature is truly unchanging, for all the types to be met with in a modern community, be it school or college, ship or government office, have their prototypes among these medieval monks and nuns. The amateur in human nature and the social historian alike may find in these little studied monastic detecta material of more absorbing interest and entertainment than is to be found in any other class of medieval documents.

After the bishop had heard the evidence of the nuns, given thus chaotically, the next business was to summarise, in some sort of order, the result of the inquiry. Such complaints of the nuns as the bishop considered worthy of notice were therefore classified as comperta, or things discovered by the bishop. If any member of the convent had been accused of serious breaches of the rule, she was summoned and the articles of accusation were read to her, and one by one she was invited to admit or to deny them. If she pleaded guilty, a penance was enjoined upon her. If she denied the charge, she was ordered to find a certain number of compurgators, who would swear to her innocence, and to produce them by a certain hour. The number of cases in which misconduct was sufficiently serious to make this necessary was not great. During Alnwick’s visitation it happened at Catesby, where the prioress and Isabel Benet were charged with immorality; the prioress denied the charge, but was unable to find four sisters to vouch for her and was adjudged guilty; Isabel Benet admitted misconduct, but not with the man whose name was coupled with hers, and she seems to have cleared herself of intercourse with him by the oath of four of the nuns[1519]. Usually the bishop showed himself lenient and allowed the agitated sinner an extension of time, if she could not find her compurgators within the period allotted to her[1520]. Whether this leniency is to be attributed to Christian charity, or to a desire to avoid scandal, is not clear; but if a prioress could not in two hours find four nuns to swear that she was not guilty, the value of their oaths, when they appeared after four hours’ canvassing, would not appear to be very great. Yet it is impossible not to understand the bishop’s desire to give a sinner the benefit of the doubt; fright and admonition alone might reform her, and it was exceedingly difficult to deal with a really bad prioress, when she could not be ejected from her order.

The bishop having dealt with individual offenders, the whole convent was summoned once more to the chapter house. The detecta and comperta were read aloud to the nuns and the bishop made verbal injunctions upon points which stood in special need of reform. He then dissolved the visitation; or, if any further business remained to be dealt with, prorogued it until a later date. Then he rode away again, and the fluttered convent settled down again to gossip and to await further injunctions. For the admonitions of the bishop at the visitation were only interim injunctions; his business was not finished until he had sent to the nunnery a set of written injunctions, embodying the reforms shown to be necessary by the comperta. These written injunctions were sent to the convent shortly after the visitation. Sometimes the clerk who brought them was ordered to expound them, or some reverend commissioner was sent to complete at the same time any special business arising out of the visitation. For instance, when Peckham sent a set of injunctions on April 20th, 1284, to the Priory of the Holy Sepulchre, Canterbury, which had been visited by commissioners on his behalf, he also addressed a letter to his commissary Martin, bidding him go in person to the house and expound the injunctions to the nuns. At the same time he was ordered (1) to appoint two coadjutresses to the prioress, who had been wasting the goods of the house; one of these was named and Martin was particularly warned against appointing another nun, who was said to be contumelious; (2) to beseech the Vicar of Wickham on behalf of the Archbishop to undertake the office of master of the house, so as to order its temporal affairs; (3) to receive the compurgation of Isabella de Scorue, who was defamed with the cellarer of the cathedral church and to forbid all the nuns access to the cathedral and the cellarer access to the priory[1521]. These pieces of specific and administrative business were not mentioned in Peckham’s more general injunctions. The injunctions were left in the hands of the convent and from that moment became as canonically binding upon the nuns, as was their original rule; any breach of them was liable to punishment by excommunication. The prioress was usually ordered to display them in a place where they could be easily read by the sisters, or to have them solemnly read aloud in chapter a certain number of times each year.

It was by this machinery of visitation and injunction that the diocesans endeavoured to control and reform the nunneries. But how far was the control adequate and the reform successful? It is obvious that the efficacy of the visitation system depended on three things: (1) the success of the cross-examination in drawing the real state of the convent from the nuns, (2) the regularity with which visitation was repeated, (3) the ability of the bishop to enforce his injunctions. As to the first of these conditions, the extent to which breaches of discipline came to light depended on the skill of the bishop in cross-examination on the one hand, and on the other the honesty of the nun’s desire to assist him. If a convent were seriously discontented the chances were that charges would be freely made: thus Alnwick experienced no difficulty in extracting an almost unanimous testimony against the Prioress of Catesby. But this did not always happen; as is shown by Gray’s letter bidding his commissary visit Markyate in 1433:

One of the matters thus concealed was the immorality of the prioress with the steward of the house, a fact which seems to have been notorious throughout the neighbourhood.

When such a grave defect could be successfully hidden from the bishop at his visitation, it is obvious that he could do little against a unanimous determination on the part of a convent to keep him in the dark. He was really dependent upon disagreement within the house; a conscientious nun or a nun with a grudge served him equally well. But it seems likely that concealment was not seldom practised, for, as Mr Coulton points out, “among the earliest and most frequently-repeated general chapter statutes are those providing against (a) conspiracy of the Religious against reformation, or (b) vengeance wreaked afterwards upon brethren who have dared to reveal the truth”[1523]. Some of the detecta at Alnwick’s visitation throw light on the efforts made (usually by the prioress) by conspiracy and by vengeance to prevent the nuns from testifying. At Catesby the evil prioress, Margaret Wavere, had excellent reasons for fearing a disclosure of her way of life. Sister Juliane Wolfe deposed “that the prioress did threaten that, if the nuns disclosed aught in the visitation, they should pay for it in prison.” Dame Isabel Benet (by no means a paragon of virtue herself) deposed that “in the last visitation which was made by the Lord William Graye, the prioress said that for a purse and certain moneys a clerk of the said bishop made known what every nun disclosed in that visitation.” Sister Alice Kempe said that “because the nuns at the last visitation disclosed what should be disclosed, the prioress whipped some of them.” All of these articles the prioress denied, but she was undoubtedly guilty and was unable to find compurgators[1524]. At Legbourne the prioress took a course with which one cannot avoid a certain sympathy. Dame Joan Gyney deposed that

At Ankerwyke Prioress Clemence Medforde, conscious of many misdeeds and of the cordial dislike of her nuns, “did invite several outside folk from the neighbourhood to this visitation at great cost to the house, saying to them, ‘Stand on my side in this time of visitation, for I do not want to resign.’” She admitted the entertainment of her friends, “but it was not to this end”[1526]. Recriminations after the visitation are even commoner than preliminary attempts to circumvent it. At Gracedieu the ill-tempered old prioress confessed, on being confronted with the detectum of one of her nuns to that effect, that she

The second condition for the efficacy of episcopal visitation as a method of reform is the regularity of such visitation. Obviously if visitations are very rare the hold of the diocesan on a house will be weak; for much water may flow under the bridge between one visitation and the next. The general rule in vogue in the middle ages was that each house should be visited once in every three years, which was in theory a very adequate arrangement. It seems clear, however, that it was not always carried out. The work was done by one overworked bishop in person or by commissioners specially appointed by him for the visitation of each house. In a big diocese, such as Lincoln or York, which abounded in monastic houses, the work of visitation was a really considerable labour, for it was only one part of the bishop’s multifarious duties; and it is impossible not to conclude that the regularity of visitation differed very much from diocese to diocese and from time to time. The bishops themselves varied very much in energy and conscientiousness, but on the whole it is evident that they took their duties seriously and honestly endeavoured to keep up the standard of life in their dioceses. No one can put down the record of Rigaud’s visitations of the diocese of Rouen, Greenfield’s visitations of the diocese of York, and Alnwick’s visitations of the diocese of Lincoln, without a profound respect for those prelates. But though they did much, they could not do enough.

There is a good deal of incidental evidence in the visitation reports, which shows that visitations were held too seldom to be really effectual. Gracedieu, for instance, had not been visited between 1433, when Gray came, and 1440-1; and by this last date it had fallen into such laxity that reform must have been difficult. Markyate was unvisited between 1433 and 1442, in spite of the deprivation of the prioress for immorality and the apostasy of one of the nuns in 1433. There are few houses in the annals of English nunneries in so bad a state as Littlemore was in 1517; yet the Prioress, forced at last to confess her misdeeds, which comprised not only habitual incontinence but the persecution of her nuns, stated that though these things had been going on for eight years, yet no inquiry had been made and, as it seems, no visitation of the house had been held; only on one occasion certain injunctions of a general kind had been sent her[1528]. On the other hand the registers show that a real attempt was often made to grapple with a really serious case. St Michael’s, Stamford, for instance, was visited by Alnwick in 1440 and found to be in a disorderly state; he gave careful interim injunctions on the spot and sent written injunctions afterwards. The house, however, was ruled by a thoroughly incompetent prioress, and the bishop seems to have made inquiries and found that his reforms had not been carried out, for in 1442 he came again,

This inquiry showed that matters were if anything worse than before; and in 1445 the bishop visited the house again[1529]. Similarly, when once Bishop Atwater had awakened to the moral condition of Littlemore in the next century, he took pains to reform it. The scandals were brought to light at the visitation by his commissary Dr Horde in 1517; a few months later the bishop summoned the prioress before him to answer the charges made against her and after a lapse of nine months the house was visited again in 1518[1530].

But if visitations were sometimes not held regularly enough to be really effective, a still greater cause of weakness was the great difficulty experienced by the bishops in controlling the religious houses in the period between one visitation and the next and in enforcing their injunctions. A bishop might send a set of the most salutary injunctions to an undisciplined house; but how was he to secure that the nuns followed them, save by the most solemn threats of excommunication, which they seem often enough to have disregarded. Markyate, St Michael’s, Stamford, and Littlemore went steadily from bad to worse between each of the visitations made by Gray, Alnwick and Atwater respectively. In 1442

These were comparatively trivial faults; since the last visitation one of the nuns had had a child; and at the next visitation, three years later, the same fate was found to have overtaken another, which is a significant commentary on the effectuality of episcopal control.

The fundamental difficulty was that the bishop was obliged in the nature of things to trust largely to the prioress and to the nuns themselves to enforce his decrees. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Sometimes the very women whom he singled out for special trust were subsequently found to be worse than their sisters. Indeed it is sometimes difficult to account for the principle on which coadjutresses were appointed. It surely seems somewhat like tempting providence that Alnwick should have selected Isabel Benet, the only other nun in the house who was defamed of incontinence, to be administrator in place of the suspended Prioress of Catesby, and it is not surprising to read of the later escapade of that lady at a dance with the friars of Northampton and of their refusal to obey his ordinance against private rooms[1532]. The only intelligible principle of the bishop would appear to have been that applied by Henry VII to the Earl of Kildare, “All Ireland cannot rule this man; then he shall rule all Ireland.” It is moreover significant (as has already been pointed out)[1533] that in the majority of cases a prioress, however wicked, was suspended rather than deprived; even Denise Loweliche and Katherine Wells remained in office after their resignation. It was indeed too embarrassing to know what to do with a sinner. She could not be expelled from her order; if she were kept in the same house in a subordinate position she would probably make her successor’s life a burden; if she were transferred to another house she would probably corrupt a hitherto unblemished flock. The bishops did their best in the face of great difficulties, but it is plain that the prioresses sometimes thought little enough of their authority. The rather disreputable old Abbess of Romsey, Joyce Rowse, said openly to her nuns that when the inquiry (held in 1492) was finished she would do as she had done before; and she kept her word[1534]. At Ankerwyke in 1441 one little nun of tender age explained to the bishop “that the prioress doth not provide this deponent with bed-clothes, insomuch that she lies in the straw; and when my lord had commanded this deponent to lie in the dorter, and this deponent asked bed-clothes of the prioress, she said chidingly to her, ‘Let him who gave you leave to lie in the dorter supply you with raiment’”[1535].

Though the bishops for the most part did their work conscientiously it is difficult, in the light of the considerations which have been urged above to conclude that their visitations had a lasting effect. But if the visitations and the injunctions based on them were sometimes of small value for their purpose, they have an incidental value to historians which cannot be overestimated. There have come down to us in the bishops’ registers a comparatively small number of complete visitation reports, comprising detecta and comperta (or sometimes comperta only) and injunctions[1536], and a much larger number of injunctions, without the comperta on which they were based. The similarity in wording of episcopal injunctions, combined with the fact that the most important collection of complete reports (Alnwick’s visitations) was until recently unknown, has led many writers to argue that injunctions were mere general “common form,” without any relation to specific abuses found at the house to which they were sent, “left,” as Mr Hamilton Thompson says, “like portentous visiting cards upon a convent, to show that the diocesan had duly called”[1537]. The point is of great importance, for it involves the reliability of injunctions as evidence of the state of a particular convent at a particular time.

The answer to this view of “common form” is easily found if we study the process by which injunctions were composed, as revealed in the great series of visitations by Bishop Alnwick. They were drawn up with great care by the bishop’s registrar and he based them upon two sources, the detecta and comperta of each visitation, which had been noted down on the spot by clerks, and the sets of injunctions sent to other religious houses, which were regularly copied into the episcopal register as models for future use. It is inherent in the nature of the case that monasteries subject to the same original rule and statutory regulations and living under almost identical conditions, should be subject to similar breaches of discipline. It is only necessary to study those detecta which have been preserved to perceive how universal, in all dioceses and among both sexes, were (for instance) the customs of drinking after Compline, forming separate “households,” taking unlicensed boarders, making unwise grants of corrodies and long leases, wandering abroad in the world, and wearing worldly garments. The registrar did not wish to invent new wording every time these offences occurred; he used a common form for them. But “common form” has here a different sense from that in which it is used by those who question the value of injunctions as evidence. The registrar never made an injunction which was not based upon a detectum made at the house to which the injunction was directed. Injunctions are common form only because they deal with common errors. If an almost similar set be sent to two houses, it is because the houses have displayed (as is indeed only natural) almost similar faults; and where the two sets differ, they differ not accidentally, but of careful purpose. It was the business of the registrar to express the injunctions in general terms, even though a fault may have been that of a single individual, because they were intended to be canonically binding upon the whole convent. The reason why injunctions have survived in much greater numbers than the detecta upon which they were based, is that the clerks copied into the bishop’s register only common forms, which would be likely to be useful. The record of individual evidence would not help them; but a carefully worded injunction might be used over and over again, whenever the fault with which it dealt recurred at the same or another house. No one who has studied the relation of detecta and injunctions in Alnwick’s book of visitations can doubt the value of the latter as evidence, when they appear alone; the very process by which “Dame Alice Decun says that only two little girls, of six or seven years, do lie in the dorter” is transmuted into the common injunction “that ye suffre ne seculere persones wymmen ne childern lyg by nyghte in the dormytory” is patent in the register.

If the reliability of the injunctions be thus accepted, it is almost unnecessary to point out what an invaluable source of evidence is to be found in the bishops’ registers. Controversialists have fought ad nauseam over the truth or falsehood of the “scandalous comperta” of Henry VIII’s commissioners, without understanding that for nearly three hundred years before the Dissolution the comperta and injunctions in the registers give a picture of English monasticism coloured by no ulterior motive. Even after a large number of the registers have been published, historians are still content to paint monastic life in the later middle ages from the monastic rule, ignoring the evidence of practice which is always necessary to supplement the evidence of theory. Not even the chronicles of an earlier age are more interesting; the record of Alnwick is as valuable as that of Jocelin of Brakelonde. In dioceses where registers were regularly kept and have survived uninjured and where injunctions were punctiliously copied, the history of a house may be traced throughout the whole period covered by this book. The dioceses of Winchester, Lincoln and York are most fortunate in this respect. To select a few examples at random, there are extant records of the visitation of Romsey Abbey by Archbishop Peckham in 1284, by Bishop John of Pontoise in 1302, by Bishop Henry Woodlock in 1311, by Bishop William of Wykeham in 1387, by Archbishop Morton (through his vicar-general, Robert Shirbourne) in 1492, by Dr Hede, commissary of the Prior of Canterbury, during the vacancies of the sees of Canterbury and Winchester in 1502, by Bishop Fox (through his vicar-general, John Dowman) in 1507, again (through Master John Incent) in 1523 and again (through the vicar-general) in 1527[1538]. It is thus possible to describe with approximate accuracy the life of this great convent during the whole period from 1284 to the Dissolution. Similarly records have survived of visitations of Elstow Abbey by Bishop Gynewell in 1359, Bishop Buckingham in 1387, Archbishop Courtenay in 1389, Bishop Flemyng in 1421-2, Bishop Gray in 1434, Bishop Alnwick in 1442-3, and Bishop Longland in 1530 and 1531. Of Nunappleton Priory there are recorded visitations by Archbishop Wickwane in 1281, Archbishop Melton in 1318, Archbishop Zouche in 1346, Archbishop Rotherham in 1489 and Archbishop Lee in 1534. Moreover mandates concerning isolated pieces of business, elections, permits to receive boarders, orders to reform specific abuses, are scattered through the registers and provide useful supplementary information.

All houses are not as well represented. In some dioceses injunctions are rarely recorded: the fine series of registers for Hereford yield surprisingly few. Some houses emerge only rarely into the light with a single set of injunctions; others (and among them important houses such as Lacock and Amesbury) lack even a single visitation report to rescue their inmates from oblivion. But the geographical range of the surviving reports is sufficiently great to enable the formation of an accurate general account of English nunneries during the later middle ages. One warning only must be borne in mind by the reader. If it is unhistorical to write an account of monastic houses based solely upon the rule, it is also unhistorical to write one based solely on visitation documents. The detecta made to a bishop were, and were intended to be, revelations of faults; it was not the function of the bishop’s clerk to catalogue virtues, though sometimes a string of “omnia bene,” or a curt note to the effect that my lord, finding little in need of reformation, passed on, bears positive witness to a convent’s good life. It must always be remembered, in estimating the state of a house from a set of detecta and injunctions, that though they are indubitably the truth, they are not the whole truth. Goodness is after all largely a matter of proportion; and though convents are to be found which were positively bad, in others there were probably virtues of kindness, piety and a brave struggle against poverty, which would counterbalance (if we knew them), the unfavourable impression left by a string of accusations. Moreover by far the larger number of the detecta witnesses to a growing worldliness and to minor breaches of the rule, rather than to serious moral defects. 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.