PLATE I PAGE FROM LA SAINTE ABBAYE (At the top of the picture a priest with two acolytes prepares the sacrament; behind them stand the abbess, holding her staff, her chaplain and the sacristan, who rings the bell; behind them a group of four nuns, including the cellaress with her keys. At the bottom is a procession of priest, acolytes and nuns in the quire.) MEDIEVAL ENGLISH NUNNERIES c. 1275 to 1535 BY EILEEN POWER SOMETIME FELLOW AND LECTURER OF GIRTON COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE MADAME EGLENTYNE (F

There is only too much truth in the frequent complaint that history, as compared with the physical sciences, is neglected by the modern public. But historians have the remedy in their own hands; choosing problems of equal importance to those of the scientist, and treating them with equal accuracy, they will command equal attention. Those who insist that the proportion of accurately ascertainable facts is smaller in history, and therefore the room for speculation wider, do not thereby establish a

The monastic ideal and the development of the monastic rule and orders have been studied in many admirable books. The purpose of the present work is not to describe and analyse once again that ideal, but to give a general picture of English nunnery life during a definite period, the three centuries before the Dissolution. It is derived entirely from pre-Reformation sources, and the tainted evidence of Henry VIII’s commissioners has not been used; nor has the story of the suppression of the Engli

THE NOVICE There were in England during the later middle ages (c. 1270-1536) some 138 nunneries, excluding double houses of the Gilbertine order, which contained brothers as well as nuns. Of these over one half belonged to the Benedictine order and about a quarter (localised almost entirely in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire) to the Cistercian order. The rest were distributed as follows: 17 to the order of St Augustine and one (Minchin Buckland), which belonged to the order of St John of Jerusalem an

THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE It usually happened that the head of a nunnery was a woman of some social standing in her own right. All nuns were Christ’s brides, but an earthly father in the neighbourhood, with broad acres and loose purse strings, was not to be despised. If a great lady retired to a nunnery she was very like to end as its head; Barking Abbey in Essex had a long line of well-born abbesses, including three queens and two princesses; and when Katherine de la Pole (the youngest daughter of

WORLDLY GOODS   In many ways the most valuable general account of monastic property at the close of the middle ages is to be found in the great Valor Ecclesiasticus , a survey of all the property of the church, compiled in 1535 for the assessment of the tenth lately appropriated by the King [264] . It is true that only 100 out of the 126 nunneries then in existence are described with any detail and that the amount of detail given varies very much for different localities. Nevertheless the record

MONASTIC HOUSEWIVES Every monastic house may be considered from two points of view, as a religious and as a social unit. From the religious point of view it is a house of prayer, its centre is the church, its raison d’être the daily round of offices. From the social point of view it is a community of human beings, who require to be fed and clothed; it is often a landowner on a large scale; it maintains a more or less elaborate household of servants and dependents; it runs a home farm; it buys an

FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen, six; result, happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds, ought and six; result, misery. Mr Micawber. In the history of the medieval nunneries of England there is nothing more striking than the constant financial straits to which they were reduced. Professor Savine’s analysis of the Valor Ecclesiasticus has shown that in 1535 the nunneries were on an average only half as rich a

EDUCATION The Benedictine ideal set study together with prayer and labour as the three bases of monastic life and in the short golden age of English monasticism women as well as men loved books and learning. The tale of the Anglo-Saxon nuns who corresponded with St Boniface has often been told. Eadburg, Abbess of Thanet, wrote the Epistles of St Peter for him in letters of gold and sent books to him in the wilds of Germany. Bugga, Abbess of a Kentish house, exchanged books with him. The charming

ROUTINE AND REACTION Where is the pain that does not become deadened after a thousand years? or what is the nature of that pleasure or happiness which never wearies by monotony? Earthly pleasures and pains are short in proportion as they are keen; of any others, which are both intense and lasting, we can form no idea.... To beings constituted as we are, the monotony of singing Psalms would be as great an affliction as the pains of hell and might even be pleasantly interrupted by them. Jowett , I

PRIVATE LIFE AND PRIVATE PROPERTY The reaction from a strict routine of life led monks and nuns to a more serious modification of the Rule under which they lived than that represented by pet dogs and pretty clothes, which were after all only superficial frivolities. They sought also to modify two rules which were fundamental to the Benedictine ideal. One was the rigidly communal life, the obligation to do everything in company with everyone else. The other was the obligation of strict personal p

FISH OUT OF WATER De sorte qu’une Religieuse hors de sa clôture est comme une pierre hors de son centre; comme un arbre hors de terre; comme Adam et Eve hors du Paradis terrestre; comme le corbeau hors de l’arche qui ne s’arreste qu’à des charognes; comme un poisson hors de l’eau, selon le grand Saint Antoine et Saint Bernard; comme une brebis hors de sa bergerie et en danger d’estre devorée des loups, selon Saint Theodore Studite; comme un oiseau hors de son nid et une grenouille hors de son ma

THE WORLD IN THE CLOISTER In the last chapter the question of enclosure was considered only from one point of view, that of keeping the nuns within the precincts of their cloister. But there was another side to the problem. In order to preserve them unspotted from the world it was necessary not only that the nuns should keep within their cloisters, but that secular persons should keep outside. It was useless to pass regulations forbidding nuns to leave their houses, if visitors from the world ha

THE OLDE DAUNCE A child of our grandmother Eve, a female; or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman. Love’s Labour’s Lost , I , i, 266-8. It is difficult to form any exact impression of the moral state of the English nunneries during the later middle ages. Certainly there is widespread evidence of frailty on the part of individuals, and there are one or two serious cases in which a whole house was obviously in a bad condition. It is certain also that we retain the record of only a portion of

THE MACHINERY OF REFORM 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 t

THE NUN IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE “La science,” said a wise Frenchman, “atteint l’exactitude; il appartient à l’art seul de saisir la vérité.” And another, “L’histoire vit de documents, mais les documents sont pareils aux lettres écrites avec les encres chimiques; ils veulent, pour livrer leur secret, qu’on les réchauffe, et les éclaire par transparence, à la flamme de la vie.” The quotations are complementary, for what, after all, is literature but a form of life; the quintessence of many moods an

ADDITIONAL NOTES TO THE TEXT   NOTE A. THE DAILY FARE OF BARKING ABBEY. The Charthe [charter] longynge to the office of the Celeresse of the Monasterye of Barkinge [1647] is one of the most interesting domestic documents which has survived from the middle ages. The Ménagier de Paris gives a first rate account of the work of a housewife who has to provide for a private household. The Charthe sets forth the duties of a housewife who has to feed a large institution. No bursar of a college or housek

VISITATION OF NUNNERIES IN THE DIOCESE OF ROUEN BY ARCHBISHOP EUDES RIGAUD, 1248-1269 For twenty-seven years in the thirteenth century the Archbishopric of Rouen was held by a man who was at once a scholar and a man of action, a great saint and a great reformer. Eudes Rigaud (Odo Rigaldi), “the Model of Good Life,” as he was afterwards called, was among the most able and energetic churchmen produced by the middle ages. Salimbene, that gossiping friar of Parma to whom we owe perhaps the most ente

FIFTEENTH CENTURY SAXON VISITATIONS BY JOHANN BUSCH Three accounts of medieval visitations stand out in general interest above all others, the thirteenth century Norman visitations of Eudes Rigaud, Archbishop of Rouen, described in his diary, the fifteenth century English visitations of Alnwick, Bishop of Lincoln, described in his Register [2117] and the almost contemporary German visitations of the Austin Canon and reformer Johann Busch, described in his Liber de Reformatione Monasteriorum . Bu

LIST OF ENGLISH NUNNERIES. c. 1275-1535 [In this list Ab. = Abbey, Pr. = Priory; A. = Austin, B. = Benedictine, C. = Cistercian, Cl. = Cluniac, Dom. = Dominican, Fr. = Franciscan, Brig. = Brigittine. P. = Premonstratensian. Gilbertine houses are not included.]...