holds too much talk with the strangers that come to the monastery in the church, in the chapter-house, at the church-door, the hall door and divers other places; nor is she obedient to the orders and commands of the abbess according to the rule[1246].
Other houses also found the clerks of Oxford too attractive. At Alnwick’s visitation of Littlemore Dame Agnes Marcham (a lady with a tongue) spoke of “the ill-fame which is current thereabouts concerning the place,” and said
that a certain monk of Rievaulx, who is a student at Oxford and is of the Cistercian order, has common and often access to the priory, eating and drinking with the prioress and spending the night therein, sometimes for three, sometimes for four days on end. Also she says that master John Herars, master in arts, a scholar of Oxford and a kinsman of the prioress, has access in like manner to the priory, breakfasting, supping and spending the night in the same[1247].
The state of the house in the sixteenth century was infinitely worse and it well merited its early suppression in 1526[1248]. At another house, Studley, visited by Alnwick in 1445, the significant request was made:
that the vicar of Bicester, who is reckoned to be of ripe judgment and age and sufficient knowledge, may be appointed as confessor to the convent and in no wise an Oxford scholar, since it is not healthy that scholars of Oxford should have a reason for coming to the priory[1249].
Nor does the proximity of Cambridge appear to have had a less disturbing effect upon morals and discipline. In 1373 it was found that the Prioress of St Radegund’s
did not correct Dame Elizabeth de Cambridge for withdrawing herself from divine service and allowing friars of different orders, as well as scholars, to visit her at inopportune times and to converse with her, to the scandal of religion[1250],
and in 1496, when John Alcock, Bishop of Ely, converted the nunnery into the college afterwards known as Jesus College, its dilapidation was ascribed to “the negligence and improvidence and dissolute disposition and incontinence of the religious women of the same house, by reason of the vicinity of Cambridge University”[1251]. Plainly the scholars who hung about the portals and tethered their horses in the paddocks of Godstow, and who gossiped with the sisters of Studley and Littlemore and St Radegund’s, were not of the type of that clerk of Oxenford, who loved his twenty red and black-clad books better than “robes riche or fithele or gay sautrye”; and it is to be feared that their speech was not “souninge in moral vertu.” Rather they belonged to the tribe of Absolon, who could trip and dance in twenty manners:
After the scole of Oxenforde tho,
And with his legges casten to and fro,
And pleyen songes on a small rubible,
or of hende Nicholas (“of derne love he coude and of solas”), or of those two clerks of Cambridge, Aleyn and John, who harboured with the Miller of Trumpington, or of “joly Jankin,” the Wife of Bath’s first husband. The nuns certainly got no good from these young men of light heart and slippery tongue.