Also we ordeyne and injoyne yow, that noone of yow speke, ne comone with no seculere persone; ne sende ne receyve letteres myssyves or gyftes of any seculere persone, withowte lycence of the prioresse: ... and such letters or gyftes sent or receyved, may turne into honeste and wurchepe and none into velanye or disclaundered of yowre honeste and religione[1282].
It is common to find among episcopal injunctions to nunneries one to the effect that no secular woman is to sleep in the dorter with the nuns. The fact that this injunction had constantly to be repeated shows that it was as constantly broken. Servants, boarders and school children seem in many houses to have shared the dorter with the nuns, an arrangement which must have been exceedingly disturbing to all parties. Alnwick found the practice at eleven out of the twenty houses which he visited in 1440-5. At Catesby, Langley, Stixwould and St Michael’s, Stamford, little girls, between the ages of five and ten, used to sleep with the nuns; there were six or seven of them at that ill-conducted house, Catesby, in the charge of Agnes Allesley, who was so disobedient to the bishop[1283]. At Gracedieu the cellaress had a boy of seven with her in the dorter[1284]. At Legbourne a nun complained that “the Prioress suffers secular women, both boarders and servants, to lie by night in the dorter among the nuns, against the rule”[1285] and at Heynings (which was much haunted by visitors) a lay sister deposed that “the infirmary is occupied by secular folk, to the great disturbance of the sisters; ... also that secular serving women do lie among the sisters in the dorter, and especially one who did buy a corrody there”[1286]. At the other houses (Godstow, Nuncoton and Stainfield) it was simply mentioned that secular persons lay in the dorter, without details as to whether they were servants, boarders or children[1287]. In all cases Alnwick strictly forbade the practice, and a prohibition to this effect is common in episcopal injunctions[1288].
These injunctions against the use of the dorter by seculars illustrate another aspect of the movement for enclosure. The majority of the other injunctions which have been quoted were attempts to regulate the intercourse of nuns with casual visitors, strangers who came for a day, or perhaps for two or three days. But a far more dangerous menace to the quiet of the cloister lay in the constant presence of secular boarders and corrodians, who made their home in a nunnery. Ladies who wished to end their days in peace sometimes went there as boarders or as corrodians; it is, no doubt, decent sober women such as these, who are sometimes exempted by name in episcopal injunctions ordering the exclusion of boarders from a house. But more often women would seek the temporary hospitality of a nunnery when, for some reason, they wished to leave their homes. A monastic house was, on the whole, a safe refuge, and many a knight going to the wars went with a lighter heart when he knew that his wife or daughter was sleeping within convent walls. In 1314 John of Drokensford, Bishop of Bath and Wells, licensed the Prioress of Cannington to lodge and board the wife and two daughters of John Fychet during his absence abroad[1289], and in 1372 William of Wykeham sent letters to the Abbesses of Romsey and Wherwell on behalf of another wife left alone in England:
“The noble Earl of Pembroke,” wrote the Bishop, “has begged us by his letters to direct our special letters to you on behalf of the noble and gently-born lady, Lady Elizabeth de Berkele, a kinswoman of the aforesaid Earl, that she may lodge within your house ... while Sir Maurice Wytht [sic ? knyght] the same lady’s husband, remains in the company of the aforesaid Earl in parts beyond the sea”;
and so, in spite of a recent prohibition to these houses to receive boarders, they are to take in Lady Berkeley[1290]. Sometimes the wording of these licences shows that the ladies required only a temporary shelter and had by no means retired from the world. Bishop Ralph of Shrewsbury gave leave to Joan Wason and Maude Poer to stay at Cannington from December 1336 till the following Easter, and Isabel Fychet received a similar licence; in 1354 Isolda wife of John Bycombe was licensed to stay there from March till August[1291]. Sometimes these ladies brought their servants or gentlewomen with them; Joan Wason and Maude Poer had permission to take two “dammoiselles” and Isabel Fychet one maid to Cannington; when Lady Margery Treverbyn, a widow, went with every profession of piety to Canonsleigh in 1328, she was accompanied by “a certain priest, a squire (domicellus) and a damsel (domicella)”[1292]; the widow of Sir John Pateshull was licensed to dwell in Elstow with her daughter and maids in 1350[1293]; the familia of Elizabeth Berkeley is mentioned in William of Wykeham’s licence and in 1291 John le Romeyn, Archbishop of York, gave the convent of Nunappleton permission to receive Lady Margaret Percy as a boarder for a year, “provided that her household during that time shall not be other than respectable (honesta)”[1294]. In the list (compiled by Mr Rye) of boarders in Carrow Priory during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, several ladies are mentioned as being accompanied by servants; Lady Maloysel and servant, Isabell Argentoin and servant, the Lady Margaret Kerdeston and woman, Margaret Wryght and servant, Lady Margaret Wetherby, her servant Matilda and her chaplain William. The same list shows that not only women but men were received as boarders, sometimes alone and sometimes accompanied by their wives, and though some of the names given are doubtless those of little boys, who were receiving their education in the nunnery, others can be clearly identified as adults[1295]. The Paston Letters afford a famous case in which both a girl and her betrothed, who had quarrelled with her parents, were lodged for a time in a nunnery. Margery Paston had fallen in love with her brother’s bailiff, Richard Calle, to the fury of her family, who swore that “he should never have their good will for to make her to sell candle and mustard in Framlingham.” The two lovers plighted their troth, a ceremony as binding in the eyes of the Church as marriage itself, and Richard Calle appealed to the Bishop of Norwich to set the matter beyond doubt by an inquiry. The spirited Margery “rehearsed what she had said, and said, if those words made it not sure, she said boldly that she would make that surer or than she went thence, for she said she thought in her conscience she was bound, whatsoever the words were,” whereupon her mother refused to receive her back into her house, and the Bishop himself was obliged to find a lodging for her. This he did at first with some friends and afterwards at a nunnery, where Richard Calle also was lodged, for John Paston mentions him shortly afterwards in a letter to his brother, “As to his abiding it is in Blakborow nunnery a little fro Lynn and our unhappy sister’s also”[1296].
It is plain from visitation records that the boarders who flocked to the nunneries were exceedingly disturbing to conventual life and sometimes even brought disrepute upon their hostesses by behaviour more suited to the world than to the cloister. Alnwick’s register contains some amusing and instructive evidence on this point. At Langley, a very worldly and aristocratic person, Lady Audley, was occupying a house or set of rooms (domum) within the Priory, paying 40s. yearly and keeping the house in repair; but she had no intention of giving up the ways of the world; pet dogs were her hobby, and the helpless Prioress complained to Alnwick (a Bishop must sometimes have had much ado to keep a straight face at these revelations):
Lady Audley, who boards in the house, has a great abundance of dogs, insomuch that whenever she comes to church there follow her twelve dogs, who make a great uproar in church, hindering them in their psalmody and the nuns hereby are made terrified![1297]
“Let a warning be directed to Lady Audley to remove her dogs from the church and the choir,” says a note in the Register; and Lady Audley, followed by her twelve dogs, recedes for ever from our view, unless reincarnated four centuries later in the person of Hawker of Morwenstow. A boarder at Legbourne had a different taste in pets. Dame Joan Pavy informed the Bishop: “That Margaret Ingoldesby, a secular woman, lies of a night in the dorter among the nuns, bringing with her birds, by whose jargoning silence is broken and the rest of the nuns is disturbed”[1298]. Exasperated Dame Joan, trying to steal some sleep before groping her way down to matins! She had never heard of Vert-Vert, nor even of Philip Sparrow and she would not have been of the young and pretty novices, whose toilet the immortal parrot superintended with a connoisseur’s eye. The Bishop cut the Gordian knot for her by ordering all seculars to be turned out of the dorter. At Stixwould there were two widows, Elizabeth Dymmok and Margaret Tylney, with their maidservants, staying with the Prioress, and two other adult women staying with the cellaress; and
there is in the same place a certain woman suspect [she was probably a servant] who dwells within the cloister precincts, Joan Bartone by name, to whom one William Traherne had had suspicious access, bringing her therafter before the ecclesiastical judge in a matrimonial suit, and she is very troublesome to the nuns[1299].
At Gracedieu it was found that the Prioress divulged the secrets of the house to her secular boarders[1300]. At other houses also it was complained that the boarders not only disturbed convent life, but attracted many visitors. At Nuncoton the Subprioress “prays that the lodgers be removed from the house, so that they mingle not among the nuns, for if there were none the Prioress might be able to come constantly to frater; and because there is great recourse of strangers to the lodgers, to the sore burthen of the house”; another nun also deposed “that there is great recourse of guests on account of the lodgers” and a third asked that boarders of marriageable age should be altogether removed from the house, frater and dorter, “by reason of the divers disadvantages which arise to the house out of their stay”[1301]. At Godstow in 1432 Bishop Gray enjoined: