It is clear from the evidence of visitation documents that nuns often took boarders of their own free will, for the sake of the money which thus accrued to their impecunious houses; certainly no episcopal injunction was more consistently disobeyed. On the other hand great ladies often thrust themselves upon a convent, which dared not say them nay, and it is not at all unusual to find the nuns complaining of the disturbance caused to their daily life by visitors. The matter was complicated by the fact that the exercise of hospitality was one of the chief functions of monastic houses in the middle ages, and was so far regarded as a right by their neighbours that remonstrances were actually made if the quality of the entertainment offered was not considered sufficiently good. At Campsey in 1532 one of the nuns declared that “well-born guests (hospites generosae) coming to the priory complained of the excessive parsimony of the Prioress”[1320]. Complaints by the nuns of the spiritual disturbance caused by this influx of visitors, show that the right was vigorously exercised. In 1364 the Pope granted permission to Margaret de Lancaster, an Augustinian Canoness of the same nunnery of Campsey, to transfer herself to the Order of St Clare, she having already caused herself to be enclosed at Campsey in order to avoid the number of nobles coming to the house[1321]; and in 1375 he commanded the Bishop of St Andrews to make order concerning the Prioress and nuns of the Benedictine convent of North Berwick, “who have petitioned for perpetual enclosure, they being much molested by the neighbourhood and visits of nobles and other secular persons”[1322]. Even enclosure was not always a protection against visitors; for the Popes constantly granted indults to great persons, allowing them to enter, with a retinue, the houses of monks and nuns belonging to enclosed orders. A few instances may be taken at random. John of Gaunt in 1371 received an indult to enter any monasteries of religious men and women once a year, with thirty persons of good repute[1323]; Joan Princess of Wales in 1372 was given permission to enter monasteries of enclosed nuns with six honest and aged men and fourteen women and to eat and drink, but not to pass the night therein[1324]; Thomas of Gloucester and his wife, the notorious Eleanor de Cobham, had an indult to enter monasteries of enclosed monks and nuns six times a year, with twenty persons of either sex[1325]. Sometimes, it is true, the visitors were forbidden to eat, drink or spend the night in the house[1326], but often they received special permission to do so; thus in 1408 Philippa, Duchess of York, was given an indult allowing her to take five or six matrons and to stay in monasteries of enclosed nuns for three days and nights at a time[1327] and in 1422 Joan Countess of Westmoreland received one to enter any nunnery with eight honest women, and to stay there with the nuns, eating, drinking and talking with them and spending the night[1328]. An indult granted in 1398 to Margery and Grace de Tylney “noblewomen,” to enter “as often as they please with six honest matrons, the monastery of enclosed nuns of the Order of St Clare, Denney”[1329], and a faculty granted in 1371 to “John, Cardinal of Sancti Quatuor Coronati”[1330], empowering him to give leave to a hundred women of high birth of France and England, to enter nunneries once a year, accompanied each by four matrons[1331], give some idea of the extent to which it was usual for guests to visit even houses belonging to enclosed orders.
Nuns do not seem to have concerned themselves with political movements, unlike the monks, who in great abbeys were sometimes keen politicians. But it sometimes happened that the strife and intrigue and tragedy of the outside world entered into quiet convents, through this custom of using them as boarding houses. Not otherwise can we account for a curious case in which the nuns of Sewardsley were involved in 1470, when a certain Thomas Wake accused Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, of making an image of lead to be used in witchcraft against the King and Queen, which image he said had been shown to various persons and exhibited in the nunnery of Sewardsley[1332]. Moreover echoes of great doings came to nuns when the hapless wives and daughters of the King’s enemies were placed in their custody, a kindlier fate than imprisonment in a fortress or in charge of some loyal noble’s sharp-tongued wife. The course of Edward II’s troubled reign may be traced in the story of the women who were successively sent as prisoners, or (worse still) as nuns, to various priories. The first to suffer was the King’s niece Margaret; she had been married by him to Piers Gaveston and had seen her husband miserably slain at Thomas of Lancaster’s behest; she was married again to Sir Hugh Audley and ten years later, poor pawn in the game of politics, she suffered for her second husband’s share in Lancaster’s rebellion, when the crime of Blacklow Hill was expiated on the hill of Pontefract.
“Margarete countesse de Cornewaille,” says the chronicle of Sempringham, “La femme Sire Hugh Daudelee, e la niece le roi, fu ordinee a demorer en guarde a Sempringham entre les nonaignes, a quel lieu ele vint le xvi jour de Mai (1322) e la demorra”[1333].
In the same year the Abbess of Barking was ordered “to cause the body of Elizabeth de Burgo, late wife of Roger Damory, within her abbey, to be kept safely and not to permit her to go outside the abbey gates in any wise until further orders”[1334]. In 1324 another rebel, Roger Mortimer, broke his prison in the Tower and escaped across the sea to France. But three poor children, his daughters, could not escape, and on April 7th of the same year the sheriff of Southampton received an order to cause Margaret, daughter of Roger Mortimer of Wygmore, to be conducted to the Priory of Shouldham, Joan, his second daughter, to the Priory of Sempringham, and Isabella, his third daughter, to the Priory of Chicksand, “to be delivered to the priors of those places (all were Gilbertine houses) to stay amongst the nuns in the same priories.” The Prior of Shouldham had 15d. weekly for Margaret’s expenses and a mark yearly for her robe, and each of the other two little girls received 12d. weekly for expenses and a mark for her robe[1335]. The she-wolf of France bided her time, and when the game was hers she was no less swift to avenge her wrongs; to Sempringham (where her lover’s daughter had gone two years before) now went the two daughters of the elder Hugh Despenser, to pray for the souls of a father and brother done most dreadfully to death[1336]. The perennial wars with Scotland also found their echo in the nunneries. In 1306 the Abbess of Barking was ordered “to deliver Elizabeth, sister of William Olifard [? Olifaunt] Knight, who is in their custody by the King’s permission to Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, the King having granted her to the said Henry”[1337]; she was doubtless a relative of that “Hugh Olyfard, a Scot, the King’s enemy and rebel,” who together with one “William Sauvage the King’s approver” had broken his prison at Colchester some three years before, and fled into sanctuary in the convent church[1338]. Barking was a favourite prison, doubtless on account of its situation, and in 1314 the sheriffs of London were ordered “to receive Elizabeth, wife of Robert de Brus, from the Abbess of Berkyngg, with whom she had been staying by the King’s order and to take her under safe custody to Rochester and there deliver her to Henry de Cobham, constable of the castle”[1339].
The mention of the Scot Hugh Olyfard, who took sanctuary in the church of Barking, recalls another reason for which the world might break into the cloister. The terrified fugitive from justice would take sanctuary in a convent church if it lay nearest to him, and the peace of chanting nuns would be rudely broken, when that unkempt and desperate figure sprang up the choir between them and flung itself upon their altar steps. The hand of a master has drawn for us what the trembling novices saw, peeping from their stalls:
... the breathless fellow at the altar foot,
Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there
With the little children round him in a row
Of admiration, half for his beard and half
For that white anger of his victim’s son
Shaking a fist at him with one fierce arm,
Signing himself with the other because of Christ
(Whose sad face on the cross sees only this
After the passion of a thousand years),
Till some poor girl, her apron o’er her head
Which the intense eyes looked through, came at eve
On tiptoe, said a word, dropped in a loaf,
Her pair of ear-rings and a bunch of flowers
The brute took growling, prayed and then was gone[1340].
But sometimes more than a momentary disturbance was occasioned to the nunnery; in 1416, for instance, Edith Wilton, Prioress of Carrow, was attached, together with one of her nuns, on the charge of harbouring in sanctuary the murderers of William Koc of Trowse, at the appeal of his widow Margaret. She was arrested, imprisoned and called to answer at Westminster, but after the court had adjourned many times she was acquitted[1341]. An abbess of Wherwell was involved in a lawsuit over a case of sanctuary for somewhat different reasons; she claimed the right of seizing chattels of fugitives in the hundred of Mestowe[1342], a right which was disputed by the crown officials. One Henry Harold of Wherwell had killed his wife Isabel and fled to the church of Wherwell and the Abbess had promptly seized his chattels to the value of over £35, by the hands of her reeve[1343].
These cases of violence will lead us to the consideration of breaches of enclosure which were in no sense the fault of the unhappy nuns. Visits from their peaceful friends they welcomed; the sojourn of great folk they bore; but they would fain have passed their days undisturbed by war’s alarms and by the assault and battery of private feuds. But it was not to be. Alarums and excursions sometimes shattered their peace and, especially in the Northern counties, violent attacks at the hands of robbers, lawless neighbours, or enemies of the realm were only too common. Disorder was general and grew worse in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The nunnery of Markyate was once assaulted in the night by fifty robbers and the nuns pillaged and robbed of everything valuable[1344], and in 1408 the Bishop of Ely gave an indulgence for the relief of the nuns of Rowney, “whose chalices, books, ornaments and other goods have been stolen by evil men, so that they have not the wherewithal to perform the divine office”[1345].
Neighbourly disagreements sometimes developed into petty warfare, as the Paston Letters show, and an almost exact parallel to the dispute between John Paston and Lord Molynes over the manor of Gresham is to be found in a complaint made in 1383 by the Prioress of Brodholme, who asserted that a gang of men (whom she named)
“had broken her close at Brodholme, felled her trees and underwood, dug in her soil, carried off earth, trees, underwood and other goods, depastured her corn and grass, assaulted her servants and besieged her and her nuns in the Priory and threatened them with death”[1346].