Such instances might be multiplied[1347]. Sometimes the presence of secular boarders led to unpleasant experiences for the nuns. The Lincoln registers record two such cases, which incidentally furnish an additional reason why the reception of boarders was frowned upon by the Church. In 1304 certain
“satellites of Satan whose names we know not” (Bishop Dalderby informs his official), “lately came in great numbers to the monastery of the nuns of Goring, where they boldly laid violent hands upon Henry, chaplain of the parish church and brother John le Walleys, lay brother of the same place (from whom they drew blood) and upon certain nuns of the house who struggled to guard their monastery, and then they entered and rode their horses up to the high altar of the church, polluting that holy place shamefully with the footprints and dung of their horses.”
Their object was apparently to seize a certain Isabella de Kent, a married woman then dwelling in the nunnery, and they pursued her to the belfry, where she had taken refuge and dragged her away with them[1348]. An even worse disturbance took place at Rothwell in 1421-2. A gang of ruffians broke open the cloister and doors, seized one Joan (a boarder) and carried her away to a lonely house, where their leader forcibly violated her, with every circumstance of brutality. She escaped back to the priory, whereupon the leader
entering the same priory a second time, like a tyrant and pirate with a far greater multitude of like henchmen and people untamed and savage in his company, with naked swords and other sorts of divers weapons of offence, fell ... upon the same woman, who was then in the presence of the prioress and the nuns in the hall of the said priory and ... daringly laid wicked, sacrilegious and violent hands, notwithstanding the worship both of their persons and of the place, upon the prioress and nuns of the said place, honourable members of the church and persons hallowed to God accordingly—who endeavoured gently to appease their baseness and savagery, so far as their sex as women allowed—and cudgelled them with cruel strokes, threw them down on the ground and, trampling on them with their feet, mercilessly kicked them and violently dragged off their garments of their habits over their heads, and even as robbers, having caught their prey, carried off the said woman, dragging her with them out of the priory[1349].
Even more significant is the licence granted to the Abbess and Convent of Tarrant Keynes in 1343 to cut down two hundred acres of under-wood in their demesne land, “on their petition setting forth that their house and possessions in the county of Dorset had been burned and destroyed by an invasion of the king’s enemies in those parts”[1350]; or the permission given to the Abbess of Shaftesbury in 1367 to crenellate her Abbey, presumably for purposes of defence[1351]. The south coast was a constant prey to pirates, and it was still within the memory of man that, at the beginning of the French war
the Normayns Pycardes and Spanyerdes entred into the toune (of Southampton) and robbed and pilled the toune, and slewe dyvers and defowled maydens, and enforced wyves, and charged their vessels with the pyllage and so entred agayne into their shyppes[1352].
The sanctity which attached to the person of a nun was apt to be forgotten in the brutal warfare of the day and the Abbess might well fear for her flock. The English nunneries did not, indeed, experience anything to compare with the unimaginable sufferings endured by French convents during the hundred years’ war[1353]. But they were by no means immune from the effects of civil war; Wilton, Wherwell and St Mary’s, Winchester, were all burned during the struggle between Stephen and Matilda[1354], and during the Wars of the Roses the nuns of Delapré were unwilling witnesses of the Battle of Northampton (1460), which was held “in the medowys beside the Nonry”; after the fight was over the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London rested at the nunnery and many of the slain were buried in its churchyard[1355].
The most striking example of the effect of warfare upon monastic houses in England is, however, provided by the history of the northern monasteries, which were throughout their history (but especially during the first part of the fourteenth century) in danger from the inroads of the Scots. So great was the destruction wrought in 1318 that it was necessary to make a new assessment of church property for purposes of taxation, in part of the province of York[1356]. Nor was the trouble purely material, though the poverty of the nunneries (in particular) was sometimes abject and the harrying of their lands must have made prosperity at all times a vain hope. The moral results of such disorder were even more serious. It was almost impossible to maintain an ordinary communal life, when at any moment it might be necessary to disperse the nuns and quarter them in other houses out of the line of the marauders’ march. Even in houses which were never actually attacked, the prevalent unrest, the lawlessness which is naturally engendered by border warfare, must have been disorganising and demoralising. It is easy to understand why cases of immorality and grave disorder are more prevalent in the convents of the north of England than in those of any other district.
In 1296 the chronicler of Lanercost describes thus the first great raid of the Scots:
In this raid they surpassed in cruelty all the fury of the heathen; when they could not catch the strong and young people, who took flight, they imbrued their arms, hitherto unfleshed, with the blood of infirm people, old women, women in childbed and even children two or three years old, proving themselves apt scholars in atrocity, insomuch that they raised little span-long children pierced on pikes, to expire thus and fly away to the heavens. They burnt consecrated churches; both in the sanctuary and elsewhere they violated women dedicated to God [i.e. nuns] as well as married women and girls, either murdering them or robbing them, after gratifying their lust. Also they herded together a crowd of little scholars in the schools of Hexham and having blocked the doors set fire to that pile [so] fair [in the sight of God]. Three monasteries of holy collegiates were destroyed by them, Lanercost, of the Canons Regular; and Hexham of the same order and [that] of the nuns of Lambley; of all of these the devastation can by no means be attributed to the valour of warriors, but to the dastardly conduct of thieves, who attacked a weaker community, where they would not be likely to meet with any resistance[1357].