Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535

by Eileen Power

Certain houses, which had founded other houses as offshoots or colonies, retained the right to visit and reform their daughter-houses. Some monasteries had small outlying priories, known as “cells,” founded originally to look after distant estates of the house; sometimes such cells contained only one or two monks, living in an ordinary dwelling house, and had no real existence apart from the parent house. Sometimes, however, the cells grew and achieved an independent existence, though still maintaining their connection with their founders. This frequently happened to the English cells of foreign houses, and certain cells of English houses also grew into independent priories. Among nunneries, originally founded as cells of foreign houses, may be mentioned Lyminster in Sussex. Few English nunneries had cells; but Seton in Coupland was a cell of Nunburnholme. The connection between mother house and cell is illustrated by a licence granted by Archbishop Greenfield to the Prioress of Nunburnholme in 1313 to visit, “your cell of Seton in Coupland, which is subject to your monastery,” taking with her two honest nuns of the house, in order to visit the nuns of Seton, and returning without delay[1501]. The visitation of the cell was usually included in that of the mother house and the larger independent cells were often subject to episcopal visitation.

Rather different in origin from a cell was a house founded by a monastery, less as a colony than as a distinct but dependent institution. The most interesting example of this is provided by the great Abbey of St Albans, which founded two nunneries, St Mary de Pré and Sopwell. Both the nunneries were always very dependent on St Albans and are often mentioned in the chronicles of that house. St Mary de Pré, having been founded in the twelfth century as a hospital for leprous women living under a rule, became later an ordinary nunnery, containing nuns, and both lay sisters and lay brothers; in the time of Abbot Thomas de la Mare (1349-96) the rank of sister was abolished and a higher standard of education was insisted upon for the nuns, who were to profess the rule of St Benedict[1502]. Sopwell was also founded in the twelfth century as a Benedictine nunnery[1503]. In both houses nuns were admitted only by consent of the Abbot of St Albans, who also claimed the right to appoint their prioress. In both the temporal affairs of the convent were administered by wardens, appointed by the Abbot from among the monks of the abbey[1504]. The close connection was not always maintained without friction. At Sopwell the nuns more than once tried to elect their own prioress and seem to have found the Abbot somewhat high-handed[1505]. In 1481 Abbot Wallingford sent the archdeacon and subprior of the house to remove the prioress from office on account of her age and infirmities and to put Elizabeth Webbe in her place, but some years later the archdeacon deposed Elizabeth, whereupon she brought an action against him in the Court of Arches and was reinstated. Thereupon “two monks of St Albans, sent by the archdeacon, came to the nunnery, broke down Elizabeth’s door with an iron bar, beat her and put her in prison,” after which she appealed to Archbishop Morton as Chancellor[1506]. She may have been at the bottom of the famous letter written by Morton to the Abbot of St Albans in 1490, accusing him of changing prioresses at Pré and at Sopwell as he pleased and deposing good and religious persons for the benefit of the evil and vicious, and stating that the Prioress of St Mary de Pré, Helen Germyn, was a married woman who had left her husband for a lover and that she and some of her nuns were leading immoral lives with monks of St Albans[1507]. The same letter accused the monks put in as wardens of using their opportunities to dissipate the goods of the house, and the turbulent Prioress of Sopwell, Elizabeth, is found complaining to the Chancellor that a deed of lease by the convent had been secretly altered to their disadvantage by their “keeper” and his clerk, who had been bribed by a tenant[1508].

It is difficult to say how much truth there was in these charges and they certainly do not seem to show overmuch care for the reform of the daughter houses by their august parent. But it would not be fair to judge St Albans by this quarrel at the end of its career, and there is evidence to show that past abbots tried conscientiously to maintain good order in the dependent nunneries. Among other rights the abbot possessed that of visitation, and chance has fortunately preserved an interesting set of injunctions sent by Abbot Michael to Sopwell, after a visitation held in 1338[1509]. The orders given to the Warden of Sopwell by Abbot Thomas (1349-96) have also been preserved in the Gesta Abbatum[1510].

Another nunnery founded by a famous abbey of monks was St Michael’s, Stamford, founded by William of Waterville, Abbot of Peterborough in 1155; and this house remained for long dependent upon its parent abbey[1511]. In its early years it was customary for the prioress in the name of the chapter to pay an annual pension of a mark of silver to the Abbot and to make formal recognition of subjection, once every year, on the morrow of the Feast of St Michael. The Abbot had the right of receiving the profession of the sisters and his consent was necessary to the election of the prioress. He also had the appointment of the warden or prior, who looked after the temporalities of the house. In 1270 Bishop Gravesend sanctioned the personal visitation of the house once a year by the abbot and two or three monks, with power to correct and reform, and the Register of the Abbey records such visitations in 1297, 1300, 1303 and 1323. The tendency was, however, for the diocesan to oust the abbey from the control of the house; from time to time he claimed and exercised the right of instituting the warden, and from the end of the thirteenth century he regularly instituted the prioress. From this time the bishops’ registers show that the regulation and reform of the house were in the hands of the bishop and it was duly visited by Alnwick in the fifteenth century. The accounts of St Michael’s, Stamford, show that the nuns still had dealings with the Abbey; but Peterborough did not retain over this nunnery the exclusive rights of appointment and visitation, which St Albans, owing to its exemption from diocesan control, exercised to the end over Sopwell and St Mary de Pré. There is no mention of either of these houses in the episcopal registers.

Nunneries subject to visitation by a parent abbey were highly exceptional. Another exceptional method of external control was visitation by the chapter-general of the order, to which the nunnery belonged. Nuns as well as monks were constantly legislated for by these chapters-general, but they were very rarely visited, because (as we shall see) they were almost all subject to visitation by the bishop of their diocese. A trace of visitation by order of the chapter-general seems to survive in a letter from the Abbot of Stratford (4 December, 1491), preserved among the Cistercian documents in the archives at Dijon[1512]. The Abbot relates that he had visited Cokehill, found it in a very unsatisfactory condition and tried in vain to depose the prioress; at other times, however, Cokehill was visited by the Bishops of Worcester. The Cistercian order claimed exemption from episcopal visitation for male houses and we shall see that it made occasional attempts to exert its right over nunneries too.

By far the most common method of reforming nunneries from outside was by means of the control of the bishop of the diocese[1513]. It is an interesting fact that not even the greatest and most important Benedictine abbeys of women, such as Shaftesbury, Amesbury and Romsey, succeeded in obtaining an exemption from episcopal jurisdiction such as was enjoyed by St Albans and some other houses; and nunneries belonging to “exempt” orders were invariably under episcopal control. Bishops, who would never have dreamed of interfering with houses of Cistercian or Cluniac monks, visited the nuns of those orders as a matter of course and no objection was as a rule raised by the houses or by the orders. There is, it is true, one extremely interesting case in which this right of visitation was contested. In 1276 the nuns of Sinningthwaite contested the right of Archbishop Giffard of York to visit them and appealed against him to the Pope. Unfortunately the papal decision is not recorded, but as they were regularly visited until their dissolution, it was evidently against them. They possibly acted in collusion with the Cistercian abbots of their diocese, for in the same year Archbishop Giffard ordered them to have Friars Minor as their confessors, in spite of the inhibition of Cistercian abbots, who had no jurisdiction over them[1514]. The Cokehill case quoted above may represent a similar attempt of the Cistercian chapter-general to control a nunnery belonging to the order. For the historian of the English nunneries it is an exceedingly fortunate thing that the diocesans enjoyed this unchallenged right of visitation over almost all the nunneries in the kingdom; for the episcopal registers are the best source of monastic history and an exempt house (save when it was a famous abbey with a chronicle) is not infrequently a house without history, because without visitation records.

Since the periodical visitation by the diocesan was not only the main method of external control and reformation, but also incidentally gave rise to the records on which so much of this history of nunneries is based, it is worth while to study what exactly happened when a bishop, or his commissioners, came to inspect a nunnery. A regular routine was followed, which can easily be reconstructed from such full records as those kept by Bishop Alnwick of Lincoln[1515]. A formal summons was sent by the bishop to the house to be visited, warning the convent to hold itself in readiness for visitation by himself, or by one or more commissioners (named). On the appointed day he rode up to the house, accompanied by his clerks, and was met at the door of the church by the convent and conducted to the high altar. Here high mass was celebrated and the bishop, his clerks and the convent then adjourned to the chapter house for the business of visitation. The proceedings began with the preaching of a sermon by one of the bishop’s clerks; in houses of monks this was given in Latin until the end of our period, but knowledge of Latin had died out in nunneries before the fifteenth century and at Alnwick’s visitation the sermon was always preached in the vulgar tongue, on some such text as “Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion and behold king Solomon” (Cant. iii. 11), “Present your bodies a living sacrifice ... unto God” (Rom. xii. 1), or others less specifically appropriate to nuns. When this had been finished, the head of the house was required to present a certificate of receipt of the summons to visitation, which had to be drawn up according to a common form; and this not infrequently caused some delay in nunneries, where the inmates were often too ignorant of Latin to draw up the document correctly, unless they could call in the help of a clerk[1516]. The head of the house then produced the certificate of her election, confirmation by the diocesan and installation. Here again there was sometimes a delay, for prioresses were occasionally all at sea over documents and the necessary certificates were apt to be lacking at the last minute. Thus Dame Alice Dunwyche, the incompetent old Prioress of Gracedieu, was unable to produce any evidence of her confirmation in 1440 and the bishop had to appoint a special commissary to inquire into the matter; three months later the commissary examined two laymen brought by her as witnesses to her confirmation and installation[1517]. Meanwhile the visitation would continue; and the last formality to be observed was the production by the prioress of the foundation charter of the house, and the financial balance sheet (or status domus) for the year, this last an important item, since it enabled the bishop to see at a glance whether the financial affairs of the convent were in a satisfactory condition[1518]. This completed the preliminary business.

There now followed the main business of the visitation, the verbal examination of the nuns, in order to detect what abuses might stand in need of reform. Some abuses were patent to the eyes of the bishop; he could see garments in holes, and veils spread wide to show fair foreheads; he might have caught the scuttle of little dogs round corners as he rode in at the gates, or the whisk of a boarder’s murrey-coloured skirts behind a pillar. But the bulk of his information had to be obtained by careful cross-examination. The chapter house was cleared and he proceeded to question the nuns separately and in private, beginning with the prioress. Experience would teach him what were the most common breaches of discipline about which to make specific inquiry, but the nuns were encouraged to complain freely and the bishop’s clerks were kept busy scribbling notes of what each shrill tale-bearer told, to be written out afterwards under her name as detecta, or things discovered to the bishop.

These detecta are an amusing commentary on life in a community and grist (it must be admitted) to the cynic’s mill. Serious charges of immorality are mingled with trivialities, much as the chroniclers of the period mingle battles, monastic gossip and sea monsters cast upon the shore. The beer is too light; swine do come into the churchyard and root up the earth and befoul the churchyard; all corrections are made with so great harshness and so much ado that charity and loving-kindness are banished from the house; the nuns do hold drinkings of evenings in the guestchamber, even after Compline; the prioress has pawned the jewels of the house; sister so-and-so is defamed with sir so-and-so, sometime chaplain in that place and did conceive of him and bear a child; the buildings and tenements of the priory are dilapidated and many have fallen to the ground because of default in repairs; secular persons do lie in the dorter near the nuns; the nuns wear silken veils and robes; in the prioress’ default six nuns have now left the house in apostasy; the nuns frequent taverns and continually go into town without leave; silence is not observed in due places; the nuns do help secular folk in garnering their grain during the autumn season; the nuns are somewhat sleepy and come late to matins; the prioress does not render an account. Besides this infinite variety of complaint, the detecta exhibit also an infinite variety of motive, ranging from the disciplinarian’s zeal for reform to the private grudge of one individual against another. Sometimes the prioress and the nuns engage in mutual recriminations: she is harsh, or autocratic, or incompetent, they are lax or disobedient. Sometimes, on the other hand, a whole convent declares omnia bene. About some houses there still hangs a gentle atmosphere of peace and goodwill, others are rent with feud and petty bickering, others are in a condition of very lax morality. Human nature is truly unchanging, for all the types to be met with in a modern community, be it school or college, ship or government office, have their prototypes among these medieval monks and nuns. The amateur in human nature and the social historian alike may find in these little studied monastic detecta material of more absorbing interest and entertainment than is to be found in any other class of medieval documents.

After the bishop had heard the evidence of the nuns, given thus chaotically, the next business was to summarise, in some sort of order, the result of the inquiry. Such complaints of the nuns as the bishop considered worthy of notice were therefore classified as comperta, or things discovered by the bishop. If any member of the convent had been accused of serious breaches of the rule, she was summoned and the articles of accusation were read to her, and one by one she was invited to admit or to deny them. If she pleaded guilty, a penance was enjoined upon her. If she denied the charge, she was ordered to find a certain number of compurgators, who would swear to her innocence, and to produce them by a certain hour. The number of cases in which misconduct was sufficiently serious to make this necessary was not great. During Alnwick’s visitation it happened at Catesby, where the prioress and Isabel Benet were charged with immorality; the prioress denied the charge, but was unable to find four sisters to vouch for her and was adjudged guilty; Isabel Benet admitted misconduct, but not with the man whose name was coupled with hers, and she seems to have cleared herself of intercourse with him by the oath of four of the nuns[1519]. Usually the bishop showed himself lenient and allowed the agitated sinner an extension of time, if she could not find her compurgators within the period allotted to her[1520]. Whether this leniency is to be attributed to Christian charity, or to a desire to avoid scandal, is not clear; but if a prioress could not in two hours find four nuns to swear that she was not guilty, the value of their oaths, when they appeared after four hours’ canvassing, would not appear to be very great. Yet it is impossible not to understand the bishop’s desire to give a sinner the benefit of the doubt; fright and admonition alone might reform her, and it was exceedingly difficult to deal with a really bad prioress, when she could not be ejected from her order.