and then after the cause of such his visitation had been set forth and explained to the said prioress and nuns by the same reverend father, to wit because his injunctions at his first visitation ... were not duly kept, he proceeded to his preparatory inquiry.
This inquiry showed that matters were if anything worse than before; and in 1445 the bishop visited the house again[1529]. Similarly, when once Bishop Atwater had awakened to the moral condition of Littlemore in the next century, he took pains to reform it. The scandals were brought to light at the visitation by his commissary Dr Horde in 1517; a few months later the bishop summoned the prioress before him to answer the charges made against her and after a lapse of nine months the house was visited again in 1518[1530].
But if visitations were sometimes not held regularly enough to be really effective, a still greater cause of weakness was the great difficulty experienced by the bishops in controlling the religious houses in the period between one visitation and the next and in enforcing their injunctions. A bishop might send a set of the most salutary injunctions to an undisciplined house; but how was he to secure that the nuns followed them, save by the most solemn threats of excommunication, which they seem often enough to have disregarded. Markyate, St Michael’s, Stamford, and Littlemore went steadily from bad to worse between each of the visitations made by Gray, Alnwick and Atwater respectively. In 1442
Dame Elizabeth the prioress [of St Michael’s], being asked whether she has observed and caused to be observed by the others my lord’s injunctions made to them at another time, says that, so far as she has been able she has kept them and caused them to be kept by the others: howbeit she says that she does not lie in the dorter, or keep frater, or even keep cloister or church according to my lord’s injunction and this because of her bodily incapacity. And she avers that my lord granted her a dispensation touching these things, the which my lord utterly disavows[1531].
These were comparatively trivial faults; since the last visitation one of the nuns had had a child; and at the next visitation, three years later, the same fate was found to have overtaken another, which is a significant commentary on the effectuality of episcopal control.
The fundamental difficulty was that the bishop was obliged in the nature of things to trust largely to the prioress and to the nuns themselves to enforce his decrees. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Sometimes the very women whom he singled out for special trust were subsequently found to be worse than their sisters. Indeed it is sometimes difficult to account for the principle on which coadjutresses were appointed. It surely seems somewhat like tempting providence that Alnwick should have selected Isabel Benet, the only other nun in the house who was defamed of incontinence, to be administrator in place of the suspended Prioress of Catesby, and it is not surprising to read of the later escapade of that lady at a dance with the friars of Northampton and of their refusal to obey his ordinance against private rooms[1532]. The only intelligible principle of the bishop would appear to have been that applied by Henry VII to the Earl of Kildare, “All Ireland cannot rule this man; then he shall rule all Ireland.” It is moreover significant (as has already been pointed out)[1533] that in the majority of cases a prioress, however wicked, was suspended rather than deprived; even Denise Loweliche and Katherine Wells remained in office after their resignation. It was indeed too embarrassing to know what to do with a sinner. She could not be expelled from her order; if she were kept in the same house in a subordinate position she would probably make her successor’s life a burden; if she were transferred to another house she would probably corrupt a hitherto unblemished flock. The bishops did their best in the face of great difficulties, but it is plain that the prioresses sometimes thought little enough of their authority. The rather disreputable old Abbess of Romsey, Joyce Rowse, said openly to her nuns that when the inquiry (held in 1492) was finished she would do as she had done before; and she kept her word[1534]. At Ankerwyke in 1441 one little nun of tender age explained to the bishop “that the prioress doth not provide this deponent with bed-clothes, insomuch that she lies in the straw; and when my lord had commanded this deponent to lie in the dorter, and this deponent asked bed-clothes of the prioress, she said chidingly to her, ‘Let him who gave you leave to lie in the dorter supply you with raiment’”[1535].
Though the bishops for the most part did their work conscientiously it is difficult, in the light of the considerations which have been urged above to conclude that their visitations had a lasting effect. But if the visitations and the injunctions based on them were sometimes of small value for their purpose, they have an incidental value to historians which cannot be overestimated. There have come down to us in the bishops’ registers a comparatively small number of complete visitation reports, comprising detecta and comperta (or sometimes comperta only) and injunctions[1536], and a much larger number of injunctions, without the comperta on which they were based. The similarity in wording of episcopal injunctions, combined with the fact that the most important collection of complete reports (Alnwick’s visitations) was until recently unknown, has led many writers to argue that injunctions were mere general “common form,” without any relation to specific abuses found at the house to which they were sent, “left,” as Mr Hamilton Thompson says, “like portentous visiting cards upon a convent, to show that the diocesan had duly called”[1537]. The point is of great importance, for it involves the reliability of injunctions as evidence of the state of a particular convent at a particular time.
The answer to this view of “common form” is easily found if we study the process by which injunctions were composed, as revealed in the great series of visitations by Bishop Alnwick. They were drawn up with great care by the bishop’s registrar and he based them upon two sources, the detecta and comperta of each visitation, which had been noted down on the spot by clerks, and the sets of injunctions sent to other religious houses, which were regularly copied into the episcopal register as models for future use. It is inherent in the nature of the case that monasteries subject to the same original rule and statutory regulations and living under almost identical conditions, should be subject to similar breaches of discipline. It is only necessary to study those detecta which have been preserved to perceive how universal, in all dioceses and among both sexes, were (for instance) the customs of drinking after Compline, forming separate “households,” taking unlicensed boarders, making unwise grants of corrodies and long leases, wandering abroad in the world, and wearing worldly garments. The registrar did not wish to invent new wording every time these offences occurred; he used a common form for them. But “common form” has here a different sense from that in which it is used by those who question the value of injunctions as evidence. The registrar never made an injunction which was not based upon a detectum made at the house to which the injunction was directed. Injunctions are common form only because they deal with common errors. If an almost similar set be sent to two houses, it is because the houses have displayed (as is indeed only natural) almost similar faults; and where the two sets differ, they differ not accidentally, but of careful purpose. It was the business of the registrar to express the injunctions in general terms, even though a fault may have been that of a single individual, because they were intended to be canonically binding upon the whole convent. The reason why injunctions have survived in much greater numbers than the detecta upon which they were based, is that the clerks copied into the bishop’s register only common forms, which would be likely to be useful. The record of individual evidence would not help them; but a carefully worded injunction might be used over and over again, whenever the fault with which it dealt recurred at the same or another house. No one who has studied the relation of detecta and injunctions in Alnwick’s book of visitations can doubt the value of the latter as evidence, when they appear alone; the very process by which “Dame Alice Decun says that only two little girls, of six or seven years, do lie in the dorter” is transmuted into the common injunction “that ye suffre ne seculere persones wymmen ne childern lyg by nyghte in the dormytory” is patent in the register.
If the reliability of the injunctions be thus accepted, it is almost unnecessary to point out what an invaluable source of evidence is to be found in the bishops’ registers. Controversialists have fought ad nauseam over the truth or falsehood of the “scandalous comperta” of Henry VIII’s commissioners, without understanding that for nearly three hundred years before the Dissolution the comperta and injunctions in the registers give a picture of English monasticism coloured by no ulterior motive. Even after a large number of the registers have been published, historians are still content to paint monastic life in the later middle ages from the monastic rule, ignoring the evidence of practice which is always necessary to supplement the evidence of theory. Not even the chronicles of an earlier age are more interesting; the record of Alnwick is as valuable as that of Jocelin of Brakelonde. In dioceses where registers were regularly kept and have survived uninjured and where injunctions were punctiliously copied, the history of a house may be traced throughout the whole period covered by this book. The dioceses of Winchester, Lincoln and York are most fortunate in this respect. To select a few examples at random, there are extant records of the visitation of Romsey Abbey by Archbishop Peckham in 1284, by Bishop John of Pontoise in 1302, by Bishop Henry Woodlock in 1311, by Bishop William of Wykeham in 1387, by Archbishop Morton (through his vicar-general, Robert Shirbourne) in 1492, by Dr Hede, commissary of the Prior of Canterbury, during the vacancies of the sees of Canterbury and Winchester in 1502, by Bishop Fox (through his vicar-general, John Dowman) in 1507, again (through Master John Incent) in 1523 and again (through the vicar-general) in 1527[1538]. It is thus possible to describe with approximate accuracy the life of this great convent during the whole period from 1284 to the Dissolution. Similarly records have survived of visitations of Elstow Abbey by Bishop Gynewell in 1359, Bishop Buckingham in 1387, Archbishop Courtenay in 1389, Bishop Flemyng in 1421-2, Bishop Gray in 1434, Bishop Alnwick in 1442-3, and Bishop Longland in 1530 and 1531. Of Nunappleton Priory there are recorded visitations by Archbishop Wickwane in 1281, Archbishop Melton in 1318, Archbishop Zouche in 1346, Archbishop Rotherham in 1489 and Archbishop Lee in 1534. Moreover mandates concerning isolated pieces of business, elections, permits to receive boarders, orders to reform specific abuses, are scattered through the registers and provide useful supplementary information.
All houses are not as well represented. In some dioceses injunctions are rarely recorded: the fine series of registers for Hereford yield surprisingly few. Some houses emerge only rarely into the light with a single set of injunctions; others (and among them important houses such as Lacock and Amesbury) lack even a single visitation report to rescue their inmates from oblivion. But the geographical range of the surviving reports is sufficiently great to enable the formation of an accurate general account of English nunneries during the later middle ages. One warning only must be borne in mind by the reader. If it is unhistorical to write an account of monastic houses based solely upon the rule, it is also unhistorical to write one based solely on visitation documents. The detecta made to a bishop were, and were intended to be, revelations of faults; it was not the function of the bishop’s clerk to catalogue virtues, though sometimes a string of “omnia bene,” or a curt note to the effect that my lord, finding little in need of reformation, passed on, bears positive witness to a convent’s good life. It must always be remembered, in estimating the state of a house from a set of detecta and injunctions, that though they are indubitably the truth, they are not the whole truth. Goodness is after all largely a matter of proportion; and though convents are to be found which were positively bad, in others there were probably virtues of kindness, piety and a brave struggle against poverty, which would counterbalance (if we knew them), the unfavourable impression left by a string of accusations. Moreover by far the larger number of the detecta witnesses to a growing worldliness and to minor breaches of the rule, rather than to serious moral defects. If the community concerned were other than a nunnery ostensibly following a strict rule, we should hardly consider the faults to be faults at all. The immorality, bad temper and financial mismanagement revealed at some houses would be reprehensible in all communities at all ages; but in themselves boarders, pretty clothes, pet dogs and attendance at christenings are not heinous crimes. It is necessary, in dealing with medieval nuns as with all other subjects, to preserve a sense of proportion and a firm hold upon human nature.