“Farewell nunhood, never shall I enter thy state. Farewell all the household and farewell Avernay! The alms are given, too late have I left the world. Of a truth this wearies me; I will be a nun no more. (Hear this tale of the nun, whose heart was gay and whose order could not please her).”
It is but rarely that the singer’s sympathy is against the prisoned nun; and although one or two charming songs may be found which convey a warning, the moral sits all awry. A Gascon air (intended, like so many, to accompany a dance and having the favourite refrain “Va léger, légère, va légèrement”) threatens an altogether inadequate punishment for a nun who enjoys the sweets of this world.
“Down in the meadow, there is a convent. In it a nun lies ill.” “Tell me, little nun, for what do you hunger?” “For white apples and for a young lad.” “Do not eat, little nun, they will bury you not in the church, nor even in the convent, but out in the graveyard with the poor people”[1560].
A Provençal song with a haunting air tells how the Devil carried off a nun who rebelled against her imprisonment:
Dedins Aix l’y a’no moungeto,
Tant pourideto,
Di que s’avie soun bel amic
Sera la reino dou pays....
“In Aix there is a little nun, a wicked little nun; she says that with her handsome lover she will be queen of all the land. She weeps and weeps, that wicked little nun, and every day she grows thinner and thinner, because she may not put off her habit. But her father has sent her a message, a solemn message, that she cannot do as she would, that in the convent she must stay. The little nun has cursed her father, who made her leave her handsome lover and take the veil and habit. The little nun has cursed the trowel that made the church and the mason who built it and the men who worked for him. The little nun has cursed the priest who said mass and the acolytes who served him and the congregation who listened to him. The little nun has cursed the cloth which made the veil and the cord of St Francis and the vow of poverty. One day when she was all alone in her room, the devil appeared to her. ‘Welcome, my love!’ ‘I am not your love whom you desire, my pretty. I am the devil, don’t you see? I am come to rescue you from the convent.’ ‘You must first ask my father and also my mother and my friends and my kinsmen, to see if they will consent.’ ‘No, I will not ask your father, nor yet your mother, nor your friends nor your kinsmen. Now and at once we will go.’ ‘Farewell, my sister nuns, so little and young, do not do as I did, but praise God well in the convent.’ The devil has taken the little nun, the wicked little nun; he has carried her high up into the sky and then he has hurled her down into hell, down, down into hell”[1561].
There is a moral here to be sure, but it is the moral of a fairy tale, not of a sermon. As to the many variants of the “Clericus et Nonna” theme in which sometimes the nun makes love to a clerk and is repulsed and sometimes the clerk makes love to a nun and is repulsed[1562] it is possible that the Church had a hand in them all. Wandering clerks and cloistered monks were capable of the most unabashed love-poetry; but sometimes they chose to set themselves right with heaven.
In England the theme of the nun unwillingly professed is not found in popular songs, such as abound in France, Italy and Germany. It received, however, a literary expression towards the close of the fourteenth century. In the pseudo-Chaucerian Court of Love the lover sees among those who do sacrifice to the King and Queen of Love a wailing group of priests and hermits, friars and nuns:
This is the courte of lusty folke and gladde,
And wel becometh hire abite and arraye;
O why be som so sory and so sadde,
Complaynyng thus in blak and white and graye?
Freres they ben, and monkes, in gode faye:
Alas for rewth! grete dole it is to sene,
To se hem thus bewaile and sory bene.
Se howe thei crye and wryng here handes white,
For thei so sone wente to religion!
And eke the nonnes with vaile and wymple plight,
Here thought is, thei ben in confusion.
“Alas,” thay sayn, “we fayne perfeccion,
In clothes wide and lake oure libertie
But all the synne mote on oure frendes be.
For, Venus wote, we wold as fayne do ye,
That ben attired here and wel besene,
Desiren man and love in oure degree
Ferme and feithfull right as wolde the quene:
Oure frendes wikke in tender youth and grene,
Ayenst oure wille made us religious;
That is the cause we morne and waylen thus.”
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And yet agaynewarde shryked every nonne,
The pange of love so strayneth hem to cry:
“Now woo the tyme” quod thay “that we be boune!
This hatefull order nyse will done us dye!
We sigh and sobbe and bleden inwardly
Fretyng oure self with thought and hard complaynt,
That ney for love we waxen wode and faynt”[1563].
A kindred poem, The Temple of Glas, by Lydgate (who seems himself to have become a monk of Bury at the age of fifteen) contains the same idea. Among the lovers in the Temple are some who make bitter complaint, youth wedded to age, or wedded without free choice, or shut in a convent: