And riȝt anon I herd oþer crie
With sobbing teris and with ful pitous soune,
To fore þe goddes, bi lamentacioun,
That were constrayned in hir tender youþe
And in childhode, as it is ofte couþe,
Y-entred were into religioun,
Or þei hade yeris of discresioun,
That al her life cannot but complein,
In wide copis perfeccion to feine,
Ful couertli to curen al hir smert,
And shew þe contrarie outward of her hert.
Thus saugh I wepen many a faire maide,
That on hir freendis al þi wite þei liede[1564].

The same idea is also repeated in King James I of Scotland’s poem, The King’s Quair[1565], and later (with more resemblance to the continental songs) in the complaint of the wicked Prioress in Sir David Lyndesay’s morality play, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits [c. 1535]:

I gif my freinds my malisoun
That me compellit to be ane Nun,
And wald nocht let me marie.
It was my freinds greadines
That gart me be ane Priores:
Now hartlie them I warie.
Howbeit that Nunnis sing nichts and dayis
Thair hart waitis nocht quhat thair mouth sayis;
The suith I ȝow declair.
Makand ȝow intimatioun,
To Christis Congregatioun
Nunnis ar nocht necessair.
Bot I sall do the best I can,
And marie sum gude honest man,
And brew gude aill and tun.
Mariage, be my opinioun,
It is better Religioun
As to be freir or Nun[1566].

The concentrated bitterness of The Court of Love and the social satire of Lindesay are only a literary expression of the theme treated more lightheartedly in the popular chansons de nonnes. The songs are one side of the popular view of asceticism, the gay side. The serious side may be found in the famous story of The Nun who Loved the World:

Some time there was a nun that hight Beatrice, a passing fair woman, and she was sacristan of the kirk, and she had great devotion unto our Lady; and ofttimes men desired her to sin. So at last she consented unto a clerk to go away with him when compline was done, and ere she departed she went unto an altar of our Lady and said unto her; “Lady, as I have been devout unto thee, now I resign unto thee these keys, for I may no longer sustain the temptation of my flesh.” And she laid the keys on the altar and went her ways unto the clerk. And when he had defouled her, within a few days he left her and went away; and she had nothing to live on and thought shame to gang home again unto her cloister and she fell to be a common woman. And when she had lived in that vice fifteen years, on a day she came unto the nunnery gate, and asked the porter if he knew ever a nun in that place that hight Beatrice, that was sacristan and keeper of the kirk. And he said he knew her on the best wise and said she was a worthy woman and a holy from when she was a little bairn, “and ever has kept her clean and in good name.” And she understood not the words of this man and went her ways. And our Lady appeared unto her and said: “Behold, I have fulfilled thine office these fifteen years and therefore turn again now into thy place and be again in thine office as thou wast, and shrive thee and do thy penance, for there is no creature here that knows thy trespass, for I have ever been for thee in thy clothing and in thine habit.” And anon she was in her habit and went in and shrove her and did her penance and told all that was happened unto her[1567].

This tale is interesting, because it is much more than a piece of naïve piety. The story of Beatrice is intimately connected with the chansons de nonnes; it is the serious, as they are the gay, expression of a whole philosophy of life. The songs are, indeed, purely materialistic and do not attempt (how should the spinsters and the knitters in the sun attempt it?) to give a philosophical justification for their attitude. The miracle is simple and seems on the surface to draw no moral, save that devotion to the Virgin will be rewarded. Nevertheless the philosophy and the moral are there; they are those of the most famous of all medieval songs, Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus. The theme of the miracle and of the songs alike is the revolt against asceticism, the revolt of the body, which knows how short its beauty and its life, against the spirit which lives forever, and yet will not allow its poor yokefellow one little hour. The fact that the story of Beatrice takes the form of a Mary-miracle is itself significant. For the “Nos habebit humus” argument can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand stands the human multitude, gathering rosebuds while it may, crying up and down the roads of the world to all who pass to rejoice today, for “ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuere?” On the other hand stands the moralist, singing the same song:

Were beth they biforen us weren,
Houndes ladden and hauekes beren,
And hadden feld and wode,
That riche levedies in hoere bour, [ladies, their
That wereden gold in hoere tressour,
With hoere brightle rode?— [complexion

—but drawing how different a moral,

Dreghy here man, thenne, if thou wilt [endure
A luitel pine, that me the bit [pain, bid
Withdrau thine eyses ofte[1568]. [ease

Often for long stretches at a time the wandering clerks and the singers were willing to leave to the moralist this heaven which was to be won by despising earthly beauty; they were content to go to hell singing with Aucassin and Nicolete and all the kings of the world. But at other times they ached for heaven too and would not believe that they might win there only by the narrow path of righteousness. So they invented a philosophical justification for their way of life. The Church had forgotten the love which sat with publicans and sinners; the people rediscovered it, and attributed it not to the Son but to the Mother. At one blow they outwitted the moralist by inventing the cult of the Virgin Mary[1569]. In their hands this Mary worship became more than the worship of Christ’s mother; it became almost a separate religion, a religion under which jongleurs and thieves, fighters and tournament-haunters and the great host of those who loved unwisely found a mercy often denied to them by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The people created a Virgin to whom justice was nothing and law less than nothing, but to whom love of herself was all. “Imperatrix supernorum, supernatrix infernorum,” hell was emptied under her rule and heaven became a new place, filled with her disreputable, faulty, human lovers. She was not only the familiar friend of the poor and humble, she was also the confidante of the lover, of all the Aucassins and Nicoletes of the world. It is not without significance that so great a stress was always laid upon her personal loveliness. Her cult became the expression of mankind’s deep unconscious revolt against asceticism, their love of life, their passionate sense of “beauty that must die.” The story of Beatrice has kept its undiminished attraction for the modern world largely because in it, more than in all the other Mary-miracles, life has triumphed and has been justified of heaven[1570]. Even the cold garb given to it by ecclesiastics such as Caesarius of Heisterbach cannot conceal its underlying idea that all love is akin, the most earthy to the most divine; the idea which Malory expressed many years later, when he wrote of Queen Guinevere “that while she lived she was a true lover and therefore she had a good end.” The theme most familiar to us in the didactic literature of the middle ages is the theme of the soul “here in the body pent”; for the moralist has his deliberate purpose and sets down his idea more directly and with more point than do the story-teller and the singer, who have no aim but to say and speak and tell the tale. But when we have been moved by the theme of the soul, let us not fail also to recognise when we meet it—whether in the wandering scholar’s Gaudeamus or in the miracle of the nun who loved the world—the theme of the body, despised and maimed and always beautiful, crying out for its birthright. Even in the middle ages the Greeks had not lived in vain.