Sir, we say that the same Walter by covinage to compel the said Clarice to be professed, took the said Clarice when she was between the ages of seven and eight years, to the house of nuns at Buckland, and in that place were two ladies, nuns, who were of his assent to cause the infant to be professed, and they told the child that if she passed the door the devil would carry her away.
It was furthermore pleaded that on the day of purchase of the writ, Clarice was within the age of twelve years and that she was still within that age, and that therefore she could not be considered professed by the law of the land. By this time one’s sympathies are all on the side of David, and of terrified little Clarice, with whom the devil was to run away. Unfortunately the judges referred the matter to an ecclesiastical court and ordered a writ to be sent to the Bishop of Bath and Wells. The Bishop made his return
that the said Clarice on August 1st, 1383, of her own free will, was taken to the said Prioress of Buckland by Stephen Joseph, rector of the church of Northeleye, without any connivance on the part of the said Walter and the said Prioress, and she remained at the said priory for two years to see if the life would please her. Afterwards, on October 18th, 1385, she assumed the religious habit and made profession according to the manners and customs of the said house. And on the day when Clarice entered the house she was more than eight years old and on the day of purchase of the writ more than twelve years old, and at the present time is more than fourteen years old, and is well contented with the religious life.
The Bishop also found that no guards had been placed over Clarice by Walter, or by the Prioress. So David lost his suit and was in mercy for a false claim; and he also lost, upon a technical point, another suit which he had brought against the Prioress of Buckland. Nevertheless one’s sympathies remain obstinately on his side. That touch about the devil assuredly never sprang even from the fertile brain of a lawyer[143].
The illegitimate, the deformed, the feeble-minded and the unwilling represent a not very pleasant side of the conventual system. The nunneries contained other and less tragic inmates, who may be distinguished from the majority; for to them went in voluntary retirement a large number of widows[144]. If the nun unwillingly professed has always been a favourite theme in popular literature, so also has the broken-hearted wife or lover, Guinevere hiding her sorrows in the silent cloister.
Many of the widows who took the veil were, however, less romantic figures. Although their presence as secular boarders was discouraged, because it brought too much of the world within cloister walls, those who desired to make regular profession were willingly received, the more so as they often brought a substantial dower with them. Thus when Margaret, Countess of Ulster, assumed the habit at Campsey in 1347, she took with her, by licence of the Crown, the issues of all her lands and rents in England for a year after her admission, and after that date 200 marks yearly were to be paid for her sustenance[145]. Such widows often enjoyed a respect consonant with their former position in society and not infrequently became heads of their houses. Katherine de Ingham and Eleanor Lady Scrope both entered the Minories in their widowhood and eventually became abbesses[146]. But it does not need much imagination, nor an unduly cynical temperament, to guess that this element of convent life must occasionally have been a disturbing one. The conventual atmosphere did not always succeed in killing the profaner passions of the soul; and the advent of an opinionated widow, ripe in the experience of all those things which her sisters had never known, with the aplomb of one who had long enjoyed an honoured position as wife and mother and lady of the manor, must at times have caused a flutter among the doves; such a situation, for instance, as Bishop Cobham found at Wroxall when he visited it in 1323[147]. Isabel Lady Clinton of Maxstoke, widow of the patron of the house, had retired thither and had evidently taken with her a not too modest opinion of her own importance. She found it impossible to forget that she was a Clinton and to realise that she, who had in time gone by given her easy patronage to the nuns and lodged with them when she would, was now a simple sister among them. Was she to submit to the rule of Prioress Agnes of Alesbury, she without whose goodwill Prioress Agnes had never been appointed? Was she to listen meekly to chiding in the dorter, and in the frater to bear with sulks? Impossible. How she comported herself we know not, but the bishop “found grave discord existing between the Prioress and dame Isabel Clinton, some of the sisters adhering to one and some to the other.” Evidently a battle royal. The bishop, poor man, did his best. He enjoined peace and concord among the inmates; the sisters were to treat the prioress with reverence and obedience; those who had rebelled against her were to desist and the prioress was to behave amicably to all in frater, dorter, and elsewhere. And so my lord went his way. He may have known the pertinacity of the late patroness; and it was perhaps with resignation and without surprise that he confirmed her election as prioress on the death of the harassed Agnes.
The occasional cases in which wives left their husbands to enter a convent were less likely to provoke discord. Such women as left husband and children to take the veil must have been moved by a very strong vocation for religion, or else by excessive weariness. Some may perhaps have found married life even such an odious tale, “a licking of honey off thorns,” as the misguided realist who wrote Hali Meidenhad sought to depict it. In any case, whether the mystical faith of a St Bridget drew her thither, or whether matrimony had not seemed easy to her that had tried it, the presence of a wedded wife was unlikely to provoke discord in the convent; the devout and the depressed are quiet bedeswomen. It was necessary for a wife to obtain her husband’s permission before she could take the veil, since her action entailed celibacy on his part also, during her lifetime. Sometimes a husband would endow his wife liberally on her entry into the house which she had selected. There are two such dowers in the Register of Godstow Nunnery. About 1165 William de Seckworth gave the tithes of two mills and a grant of five acres of meadow to the convent, “for the helth of hys sowle and of hys chyldryn and of hys aunceters, with hys wyfe also, the whyche he toke to kepe to the forseyd holy mynchons to serve god”[148]; and a quarter of a century later Geoffrey Durant and Molde his wife, “whan þe same Moole yelded herself to be a mynchon to the same chirch,” granted one mark of rent to be paid annually by their son Peter, out of certain lands held by him, “which were of the mariage of the said Moolde”[149]. Nor did Walter Hauteyn, citizen of London, in his solicitude for his son and three daughters, forget the mother who had left her husband and children for the service of God; to Alice his wife, a nun of St Sepulchre’s Canterbury, he bequeathed in 1292 his dwelling place and rents upon Cornhill for life, with remainder to his heirs[150].