directed Richard del Clay, custos of the monastery, to proceed at once to Keldholme and to summon before him in the chapter Emma of York and Mary de Holm, who like daughters of perdition were disobedient and rebels against the Prioress. Having read the Archbishop’s letter in the mother tongue in the chapter, he was to admonish the two nuns for the first, second and third times that they must humbly obey the Prioress in all lawful and canonical injunctions. They were not to meddle with any internal or external business of the house in any way, or to go outside of the enclosure of the monastery, or to say anything against the Prioress, on pain of expulsion and of the greater excommunication.
At the end of the year, however, harassed Archbishop Greenfield went where the wicked cease from troubling; and the two malcontents at Keldholme seized the opportunity to triumph. Scarcely a couple of months after his death Emma of Stapelton resigned; she said she was “oppressed by age,” but since Emma of York was at once elected and confirmed in her place, it is probable that the rage, like Joan de Pickering’s free will, was something of a euphemism; her reason doubtless took a concrete and menacing shape and wore a veil upon its undiminished head. The last we hear of these very unsaintly ladies is in 1318, when the new Archbishop enjoined a penance on Mary de Holm for incontinence with a chaplain[166]. It is noticeable that this was the second case of the kind which had occurred in the diocese of York within fifteen years. At Swine in 1290 the appointment by Archbishop Romeyn of Josiana de Anlaby as Prioress had been followed by similar disorders and he ordered an inquiry to be held and the rebellious nuns to be sent to Rosedale[167].
Much trouble might arise within a convent over the election of its head, as these stories show. But sometimes external persons interfered; great ladies used their influence and their wealth to secure the coveted post for a protégée of their own; and the protégée herself was not averse to oiling the palms of those in authority with good marks of silver; “blood-abbesses,” Ensfrid of Cologne would have called them (“that is, foisted in by their kinsfolk”) or “jester-abbesses” (“that is, such as had been thrust in by the power of great folks”) or “simoniacs, who had crept in through money or through worldly services”[168]. In these cases there was likely to be more trouble still, for great ladies were not always careful of the character of a friend or relative whom they wished to settle comfortably as head of a convent. In 1528 the Abbess of Wilton died and Mr John Carey thought he would like the appointment for his sister Eleanor, one of the nuns. He was brother-in-law to lovely Anne Boleyn, and a word in her ear secured her warm support; the infatuated King wished to please Anne; and Wolsey, steering his bark in troubled waters, wished to please the King; so he promised that the lady should have the post, the election to which had been placed in his hands by the nuns. It seemed that all would go well with Dame Eleanor Carey, when Anne Boleyn pulled the strings; but trouble arose, and the action taken by the Cardinal and by the future oppressor of the monasteries is greatly to the credit of them both, for both had much to lose from Anne. “As touching the matter of Wilton” Henry wrote to her
My lord cardinal hath had the Nuns before him, and examined them, Mr. Bell being present; which hath certified me, that for a truth that she hath confessed herself, (which we would have had abbesse) to have had two children by two sundry priests; and furder, since, hath been kept by a servant of the Lord Broke, that was, and that not long ago; wherefore I would not for all the gold in the world clog your conscience nor mine to make her a ruler of a house, which is of so ungudly demeanor, nor I trust you would not that neither for brother nor sister I should so destain mine honor or conscience. And as touching the prioress [Isabel Jordan] or Dame Eleanor’s eldest sister, though there is not any evident case proved against them, and that the prioress is so old that of many years she could not be as she was named [ill-famed]: yet notwithstanding to do you pleasure I have done that neither of them shall have it, but that some other good and well disposed woman shall have it, whereby the house shall be the better reformed (whereof I ensure you it had much need) and God much the better served[169].
Wolsey, however, gave the appointment to Isabel Jordan, who in spite of her having been the subject of some scandal in her youth, was favoured by the greater part of the convent as being “ancient, wise and discreet”; whereupon he brought down upon himself a severe rebuke from Henry, who had “both reported and promised to divers friends of Dame Elinor Carey that the Prioress should not have it”[170]. Without doubt pretty Mistress Anne was sulking down at Hever.
Not only did outside persons thus concern themselves in a conventual election; the nuns themselves were not always unwilling to bribe, where they desired advancement. A series of letters written by Margaret Vernon to Cromwell, concerning the office of Prioress of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, throws a lurid light upon the methods which were sometimes employed:
“Sir,” she wrote to her powerful friend in 1529, “Pleaseth it you to understand that there is a goldsmith in this town, named Lewys, and he sheweth me that Mr. More hath made sure promise to parson Larke that the subprioress of St. Helen’s shall be prioress there afore Christmas-day. Sir, I most humbly beseech you to be so good master unto me, as to know my lord’s grace’s [the king’s] pleasure in this case and that I may have a determined answer whereto I shall trust, that I may settle myself in quietness; the which I am far from at this hour. And farthermore if it might like you to make the offer to my said lord’s grace of such a sum of money as we were at a point for, my friends thinketh that I should surely be at an end.”
Soon afterwards she wrote again:
Sir, it is so that there is divers and many of my friends that hath written to me that I should make labour for the said house unto your mastership, showing you that the King’s grace hath given it to master Harper, who saith that he is proffered for his favour two hundred marks of the King’s saddler, for his sister; which proffer I will never make unto him, nor no friend for me shall, for the coming in after that fashion is neither godly nor worshipful. And beside all this must come by my lady Orell’s favour, which is a woman I would least meddle with. And thus I shall not only be burdened in conscience for payment of this great sum, but also entangled and in great cumbrance to satisfy the avidity of this gentlewoman. And though I did, in my lord cardinal’s days, proffer a hundred pounds for the said house, I beseech you consider for what purpose it was made. Your mastership knoweth right well that there was by my enemies so many high and slanderous words, and your mastership had made so great instant labour for me, that I shamed so much the fall thereof that I foresaw little what proffer was made; but now, I thank our Lord, that blast is ceased, and I have no such singular love unto it; for now I have two eyes to see in this matter clearly, the one is the eye of my soul, that I may come without burthen of conscience and by the right door, and, laying away all pomp and vanity of the world, looking warily upon the maintenance and supportation of the house, which I should take in charge, and cannot be performed, master Harper’s pleasure and my lady Orell’s accomplished. In consideration whereof I intend not willingly, nor no friend of mine shall not, trouble your mastership in this case.
In another letter she mentions a saying of Master Harper, that from the good report he has heard of her, he would rather admit her without a groat than others who offer money; but her conscientious scruples were not rewarded with St Helen’s, though she almost immediately obtained an appointment as prioress at Little Marlow, and on the dissolution of that house among the lesser monasteries, received and held for a brief space the great Abbey of Malling[171]. It is true that these instances of simony and of the use of influence belong to the last degenerate years of the monasteries in England. But cases hardly less serious undoubtedly occurred at an early date. The gross venality of the papal curia[172], even in the early thirteenth century, is not a very happy omen for the behaviour of private patrons; smaller folk than the Pope could summon a wretched abbot “Amice, ut offeras”; nor was it only abbots who thus bought themselves into favour. The thirteenth century jurist Pierre Du Bois, whose enlightened plans for the better education of women included the suppression of the nunneries and the utilisation of their wealth to form schools or colleges for girls, mentioned the reception of nuns for money and rents, by means of compacts (i.e. the dowry system) and the election of abbesses and prioresses by the same illicit bargains, as among the abuses practised in nunneries[173].