Basiria, daughter of Amelina of Aulnay, who was there as a boarder, to be sent away and forbade the Prioress henceforth to keep any girl or girls there, except such as had been received as novices[1998].
But it was a difficult task to force the needy nuns, reduced already to pawning the very vessels of the altar, to give up this more certain and less sacrilegious method of adding to their income.
It is indeed a significant fact, as Mr Coulton has pointed out, that “the prohibitions are in inverse proportion to the temporal prosperity of the convent”[1999]. The wealthy Abbaye-aux-Dames at Caen had no need to take in school children. But Villarceaux, £50 in debt in 1249 and going steadily downhill, vainly struggling in the toils of Jews and Caursini, was the most frequent offender of all and resisted the most stubbornly Rigaud’s attempts at reform. In 1257 he ordered the nuns to remove all the boys and girls who were in the house, except one girl who was going to be veiled[2000]. The next year they were threatened with severe punishment if they postponed any longer the ejection of the children “whom they are bringing up in their house against our inhibition”[2001]. Follows silence for the next three visitations; then, eight years later, “There were several girls there, as it were in the charge of certain nuns, which displeased us exceedingly and shortly afterwards we ordered the Prioress by our letters to remove all secular girls” within a certain date[2002]; and in 1268
We ordered, as we had done before, that the nuns should utterly put away all secular ladies or girls (domicellas seu puellulas), if any were there, and that they should suffer neither one nor more of such girls to remain there, except such as were to be made nuns[2003].
What of St Saëns, with bad morals, growing debts and a deficiency of cider? In 1260, “We ordered secular girls to be removed,” with one favoured exception[2004]; in 1261, “They were keeping in the priory two ladies, to wit the daughter of the châtelain of Belencombre and the elder daughter of the lord of Mesnières (de Maneriis) whom we ordered to be sent away”[2005]. It is the same with St Aubin, with its bad morals and its tumble-down buildings[2006]; with Bival, immoral also, overcome with debts even to its own servants for their wages, and always short of stores; in 1252 the nuns had ten children there to be brought up (pueros decem nutriendos) and Rigaud ordered their removal[2007]. It is the same, too, with St Amand, where the debts increased from year to year and the nuns could not even get in the money due to them; in 1263 a certain daughter of Lady Aeliz de Synoz was found there and removed[2008]. At St Léger de Preaux (1249) secular girls were all to be sent away[2009]; and at St Sauveur d’Evreux all unveiled children (infantes non velatas) were immediately to be removed[2010], while some years later Rigaud made a general injunction there against receiving relatives of the nuns as boarders[2011]. A mysterious child was being brought up in a grange belonging to the Abbey of Bival at Pierremans, but why or whose we know not; was it a needy relative of the Abbess, or an indiscretion of sister Isabel or sister Florence, or merely an ordinary paying boarder? History is silent, but the Archbishop was sufficiently annoyed when his order to remove it in 1268 was still disregarded in the following year[2012].
The constant attempts of the nuns to add to their numbers were actuated by the same desire to obtain ready money, in the shape of a dowry; the Archbishop was more far-seeing and recognised that the immediate good would be out-balanced by the strain on their scanty revenues in the future; nor was he unmindful of the fact that the demand for a dowry was contrary to the rule. The heavy debts and the insufficiency of stores, which he found at convent after convent, certainly seem to indicate that their only hope lay in a rigid limitation of membership. Moreover overcrowding was certainly subversive of discipline and it looks as though Rigaud had, in some cases (e.g. at Villarceaux in 1249)[2013], been unwilling to permit new recruits to enter a house whose moral record was bad. This may explain in part his long struggle with St Saëns and with St Aubin, though here, as at Villarceaux, poverty was always the chief reason noted in his diary. At St Aubin the financial arrière pensée is very clear. In 1251 Rigaud noted that nuns were received simoniacally; on this and on the four subsequent visitations the Prioress was forbidden to receive any girl as a nun without special licence, and girls received in contravention of this rule were not to be considered veiled or recognised as nuns[2014] (this was the usual form in which his prohibition was couched). Then in 1259 came another case of simony; in spite of the Archbishop’s former inhibition the nuns had received and veiled a certain lady, the daughter of Sir Robert Mauvoisin (Mali Vicini), knight. Asked why they had done this they said that urgent necessity and poverty had forced them to it and that the father of the girl had given them an annual rent of 10s. with her; but they admitted that they had acted against the wish of the Prioress and without her consent. The Archbishop “seeing them to have acted with cupidity and with the vice of simony” soon afterwards ordered the girl to be removed, unveiled and sent back to her father’s house and enjoined a penance upon the nuns[2015]; the prohibition to receive nuns without licence was repeated at subsequent visitations[2016]. There were similarly protracted struggles between the Archbishop and the nuns at St Saëns and at St Amand. At St Saëns, when he came to visit it in 1258, he found two little girls in residence and in spite of the prayers of the Prioress and some of the nuns that he would allow the children (puellule) to be received and veiled, he ordered them to be removed within a week[2017]. The next year, however, he found that the obstinate nuns had promised four girls, nieces of certain of the nuns, that they should be received if his consent could be obtained, whereupon the Archbishop in great irritation tore up the letters before the assembled chapter and once more repeated his prohibition[2018]. In 1260 he made an exception in favour of one girl[2019], and in 1261, when the nuns asked permission to veil five new inmates “in order that the divine service might be increased” (ampliandum), he ordered them to send the candidates or their relatives to him and promised to give the necessary licence if it seemed expedient[2020]. In 1262 and 1264[2021] the usual prohibition was repeated.
The nuns of St Amand persisted with equal obstinacy in admitting novices without licence. In 1254 and again in 1257 the Archbishop noted the presence of four girls who had been promised admission as soon as there was a vacancy[2022]. In 1263 he ordered one of them to be removed[2023]. In the next year he found that four ladies (domicelle) in secular habit had been received, one of them in spite of his inhibition; the Abbess was punished for disobedience and the girl was sent home[2024]. In 1267 seven girls were waiting to be veiled, but he seems to have made no objection[2025]. At Villarceaux in 1257 the niece of a neighbouring prior was found in the house, in secular dress; “and she in the chapter,” says Rigaud, “throwing herself upon her knees, besought us to permit her to be received by them, because the Prioress and convent had promised to veil her”[2026]. Whether he acceded to her request is not known, but in the following year there was serious trouble, because the Prioress had raised the number of nuns above the statutory number of twenty, by receiving two girls against the bishop’s order and the convent’s will, one to be a nun and the other to be a lay sister. The Archbishop ordered their instant expulsion and specifically mentioned that his former prohibition had been dictated by a desire to do what was best for the convent, “since its resources hardly suffice for a small number of persons”[2027]. At Bondeville also a girl had been received without licence in 1266 and the Archbishop forbade her to be veiled[2028]. Sometimes it is clear that he had to protect the nuns, less against their own improvidence than against the enforced reception of nuns “dumped” upon them by powerful people outside their own ranks. The nuns of Villarceaux were forbidden to receive any lay sister or novice “even if the abbess of St Cyr send her”[2029]. At Bival, in 1254, where it is specifically stated that no more nuns are to be received without licence on account of the poverty of the house, he ordered no exception to be made even for two girls sent by the bishop and one by Sir William of Poissy[2030]; and at Montivilliers in 1266 he noted that in spite of his prohibition a girl had been placed there by the Legate[2031].
(5) A very common fault in these Rouen (and indeed in all) houses was the imperfect claustration of the nuns; seculars entered the precincts; nuns left them. There were constant injunctions that no secular or suspected persons were to enter the cloister precincts[2032] or to talk with the nuns anywhere save in the parlour[2033]. At Bival, however, a significant exception was made to the general prohibition; no one was to be introduced except those whom it would be a scandal to turn away[2034]—potential benefactors and other powerful folk, no doubt. It seems that the nuns were in the habit of dining and of eating meat with seculars (at Bival they absented themselves from Compline for this purpose)[2035], and the Archbishop forbade, time after time, the eating together of nuns and seculars[2036]. No secular person was to sleep in the house[2037]; and no nun was to converse with seculars, even in the parlour, without licence from the head of the house and without a suitable companion, such as the doorkeeper[2038]. These precautions seem to have been necessary, for one is left with the impression that secular visitors gained access without much difficulty to the cloister precincts; at Bival it was complained that brothers and relatives of the nuns and others, entered the house[2039]; and at Bondeville friends and relatives used to come into the cloister at will and talk with the nuns in the meadows and guest rooms of the house[2040]; at a later visitation the archbishop remarked that the house where guests were received was too close to the cloister and to the conventual buildings[2041]. The abuses to which such freedom of access might give rise are obvious. They appear in the case of St Aubin, morally the worst of all the houses; the state of that community at the visitations of 1254, 1256, 1257 and 1261 will be referred to later; in 1266 a certain miller was not to be allowed to frequent the house, as scandal had arisen through him, and the schoolmaster (Rector scolarum) of Beauvoir had “sometimes impudently frequented the said house or priory, from which evil rumours had arisen,” and he was to be warned to desist[2042]; next year the same miller and two clerics (a rector and a clerk) were frequenting the house and causing scandal and the Archbishop forbade them to enter it[2043].
The wandering of nuns outside the precincts was even more dangerous, and it is significant that after the terrible revelations at Villarceaux in 1249 the Archbishop, in his injunctions, paid special attention to the entrance of seculars into the convent and to the conditions under which the nuns were wont to leave it. Rigaud strictly forbade any nun to go out without special licence from the head of the house and that licence was not to be given except for an adequate reason[2044]; “not quickly and easily but with difficulty and for an appointed time only”[2045], ran the injunction to the Abbess of St Amand. A term was always to be fixed by which the nun had to return and she was always to have a suitable companion allotted to her[2046]. This seems to have been a necessary precaution, for at St Saëns the nuns were found to stay away alone for fifteen days or more[2047]; it is perhaps not accidental that St Saëns was one of the immoral houses. At St Léger de Préaux, also, the nuns were in the habit of going out alone to the houses of relatives[2048]: “They go outside the abbey when they can and return when they will,” says the Archbishop[2049]; in 1267 one of them was found to be alone with her mother at Argoulles, “which displeased us and we forbade the Abbess to give any nun permission to go out without company”[2050]. At Bondeville they used often to go to Rouen[2051]. Another precaution taken against the wandering of nuns in the world was the closing or careful guarding of the cloister doors; it was ordered at Bival in 1257 that a door opening on to the meadows, which was often unlocked, should be kept locked[2052]. The causes which took nuns outside the gates were many: sometimes they seem to have gone simply to take a walk; sometimes to visit relatives or to act as godmothers to the children of friends (a practice which was specifically forbidden at Montivilliers in 1257 and again in 1265)[2053]; sometimes on business to the granges of the convent; sometimes to work in the fields (three of the nuns of St Aubin were absent at the vintage (in vindemiis) when the Archbishop came in 1267)[2054]; sometimes to beg (at St Aubin in 1261 it was ordered that the younger nuns were not to be sent out to beg (pro questu)[2055] and two years later two nuns of this poverty-stricken house were absent in France, seeking alms)[2056]; sometimes for less reputable reasons. There is no more striking commentary on the writings of contemporary moralists like Matheolus and Gilles li Muisis than the Register of Eudes Rigaud[2057]; and the stress laid upon the ill results of allowing seculars to enter and nuns to leave the cloister, shows that the attempts of the medieval Church to impose strict claustration upon nuns, harsh as they seem to modern minds, were dictated by a real social necessity.
(6) Modern minds would also be inclined to consider as trifling offences the various cases of frivolous behaviour—games, gay clothes, pet animals—which the Archbishop entered from time to time in his diary. The custom of indulging in games on Innocents’ Day, which prevailed in certain English nunneries, was fairly common in Rigaud’s diocese. In 1249 he made the following injunction at Villarceaux: