Busch forbade the custom everywhere.
The nuns thus lived like seculars, performing the minimum number of services and owning private property. Like seculars also they loved to give that “fetis” pinch to their wimples, that elegant turn to their mantles, which changed the sombre habit of their order into the dress of a lady of fashion. Busch, in common with all the reformers of the later middle ages, has a great deal to say about their clothes. All the nuns of Saxony and Thuringia refused to crop their heads, and contented themselves with cutting their hair short at the neck[2131]. The nuns of Wülfinghausen and Fischbeck wore long flowing white veils over their heads, so that it was hardly possible to recognise them as nuns[2132]. Those of St Cyriac’s appeared very pompously arrayed in long tunics and mantles, with tall peaked caps and flowing veils, “que non monialium sed domicellarum castrantium apparatum habuerunt”[2133]. The nuns of Barsinghausen
were very slender, having underneath long tight tunics of white cloth, and above being clad in almost transparent robes of black linen, which they called superpellicia, not girdled but flowing, with long sleeves, which they turned back for capes, beneath which almost all their form, which was bare underneath, could be seen[2134].
The nuns of the penitential order of St Mary Magdalen near Hildesheim wore
“a pleated veil, called in the vulgar tongue Ranse, such as they imagine the blessed Mary Magdalen used to wear, and over tunics very straitly girdled at the breast, so as to make them appear slender, and with very loose pleated trains behind, from the girdle to the hem, after the fashion of secular women. I and my brother John Bodiker,” adds Busch, “censured their habit, for that it was not religious but rather ministered to worldly vanity, and with many pious admonishments we led them all in turn to put off those pleated veils and put over their heads plain white veils without folds and to give up those gowns, which were tight in the upper part and in the lower part wide and pleated, lest they should seem to be following worldly vanity and the subtlety of their own hearts, rather than religion”[2135].
As might be expected laxity of rule and widespread proprietas brought immorality in their train and Busch in several cases mentions that a convent was ill-famed for incontinence. On the other hand this was by no means invariably the case. At Wülfinghausen, for instance, Busch told the nuns that he had never heard a word breathed against their chastity[2136]. At Weinhausen, where the old abbess withstood reform so strenuously that she had to be removed by force, and where all the nuns possessed private incomes, he specially notes “these nuns observed well the vow of chastity, for their lady the old abbess ruled them very strictly, and they held her in great reverence and fear and called her ‘gracious lady,’ because of her high birth”[2137]. Moreover certain houses received reform so readily and became so soon models of good behaviour, that there cannot have been any very serious moral decay in them. But a passage in the course of Busch’s account of the reform of the Magdalenenkloster at Halle, shows his own opinion as to the relation between absolute immorality and lesser breaches of the rule, and shows in particular the important part which he held to be played by the vice of proprietas in the downward path of a nun. It is interesting also because in it he attributes a great deal of the decadence of nunneries to insufficient control by their pastors and above all to too infrequent visitation:
“The feminine sex,” he says, “cannot long persist in the due observance of their rule without men, who are proven, and reformed and who often call them by wise counsels to better things. For our eyes saw no monastery of nuns belonging to any order (and there is no small number of them in Saxony, Misnia and Thuringia) who remained for long in their good intent, holy life and due reform without reformed fathers. For wherever nuns and holy sisters do not confess at set times, nor communicate, nor hold chapter meeting concerning their faults at least once a week, nor are visited by their [spiritual] fathers every year ..., such nuns and sisters we saw and heard often to be fallen from the observance of their rule and from the religious life to a dissolute life, odious in the sight of God and men, to the grave peril and eternal damnation of their souls. For first laying aside the fear of God, they fall into the sin of property in small things, then in greater things and then in the peculium of money and clothes, thence they break out into the desires of the flesh and incontinence of the outward senses and so to the evil act, and thus they fear not to give themselves over bit by bit to all uncleanliness and foulness”[2138].
He ends with an eloquent plea for a closer watch to be kept over nuns by those responsible for their spiritual welfare.
Such were the main faults which Busch strove to abolish in bringing the nunneries under the reformed rule of Hildesheim. It remains to give some account of the difficulties which he encountered in the course of his work. In some houses he was well received; at Erscherde he says of the nuns:
These virgins were well obedient, pious and tractable, ... dealing with us and with each other kindly and benignantly by word and deed, wherefore we were no little edified by them[2139];