[855] Deanesly, The Lollard Bible, pp. 320, 336-7. It may be noted as of some interest that when in 1528 a wealthy London merchant was imprisoned for distributing Tyndale’s books and for similar practices, he pleaded that the abbess of Denney, Elizabeth Throgmorton, had wished to borrow Tyndale’s Enchiridion and that he had lent it to her. Dugdale, Mon. VI, p. 1549.
[856] Sussex Arch. Coll. IX, p. 7.
[857] Linc. Visit. II, p. 49. At Bondeville in 1251 Archbishop Eudes Rigaud has to forbid the nuns to sell their thread and their spindles to raise money, “quod moniales non vendant nec distrahant filum et lor fusees,” Reg. Visit. Archiepiscopi Roth. ed. Bonnin (1852), p. 111.
[858] “Nuns with their needles wrote histories also,” as Fuller prettily says, “that of Christ his passion for their altar clothes, as other Scripture (and moe legend) Stories to adorn their houses.” Fuller, Church Hist. (ed. 1837), II, p. 190.
[859] J. H. Middleton, Illuminated MSS. (1892), p. 112. On nunnery embroidery at different periods see ib. pp. 224-30; but the book must be read with great caution.
[860] Mackenzie Walcott, Inventory of St Mary’s Ben. Nunnery at Langley, Co. Leic. 1485 (Leic. Architec. Soc. 1872), pp. 3, 4.
[861] V.C.H. Yorks. III, 120, 127, 183. Greenfield may have so enjoined other houses; the injunctions are not always fully summarised. As to nuns’ embroidery there is an interesting passage in the thirteenth century German poem Helmbrecht by Wernher “the Gardener”: “Old farmer Helmbrecht had a son. Young Helmbrecht’s yellow locks fell down to his shoulders. He tucked them into a handsome silken cap, embroidered with doves and parrots and many a picture. This cap had been embroidered by a nun who had run away from her convent through a love adventure, as happens to so many. From her Helmbrecht’s sister Gotelind had learned to embroider and to sew. The girl and her mother had well earned that from the nun, for they gave her in pay a calf, and many cheeses and eggs.” J. Harvey Robinson, Readings in Eur. Hist. I, pp. 418-9, translated from Freytag, Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit (1876, II, pp. 52 ff.).
[862] Manners and Household Expenses (Roxburghe Club 1841), p. 18.
[863] Gasquet, Engl. Monastic Life, p. 170.
[864] Trans. St Paul’s Eccles. Soc. VII, pt II (1912), p. 54.