[885] For a discussion of these charges and of other prices and payments, with which they may be compared, see J. E. G. de Montmorency in Journ. of Educ. (1909), pp. 429-30 and Coulton, op. cit. app. iv. (School Children in Nunnery Accounts), pp. 38-40.
[886] Quoted in S. H. Burke, The Monastic Houses of England, their Accusers and Defenders (1869), p. 32. Compare the words of a Venetian traveller, Paolo Casenigo: “The English nuns gave instructions to the poorer virgins as to their duties when they became wives; to be obedient to their husbands and to give good example,” a curious note. Ib. p. 31.
[887] Quoted in Fosbroke, British Monachism (1802), II, p. 35.
[888] Ancren Riwle, ed. Gasquet, p. 319.
[889] Notice the recognition of the financial reasons for taking schoolchildren. So also in 1489 the nuns of Nunappleton are to take no boarders “but if they be childern or ellis old persons by which availe by likelihod may grow to your place”—fees or legacies, in fact. Dugdale, Mon. IV, p. 654.
[890] Caesarius of Heisterbach gives a picture of a less disturbing child in quire (though she was more probably a little girl who was intended for a nun). This is the English fifteenth century translation: “Caesarius tellis how that in Essex” (really in Saxony, but the translator was anxious to introduce local colour for the sake of his audience), “in a monasterye of nonnys, ther was a litle damysell, and on a grete solempne nyght hur maistres lete hur com with hur to matyns. So the damysell was bod a wayke thyng, and hur maistres was ferd at sho sulde take colde, and she commaundid hur befor Te Deum to go vnto the dortur to her bed agayn. And at hur commandment sho went furth of the where, thuff all it war with ill wyll, and abade withoute the where and thoght to here the residue of matyns”; whereat she saw a vision of the nuns caught up to heaven praising God among the angels, at the Te Deum. An Alphabet of Tales (E.E.T.S. 1905), II, p. 406.
[891] Fuller, Church Hist. See p. [255] above, note 3.
[892] Quoted in Gasquet, Eng. Monastic Life, p. 177.
[893] Hugo, Medieval Nunneries of Somerset (Minchin Buckland), p. 107.
[894] G. Hill, Women in Eng. Life (1896), p. 79.