Some of the most interesting entries in the accounts are the payments for extra labour at busy seasons, to weed corn, make hay, shear sheep, thresh and winnow. The busiest season of all, the climax of the farmer’s year, was harvest time; and most monastic accounts give it a separate heading. The nuns of St Michael’s, Stamford, year after year record the date “when we began to reap” and the payments to reapers and cockers for the first four or five weeks and to carters for the fortnight afterwards. Extra workers, both men and women, came in from among the cottagers of the manor and of neighbouring manors; in some parts of the country migrant harvesters came, as they do to-day, from distant uplands to help on the farms of the rich cornland. To oversee them a special reap-reeve was hired at a higher rate (the nuns of St Michael’s paid him 13s. 8d. in 1378); gloves were given to the reapers to protect them from thistles[352]; special tithers were hired to set aside the sheaves due to the convent as tithes (the convent paid “to one tither of Wothorpe,” an appropriated church, “10s., and to two of our tithers 13s. 4d.”). The honest Tusser sets out the usage in jingling rhyme:
Grant haruest lord more by a penie or twoo
to call on his fellowes the better to doo:
Giue gloues to thy reapers, a larges to crie,
and dailie to loiterers haue a good eie.
Reape wel, scatter not, gather cleane that is shorne,
binde faste, shock apace, haue an eie to thy corne.
Lode safe, carrie home, follow time being faire,
goue iust in the barne, it is out of despaire.
Tithe dulie and trulie, with hartie good will
that God and his blessing may dwell with thee still:
Though Parson neglecteth his dutie for this,
thank thou thy Lord God, and giue erie man his[353].
Usually the workers got their board during harvest and very well they fared. The careful treasuresses of St Michael’s get in beef and mutton and fish for them, to say nothing of eggs and bread and oatmeal and foaming jugs of beer. Porringers and platters have to be laid in for them to feed from; and since they work until the sun goes down, candles must be bought to light the board in the summer dusk. At the end of all, when the last sheaf was carried to the barn and the last gleaner had left the fields, the nuns entertained their harvesters to a mighty feast.
It was a time for hard work and for good fellowship. Says Tusser:
In haruest time, haruest folke, seruants and all,
should make all togither good cheere in the hall:
And fill out the black boule of bleith to their song,
and let them be merie all haruest time long.
Once ended thy haruest let none be begilde,
please such as did helpe thee, man, woman and childe.
Thus dooing, with alway such helpe as they can,
those winnest the praise of the labouring man[354].
The final feast was associated with the custom of giving a goose to all who had not overturned a load in carrying during harvest, and the nuns of St Michael’s always enter it in their accounts as “the expenses of the sickle goose” or harvest goose.
For all this good feasting, yet art thou not loose
till ploughman thou giuest his haruest home goose.
Though goose go in stubble, I passe not for that,
let goose haue a goose, be she leane, be she fat[355].
An echo of old English gaiety sounds very pleasantly through these harvest expenses.
(5) The wages sheet. The last set of expenses which the monastic housewife entered upon her roll was the wages sheet of the household, the payments for the year, or for a shorter period, of all her male and female dependents, together with the cost of their livery and of their allowance of “mixture,” when the convent gave them these. We saw in the last chapter that the nuns were the centre of a small community of farm and household servants, ranging from the reverend chaplains and dignified bailiff through all grades of standing and usefulness, down to the smallest kitchen-maid and the gardener’s boy.
Such is the tale of the account rolls. It may be objected by some that this talk of tenement-building, and livestock, ploughshares and harvest-home has little to do with monastic life, since it is but the common routine of every manor. But this is the very reason for describing it. The nunneries of England were firmly founded on the soil and the nuns were housewives and ladies of the manor, as were their sisters in the world. This homely business was half their lives; they knew the kine in the byre and the corn in the granary, as well as the service-books upon their stalls. The sound of their singing went up to heaven mingled with the shout of the ploughmen in the field and the clatter of churns in the dairy. When a prioress’ negligence lets the sheepfold fall into disrepair, so that the young lambs die of the damp, it is made a charge against her to the bishop, together with more spiritual crimes. The routine of the farm goes on side by side with the routine of the chapel. These account rolls give us the material basis for the complicated structure of monastic life. This is how nuns won their livelihood; this is how they spent it.