[1546] La Vie de Ste. Douceline, fondatrice des béguines de Marseille, ed. J. H. Albanès (Marseille, 1879). See also A. Macdonell, Saint Douceline (1905).
[1547] Acta SS. Aprilis, t. II, pp. 266-365. See also Huysmans, Ste. Lydwine de Schiedam (3rd ed. Paris, 1901).
[1548] Acta SS. Jun. t. IV, pp. 270 ff. See also Th. Wollersheim, Das Leben der ekstatischen Jungfrau Christina von Stommeln (Cologne, 1859); and Renan, Nouvelles Études d’Histoire Religieuse (1884) (Une Idylle Monacale au xiiie siècle: Christine de Stommeln), pp. 353-96. Extracts from Christina’s correspondence and life by Peter of Sweden are translated in Coulton, Med. Garn. pp. 402-21.
[1549] On these saintly and learned women see Eckenstein, op. cit. cc. III and IV, and Montalembert, The Monks of the West (introd. Gasquet), vol. IV, Book XV. The great fourteenth century mystic Julian of Norwich (1343-c. 1413) was, it is true, connected with Carrow Priory, but she was an anchoress and never a nun there; see above, p. [366].
[1550] On these songs see A. Jeanroy, Les Origines de la Poésie Lyrique en France au moyen âge (2nd ed. 1904), pp. 189-92; and P. S. Allen in Modern Philology, V (1908), pp. 432-5. The songs themselves have to be collected from various sources; see below, [Note I].
[1551] Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. Skeat. C text, Passus X, 72-5.
[1552] There was (as usual) however, more chance for a man than for a woman of villein status to enter a monastery and even to rise to the highest ecclesiastical dignities. A villein who could save enough to pay a fine to his lord might put his son to school and might buy that son’s enfranchisement, so that he would be eligible for a place in a monastery. And though it was forbidden by canon and by temporal law to ordain a serf, once ordained he was free. Pollock and Maitland, Hist. of Engl. Law (1911), I, p. 429; the lower ranks of the clergy probably contained many men of low or villein birth (see e.g. Chaucer’s Poor Parson, whose brother was a ploughman and the complaint in “Pierce the Plouman’s Crede” that beggars’ brats become bishops). Sometimes, though very rarely, a villein rose high, for once he was a churchman, it was la carrière ouverte aux talents: Bishop Grosseteste was of very humble, probably of servile, origin; and Sancho Panza’s motto will be remembered: “I am a man and I may be Pope.” For a woman, however, the Church offered no such chance of advancement through the religious orders; the nunneries were essentially upper and middle class institutions.
[1553] From a charming round, sung in Saintonge, Aunis and Bas-Poitou.
“Dans l’jardin de ma tante
Plantons le romarin!
Y’a-t-un oiseau qui chante,
Plantons le romarin,
Ma mie,
Au milieu du jardin, etc.”
Bujeaud, J., Chants et chansons populaires des provinces de l’ouest (1866), I, pp. 136-7.