Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535

by Eileen Power

and Dean Kentwood, visiting St Helen’s Bishopsgate in 1432 found that “diverce fees perpetuelle, corrodies and lyuers have been grauntyd befor this tyme to diverce officers of your house and other persones, which have hurt the house and be cause of delapidacyone of the godys of youre seyde house”[674]. Even the nuns themselves sometimes realised that the sale of corrodies had brought them no good; they often complained at visitations that the Prioress had made such grants without consulting them; and the convent of Heynings gave “the multiplication of divers men who have acquired corrodies in their house,” as one reason for their extreme poverty, when they petitioned for the appropriation of the church of Womersley[675].

The nuns were wont to have recourse to other equally improvident expedients for obtaining money without regard to future embarrassment. They farmed their churches and alienated their lands and granges or let them out on long leases. These practices were constantly forbidden in episcopal injunctions[676]; at the visitation of Easebourne in 1524 the Prioress, Dame Margaret Sackfelde, being questioned as to what grants they had made under their convent seal, said that they had made four, to wit, one to William Salter to farm the rectory there, another of the proceeds of the chapel of Farnhurst, another of the proceeds of the chapel of Midhurst and another to William Toty for his corrody; this was corroborated by the subprioress, who also mentioned a grant of the proceeds of the church of Easebourne to a rather disreputable person called Ralph Pratt; and this is only a typical case[677]. The nunnery of Wix was reduced to such penury in 1283 on account of various alienations that Pope Martin IV granted the nuns a bull declaring all such grants void:

It has come to our ears that our beloved daughters in Christ, the Prioress and convent of the monastery of Wix (who are under the rule of a prioress), of the order of St Benedict, in the diocese of London, as well as their predecessors, have conceded tithes, rents, lands, houses, vineyards, meadows, pastures, woods, mills, rights, jurisdictions and certain other goods belonging to the said monastery to several clerks and laymen, to some of them for life, to some for no short time, to others in perpetuity at farm or under an annual payment, and have to this effect given letters, taken oaths, made renunciations, and drawn up public instruments, to the grave harm of the said monastery; and some of the grantees are said to have sought confirmatory letters in common form, concerning these grants, from the apostolic see[678].

This comprehensive catalogue gives some indication of the losses which a house would suffer from reckless grants. The sale of timber and the alienation or pawning of plate were other expedients to which the nuns constantly resorted and which were as constantly prohibited by the bishops[679]. The Prioress of Nunmonkton in 1397, “alienated timber in large quantities to the value of a hundred marks”[680]; the cutting down of woods was charged against the Prioresses of Heynings, Harrold, Langley, Gracedieu, Catesby and Ankerwyke at Alnwick’s visitations; at Langley it was moreover found that the woods were not properly fenced in after the trees were felled and so the tree-stumps were damaged[681]; the necessity for raising the money was sometimes specifically pleaded, as at Markyate, where a small wood had been sold “to satisfy the creditors of the house”[682]. These sales of timber were a favourite means of obtaining ready money; but too often the loss to the house by the destruction of its woods far outweighed the temporary gain and the Abbeys of St Mary’s Winchester and Romsey made special mention of this cause of impoverishment in the middle of the fourteenth century[683]. The alienation or pawning of plate and jocalia was often resorted to in an extremity. At Gracedieu in 1441 the jewels of the house had been pawned without the knowledge of the convent, so that the nuns (as one of them complained) had not one bowl from which to drink[684]; the next year it was asserted that the Prioress of Catesby “pawned the jewels of the house for ten years, to wit one cup for the sacrament, which still remained in pawn, and also other pieces of silver”[685]. When Bishop Longland visited Nuncoton in 1531 he found that the Prioress had in times past sold various goods belonging to her house, “viz. a bolle ungilte playn with a couer, oon nutt gilte with a couer, ij bolles white without couers, oon Agnus of gold, oon bocle of gold, oon chalice, oon maser and many other things”[686]; and in 1436 it was ordered that the chalices, jewels and ornaments of St Mary’s Neasham, which were then in the hands of sundry creditors, were to be redeemed[687]. In the case of Sinningthwaite in 1534 the convent was in such a reduced state that Archbishop Lee was actually obliged to give the nuns licence to pledge jewels to the value of £15[688]. The charge of pawning or selling jewels for their own purposes was often made against prioresses whose conduct in other ways was bad; for instance against Eleanor of Arden in 1396[689], Juliana of Bromhale in 1404[690], Agnes Tawke of Easebourne in 1478[691] and Katherine Wells of Littlemore in 1517[692].

To financial incompetence and to the employment of improvident methods of raising money, the nuns occasionally added extravagance. The bishops forbade them to wear gay clothes for reasons unconnected with finance; nevertheless their silks and furs must have cost money which could ill be spared, and it is amusing to notice that even at Studley, Rothwell and Langley, which were among the smallest and poorest houses in the diocese of Lincoln and in debt, the nuns had to confess to silken veils. The maintenance of a greater number of servants than the revenues of the house could support was another not uncommon form of extravagance[693]. Instances of luxurious living on the part of the heads of various houses have been given elsewhere[694]; it need only be remarked that a self-indulgent prioress might cripple the resources of a house for many years to come, whether by spending its revenues too lavishly, or by raising money by the alienation of its goods.

One other cause of the poverty of nunneries must be noticed, before turning to the attempts of bishops and other visitors to find a remedy. Overcrowding was, throughout the earlier period under consideration, a common cause of financial distress; and the admission of a greater number of nuns than the revenues of the convent were able to support was constantly forbidden in episcopal injunctions. Certainly this was not invariably the fault of the nuns. They suffered (as we have seen) from the formal right of bishop or of patron to place a nun in their house on special occasions, and they suffered still more from the constant pressure to which they were subjected by private persons, anxious to obtain comfortable provision for daughters and nieces. It was sometimes impossible and always difficult to resist the importunity of influential gentlemen in the neighbourhood, whose ill-will might be a serious thing, whether it showed itself in open violence or in closed purses. The authorities of the church had sometimes to step in and rescue houses which had thus been persuaded to burden themselves beyond their means. In 1273 Gregory X issued a bull to the Priory of Carrow, with the intention of putting a stop to the practice.

Your petition having been expounded to us, containing a complaint that you have, at the instant requests of certain lords of England, whom you are unable to resist on account of their power, received so many nuns already into your monastery, that you may scarce be fitly sustained by its rents, we therefore, by the authority of these present letters, forbid you henceforth to receive any nun or sister to the burden of your house[695].

Some nine years later Archbishop Wickwane wrote in the same strain to the nuns of Nunkeeling and Wilberfoss:

Because we have learned from public rumour that your monastery is sometimes burdened by the reception of nuns and by the visits of secular women and girls, at the instance of great persons, to whom you foolishly and unlawfully grant easy permission, we order you ... henceforward, to receive no one as nun or sister of your house, or to lodge for a time in your monastery, without our special licence[696].

Bishop Stratford, in his visitation of Romsey in 1311, forbade additions to the nuns, the proper number having been exceeded, and again in 1327 he wrote: