It is notorious that your house is burdened with ladies beyond the established number which used to be kept; and I have heard that you are being pressed to receive more young ladies (damoyseles) as nuns, wherefore I order you strictly that no young lady received by you be veiled, nor any other received, until the Bishop’s visitation, or until they have special orders from him[697].
The situation at the great Abbey of Shaftesbury was the same. As early as 1218 the Pope had forbidden the community to admit nuns beyond the number of a hundred because they were unable to support more or to give alms to the poor; in 1322 Bishop Mortival wrote remonstrating with them for their neglect of the Pope’s order and repeating the prohibition to admit more nuns until the state of the Abbey was relieved, on the ground that the inmates of the house were far too many for its goods to support; and in 1326 (in response to a petition from the Abbess asking him to fix the statutory number) the Bishop issued an order stating that the house was capable of maintaining a hundred and twenty nuns and no more and that no novices were to be received until the community was reduced to that number[698].
Episcopal prohibitions to receive new inmates without special licence were very common, especially in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Bishops realised that overcrowding only increased the growing poverty of the nunneries. In the poor diocese of York, between 1250 and 1320, the nuns were over and over again forbidden to receive nuns, lay sisters or lay brothers without the licence of the Archbishop. Injunctions to this effect were issued to Marrick (1252), Swine (1268), Wilberfoss (1282), Nunappleton (1282, 1290, 1346), Hampole (1267, 1308, 1312), Arden (1306), Thicket (1309, 1314), Nunkeeling (1282, 1314), Nunburnholme (1318), Esholt (1318), Arthington (1318) and Sinningthwaite (1319)[699]. At Swine, after the visitation by Archbishop Walter Giffard in 1267-8, it was noted among the comperta
that the house of Swine cannot sustain more nuns or sisters than now are there, inasmuch as those at present there are ill provided with food, as is said above, and that the house nevertheless remains at least a hundred and forty marks in debt; wherefore the lord Archbishop decreed that no nun or sister should thenceforward be received there, save with his consent[700].
A very severe punishment was decreed at Marrick, where the Archbishop announced that any man or woman admitted without his licence would be expelled without hope of mercy, the Prioress would be deposed and any other nuns who agreed condemned to fast on bread and water for two months (except on Sundays and festivals)[701]. In other dioceses the bishops pursued a similar policy. But it was not easy to enforce these prohibitions. Four years after Archbishop Greenfield’s injunction to Hampole (1308) he was obliged to address another letter to the convent, having heard that the prioress had received
a little girl (puellulam), by name Maud de Dreffield, niece of the Abbot of Roche, and another named Jonetta, her own niece, at the instance of Sir Hugh de Cressy, her brother, that after a time they might be admitted to the habit and profession of nuns[702].
The predicament of the Prioress is easily understood; how was she to refuse her noble brother and the Abbot of Roche? They could bring to bear far more pressure than a distant archbishop, who came upon his visitations at long intervals. Moreover the ever present need of ready money made the resistance of nuns less determined than it might otherwise have been; for a dowry in hand they were, as usual, willing to encumber themselves with a new mouth to feed throughout long years to come.
Prohibitions from increasing the number of nuns become more rare in the second half of the fourteenth and during the fifteenth century. Even when the population recovered from the havoc wrought by the Black Death, the numbers in the nunneries continued steadily to decline. Perhaps fashion had veered, conscious that the golden days of monasticism were over; more likely the growing poverty of the houses rendered them a less tempting retreat. A need for restricting the number of nuns still continued, because the decline in the revenues of the nunneries was swifter than the decline in the number of the nuns. Thus in 1440-1 Alnwick included in his injunctions to seven houses a prohibition to receive more nuns than could competently be sustained by their revenues[703], and the evidence given at his visitations shows the necessity for such a restriction. The injunction to Heynings is particularly interesting:
For as mykelle as we fonde that agayn the entente and the forbedyng of the commune lawe there are in your saide pryorye meo nunnes and susters professed then may be competently susteyned of the revenews of your sayde pryorye, the exilitee of the saide revenews and charitees duly considered, we commaunde, ordeyn, charge and enioyne yowe vnder payne etc. etc. that fro this day forthe ye receyve no mo in to nunnes ne sustres in your saide pryory wyth owte the advyse and assent of hus (and) of our successours bysshope of Lincolne, so that we or thai, wele informed of the yerely valwe of your saide revenews may ordeyn for the nombre competente of nunnes and susters[704].
Nevertheless even at Nuncoton, one of the houses to which a similar injunction was sent, a nun gave evidence “that in her oun time there were in the habit eighteen or twenty nuns and now there are only fourteen,” and the Bishop himself remarked that “ther be but fewe in couent in regarde of tymes here to fore”[705]. Everywhere this decline in the number of nuns went steadily on during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries[706]. And from the beginning of the fifteenth century there appear, here and there among visitatorial injunctions, commands of a very different nature; here and there a Bishop is found trying, not to keep down, but to keep up the number of nuns. Instead of the repeated prohibitions addressed to Romsey at the beginning of the fourteenth century, there is an injunction from William of Wykeham in 1387, ordering the Abbess to augment the number of nuns, which had fallen far below the statutory number[707]. Similarly in 1432 Bishop Gray wrote to Elstow,