There is an occasional brief reference to the recreation of nuns in their “seynys” in visitations[869], but the precaution was less necessary and less frequent than it was in houses of monks[870]. No doubt, also, the nuns sometimes nursed their boarders, some of whom must have been old and ailing; wills are occasionally dated from nunneries[871]. The nuns of Romsey had a hospital attached to the house, in which were received as sisters any parents and relatives of the nuns, who were poor and ill[872], but this does not prove that the nuns nursed them, and references in visitation reports show that even sick nuns were often looked after by lay servants in the infirmary, or if permanently disabled, occupied a separate room, with a separate maid to attend them. It is not likely that the nuns left their convents, save very occasionally, to undertake sick-nursing; this would have been against the spirit of their rule, for their main business was not (as was that of the sisters who looked after spitals) to care for the sick, but to live enclosed in their houses, following the prescribed round of church services. It is however of interest that the will of Sir Roger Salwayn, knight of York (1420) contains this legacy: “Also I will that the Nunne that kepid me in my seknes haue ij nobles, and that ther be gif into the hous that she wonnes in xxs, for to syng and pray for me”[873]. Nuns may have emerged sometimes to nurse friends and relatives, whose sick-beds they were always allowed to attend; but there is no documentary evidence for the belief of modern writers, who would fain turn the nun into a district visitor, smoothing the pillows of all who ailed in her native village.

These then were the educational attainments of the English nuns in the later middle ages: reading and singing the services of the church, sometimes but not always writing, Latin very rarely after the thirteenth century, French very rarely after the fourteenth century; needlework and embroidery; and perhaps that elementary knowledge of physic, which was the possession of most ladies of their class. It was, in fact, very little more than the education possessed by laywomen of the same social rank outside and there is little trace of anything approaching scholarship. The study of the education of the nuns during this period leads naturally to one of the most vexed questions in the field of monastic history, the extent to which the nunneries acted as girls’ schools. There is no doubt that every nunnery was prepared to educate young girls who entered in order to take the veil; if the nunnery were fairly large these scolae internae probably included several novices at a time. At Ankerwyke in 1441 three young nuns complained that they had no governess to instruct them in “reading, song and religious observance,” and mention is made of three other sisters “of tender age and slender discretion, seeing that the eldest of them is not more than thirteen years of age”; the Bishop appointed a nun to be their teacher, “enjoining her to perform the charge laid upon her and to instruct them in good manners”[874]. Similarly at Thetford, where there were three novices in 1526, the Bishop found “non habent eruditricem”[875]. At the larger houses, such as Romsey, the magistra noviciarum was a regular obedientiary[876].

PLATE V

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(In the bottom left hand corner the mistress of the novices, with birch in hand, is instructing two young novices; in the bottom right hand corner the abbess and a nun are at prayer.)

The vexed question, however, does not concern these schools for novices. It has been the custom, not only of writers on monasticism but also of the man in the street, to assume that the nunneries were almost solely responsible for the education of girls in the middle ages. There was little evidence for the assumption, but it was always made, and until the combined attack made upon it in 1910 by Mr Coulton and Mr Leach it was unchallenged[877]. With the publication of bishops’ registers, however, we have something more definite to go upon and it is now possible to come to some sort of conclusion, based on the evidence of visitation injunctions, account rolls and other miscellaneous sources. This conclusion may be summarised as follows. It was a fairly general custom among the English nuns, in the two and a half centuries before the Dissolution, to receive children for education. But there are four limitations, within which and only within which, this conclusion is true. First, that by no means all nunneries took children and those which did take them seldom had large schools; secondly, that the children who thus received a convent education were drawn exclusively from the upper and the wealthy middle classes, from people, that is to say, of birth and wealth; thirdly, that the practice was a purely financial expedient on the part of the nuns, at first forbidden, afterwards restricted and always frowned upon by the bishops, who regarded it as subversive of discipline; and fourthly, that the education which the children received from the nuns, so far as book-learning as distinct from nurture is concerned, was extremely exiguous. In fine, though nunneries did act as girls’ schools, they certainly did not educate more than a small proportion even of the children of the upper classes, and the education which they gave them was limited by their own limitations[878].

That the custom of receiving schoolgirls was fairly general appears from the wide area over which notices of such children are spread. The references range in date from 1282 to 1537; they give us, if a doubtful reference to King’s Mead, Derby, be accepted, the names of forty-nine convents, which at one time or other had children in residence. These convents are situated in twenty-one counties. The greater number of references naturally occur in those dioceses for which the episcopal registers are most complete; Yorkshire affords fifteen names and two which are doubtful; Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire and Leicestershire, counties in the large Lincoln diocese, afford seventeen between them, five from Lincolnshire and two from each of the others. These references do not prove that the houses in question had continuously throughout their career a school for girls; sometimes only one or two children are mentioned and usually the evidence concerns but a single year out of two and a half centuries. Sometimes, however, a happy chance has preserved several references to the same house, spread over a longer period, from which it is perhaps not too rash to conclude that it was the regular practice of that house to receive children. For Elstow, for instance, there is an early reference to a boy of five sent there for education by St Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, towards the close of the twelfth century. In 1359 Bishop Gynewell prohibited all boarders there, except girls under ten and boys under six. In 1421 Bishop Flemyng prohibited all except children under twelve and in 1432 Bishop Gray altered this to girls under fourteen and boys under ten, and children are mentioned at Alnwick’s visitation in 1442. Similarly at Godstow there are references to children in 1358, 1445 and 1538, at Esholt in Yorkshire in 1315, 1318 and 1537, at Sopwell in 1446 and 1537, at Heynings in 1347, 1387 and 1393, at Burnham in 1434 and 1519.

The mention of boys in these references needs perhaps some further emphasis, for it is not usually recognised that the nunneries occasionally acted as dame-schools for very young boys. “Abstinence the abbesse myn a.b.c. me tauȝte,” says Piers Plowman, “And conscience com aftur and kennide me betere.” It is true that a Cistercian statute of 1256-7 forbade the education of boys in nunneries of that order[879], but the ordinance soon became a dead letter, and five of the convents at which Alnwick found schoolboys (c. 1445) were Cistercian houses. Boys were specifically forbidden at Wherwell in 1284, at Heynings in 1359 and at Nuncoton in 1531, which argues that they were then present, and they are mentioned at Romsey (1311), at five Yorkshire convents (1314-17), at Burnham (1434), at Lymbrook (1437), at Swaffham Bulbeck (1483) and at Redlingfield (1514), a chronologically and geographically wide range of houses. Occasionally some details as to a particular boy may be gleaned; the five year old Robert de Noyon, sent by Bishop Hugh to Elstow “to be taught his letters,” the two Tudor boys commended to Katharine de la Pole, the noble Abbess of Barking; the little son and heir of Sir John Stanley, who made his will in 1527 and then became a monk, leaving the boy to be brought up until twelve years of age by another Abbess of Barking, after which he was to pass to the care of the Abbot of Westminster; and Cromwell’s son Gregory and his little companion, sent to be supervised, though not taught by Margaret Vernon, Prioress of Little Marlow[880]. But as a rule the boys in nunneries were very young; it was not considered decorous for them to stay with the nuns later than their ninth or tenth year; the bishop forbade it and besides, the education which the good sisters could give them would not have been considered sufficient. The rule which gives a man child to a man for education is of very old standing.