Nevertheless the danger was there. Only a minority, one may be sure, revolted actively against the duties which are sometimes, most significantly, called “the burthen of religion”[913]. That minority is known to us, for the sinner and the apostate, whether inspired by lust or by levity, mere victims to their own weakness, or active rebels against an intolerable dulness, have left their mark in official documents. But the number can only be guessed at of those others, who carried in their hearts for all their staid lives the complaint of the Latin song:
Sono tintinnabulum
Repeto psalterium,
Gratum linquo somnium
Cum dormire cuperem,
Heu misella!
Nichil est deterius tali vita
Cum enim sim petulans et lasciva[914].
The bell I am ringing,
The psalter am singing,
And from my bed creeping
Who fain would be sleeping,
Misery me!
O what can be worse than this life that I dree,
When naughty and lovelorn and wanton I be?
“Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room” is a charming justification of the sonnet, but it is neither good psychology nor good history.
It can never be too often repeated that many monks and nuns entered religion as a career while still children, with no particular vocation for the religious life. To such, even though they might experience no longing for the forbidden pleasures of the world, the monotony of the cloister would often be hard to bear. Their young limbs would kick against its restrictions and the changing moods of adolescence would turn and twist in vain within the iron bars of its unadaptable routine. Even to those no longer young happiness would depend at the best upon the fostering of a quick spiritual life, at the worst upon lack of imagination and of vitality. The undaunted daughter of desires, the man in whom religion burned as a strong fire, could find happiness in the life. But lesser brethren could not. Ennui, more deadly even than sensual temptation, was the devil who tormented them. So in the convents of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a sympathetic eye and an understanding mind will diagnose the fundamental disease as reaction against routine by men and women in whom Nature, expelled by a pitchfork, had returned a thousand times more strong.
This reaction from routine took several forms. It is somewhere at the bottom of all the more serious sins, which the pitchfork method of attaining salvation brought upon human creatures with bodies as well as souls. In this chapter, however, we are concerned not with these graver faults of immorality, but with things less gross, and yet in their cumulative effect no less fatal to monastic life. Such was the neglect of that praise of God, which was the primary raison d’être of the monk and nun, so that services sometimes became empty forms, to be hurried through with scant devotion, occasionally with scandalous irreverence. Such was the deadly sin of accidie, the name of which is forgotten today, though the thing itself is with us still. Such were the nerves on edge, the small quarrels, the wear and tear of communal life; such also the gay clothes, the pet animals and the worldly amusements, with which nuns sought to enliven their existence. For all these things were in some sense a reaction from routine.
Carelessness in the performance of the monastic hours was an exceedingly common fault during the later middle ages and often finds a place in episcopal injunctions. Sometimes monks and nuns “cut” the services, as at Peterborough in 1437, when only ten or twelve of the 44 monks came on ordinary days to church[915], or at Nuncoton in 1440, where many of the nuns failed to come to compline, but busied themselves instead in various domestic offices, or wandered idly in the garden[916]. Often they came late to matins, a fault which was common in nunneries, for the nuns were prone to sit up drinking and gossiping after compline, instead of going straight to bed[917]; and these nocturnal carousals, however harmless in themselves, did not conduce to wakefulness at one a.m. Consequently they were somewhat sleepy, quodammodo sompnolentes, at matins and found an almost Johnsonian difficulty in getting up early. At Stainfield in 1519 Atwater found that half an hour sometimes elapsed between the last stroke of the bell and the beginning of the office and that some of the nuns did not sing but dozed, partly because they had not enough candles, partly because they went to bed late; they also performed the offices very negligently[918]. But most often of all the fault of monks and nuns lay in gabbling through the services as quickly as possible in order to get them over. They left out syllables at the beginning and end of words, they omitted the dipsalma or pausacio between two verses, so that one side of the choir was beginning the second half, before the other side had finished the first; they skipped sentences; they mumbled and slurred over what should have been “entuned in their nose ful semely.”
Episcopal injunctions not infrequently animadvert against this irreverent treatment of the offices. At Catesby in 1442 Isabel Benet asserted that “divine service is chanted at so great speed that no pauses are made,” and at Carrow in 1526 several of the older nuns complained that the sisters sang and said the service more quickly than they ought, without due pauses. A strong injunction sent to Nuncoton in 1531 declares that the hours have been “doon with grete festinacon, haste and without deuocon, contrarye to the good manner and ordre of religion”[919]. Indeed so common was the fault that the Father of Evil was obliged to employ a special devil called Tittivillus, whose sole business it was to collect the dropped syllables and gabbled verses and carry them back to his master in a sack. One rhyme distinguishes carefully between the contents of his sack:
Hii sunt qui psalmos corrumpunt nequiter almos,
Dangler, cum jasper, lepar, galper quoque draggar,
Momeler, forskypper, forereynner, sic et overleper,
Fragmina verborum Tutivillus colligit horum[920].
A holy Cistercian abbot once interviewed Tittivillus; this is the tale as the nuns of Syon read it in their Myroure of Oure Ladye:
We rede of an holy Abbot of the order of Cystreus that whyle he stode in the quyer at mattyns, he sawe a fende that had a longe and a greate poke hangynge about hys necke, and wente aboute the quyer from one to an other, and wayted bysely after all letters, and syllables, and wordes, and faylynges, that eny made; and them he gathered dylygently and putte them in hys poke. And when he came before the Abbot, waytynge yf oughte had escaped hym, that he myghte have gotten and put in hys bagge; the Abbot was astoned and aferde of the foulenes and mysshape of hym, and sayde vnto hym. What art thow; And he answered and sayd. I am a poure dyuel, and my name ys Tytyuyllus, and I do myne offyce that is commytted vnto me. And what is thyne offyce sayd the Abbot, he answeryd I muste eche day he sayde brynge my master a thousande pokes full of faylynges, and of neglygences in syllables and wordes, that ar done in youre order in redynge and in syngynge. And else I must be sore beten[921].