Again the colours are darkened, but the eyes of the satirist had seen.
At St Mary’s, Winchester, insubordination was evidently the chief fault. William of Wykeham writes to the Abbess:
By public rumour it has come to our ears that some of the nuns of the aforesaid house ... care not to submit to or even to obey you and the deans and other obedientiaries lawfully constituted by you in those things which concern regular observances nor to show them due reverence, and that they will not bear or undergo the reproofs and corrections inflicted upon them by their superiors for their faults, but break out into vituperation and altercation with each other and in no way submit to these corrections; meanwhile other nuns of your house by detractions, conspiracies, confederacies, leagues, obloquies, contradictions and other breaches of discipline (insolenciis) and laxities (concerning which we speak not at present)
neglect the rule of St Benedict and other due observances. The Abbess is warned to punish the nuns and to enforce the rule more firmly than heretofore and to furnish the Bishop with the names of rebels. At the same time he addresses a letter to the nuns bidding them show obedience to their superiors and receive correction humbly “henceforth blaming no one therefore nor altercating one with another, saying that these or those were badly or excessively punished”[934]. It would seem that discipline had become lax in the convent and that the Bishop’s attempt to introduce reform by the agency of the abbess was meeting with opposition from unruly nuns. Visitors were forced constantly to make the double injunction that nuns should show obedience to their superiors and that those superiors should be equable and not harsh in correction:
Also we enioyne you, pryoresse, ... that oftentymes ye come to the chapitere for to correcte the defautes of your susters, and that as wele then as att other tymes and places ye treyte your said susters moderlie wyth all resonable fauour; and that ye rebuke ne repreue thaym cruelly ne feruently at no tyme, specyally in audience of seculeres, and that ye kepe pryvye fro seculeres your correccyons and actes of your chapitere.... Also we enioyne yowe of the couent and eueryche oon of yowe vndere peyn of imprisonyng, that mekely and buxumly ye obeye the prioresse procedyng discretely in hire correccyone, and also that in euery place ye do hire dewe reuerence, absteynyng yowe fro all elacyone of pryde and wordes of disobeysaunce or debate[935].
Sometimes it was one unruly member who set the convent by the ears. There is an amusing case at Romsey, which is reminiscent of David Copperfield:
On 16 January 1527 in the chapter house of the monastery of Romsey, before the vicar general, sitting judicially, Lady Alice Gorsyn appeared and confessed that she had used bad language with her sisters [her greatest oath evidently transcended “by sëynt Loy”] and spread abroad reproachful and defamatory words of them. He absolved her from the sentence of excommunication and enjoined on her in penance that if she used bad language in future and spread about defamatory words of them, a red tongue made of cloth should be used on the barbe under the chin (in sua barba alba) and remain there for a month[936].
a kinder punishment than the scold’s bridle or the ducking stool of common folk. Occasionally an inveterate scold would be removed altogether by the Bishop and sent to some convent where she was not known; two nuns were transferred from Burnham to Goring in 1339 “for the peace and quiet of the house” and in 1298 a quarrelsome nun of Nuncoton was sent to Greenfield to be kept in solitary confinement as long as she remained incorrigible, “until according to the discipline of her order she shall know how to live in a community”[937]. It was more difficult to restore peace when a whole nunnery was seething with dispute and heart-burnings. General injunctions to cease quarrelling would seem to show that this was sometimes the case, and, without having recourse to such an extreme instance as that of Littlemore in the sixteenth century, it is possible to quote from bishops’ registers documents which go far to bear out even Langland’s picture. One such document may be quoted in illustration, the comperta of Archbishop Giffard’s visitation of Swine in 1268:
It is discovered that Amice de Rue is a slanderer and a liar and impatient and odious to the convent and a rebel; and so are almost all the convent when the misdeeds of delinquents are proclaimed in chapter; wherefore the prioress or whoever is acting for her is not sufficient, without the help of the lord archbishop, to make corrections according to the requirements of the rule.... Item, it is discovered that three sisters in the flesh and spirit, to wit, Sibyl, Bella and Amy, frequently rebel against the corrections of the Prioress, and having leagued together with them several other sisters, they conspire against their sisters, to the great harm of the regular discipline; and Alice de Scrutevil, Beatrice de St Quintin and Maud Constable cleave to them.... Item, it is discovered that the Prioress is a suspicious woman and too credulous and breaks out at a mere word into correction, and frequently punishes unequally for the same fault and pursues with long rancour those whom she dislikes, until the time of their vindication cometh; whence it befals that the nuns, when they suspect that they are going to be burdened with too heavy a correction, procure the mitigation of her severity by means of the threats of their relatives. Item, it is discovered that the nuns and the sisters are at discord in many things, because the sisters contend that they are equal to the nuns and use black veils even as the nuns[938], which is said not to be the custom in other houses of the same order[939].
Apostasy, accidia, quarrels, all rose in part from monotony. The majority of nuns were probably content with their life, but they strove to bring some excitement and variety into it, not only unconsciously by cliques and contentions, but also by a conscious aping of the worldly amusements which enlivened their mothers and sisters outside the convent walls. The châtelaine or mistress of a manor, when not busied with the care of an estate, amused herself in the pursuit of fashion; even the business-like Margaret Paston hankered after a scarlet robe. She amused herself with keeping pets, those little dogs which scamper so gaily round the borders of manuscripts, or play so gallant a part in romances like the Châtelaine of Vergi. She hawked and she hunted, she danced and she played at tables[940]. All these occupations served to break the monotony of daily life. The nuns, always in touch with the world owing to the influx of visitors and to the neglect of enclosure, remembered these forbidden pleasures. And they sought to spice their monotonous life, as they spiced their monotonous dishes. Gay clothes, pet animals, a dance, a game, a gossip, were to them “a ferthyngworth of fenel-seed for fastyngdayes.” So we find all these worldly amusements in the convent.