It is only necessary to compare these denunciations with such accounts of the festivities in nunneries as have survived, to understand that the revelling and disguising were less harmless than modern writers are apt to represent them. Mr Leach attributes the schoolboys’ feast to the fact that regular holidays were unknown in the medieval curriculum and that the boys found in the ribaldries of Childermastide some outlet for their long suppressed spirits. Similarly the cramped and solemn existence led by the nuns for the rest of the year probably made their one outbreak the more violent. Nevertheless one cannot avoid feeling somewhat out of sympathy with the bishops. “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Nuns were ever fond of ginger “hot i’ the mouth.”

CHAPTER VIII

PRIVATE LIFE AND PRIVATE PROPERTY

All things are to be common to all.
Rule of St Benedict, ch. XXXIII.
The Rule of seint Maure or of seint Beneit,
Because that it was old and somdel streit
This ilke monk leet olde thinges pace
And held after the newe world the space.
Chaucer, Prologue, ll. 173-6.

The reaction from a strict routine of life led monks and nuns to a more serious modification of the Rule under which they lived than that represented by pet dogs and pretty clothes, which were after all only superficial frivolities. They sought also to modify two rules which were fundamental to the Benedictine ideal. One was the rigidly communal life, the obligation to do everything in company with everyone else. The other was the obligation of strict personal poverty. A monastery was in its essence a place where a number of persons lived a communal life, owning no private property, but holding everything in the name of the community. The normal routine of conventual life, as laid down in the Benedictine Rule, secured this end. The inmates of a house spent almost the whole of their time together. They prayed together in the choir, worked together in the cloister, ate together in the frater, and slept together in the dorter. Moreover the strictest regulations were made to prevent the vice of private property, one of the most serious sins in the monastic calendar, from making its appearance. All food was to be cooked in a common kitchen and served in the common frater, in which no meat was allowed. All clothes were to be provided out of the common goods of the house, and it was the business of the chamberer or chambress to see to the buying of material, the making of the clothes and their distribution to the religious; so carefully was proprietas guarded against, that all old clothes had to be given back to the chambress, when the new ones were distributed. Above all it was forbidden to monks and nuns to possess and spend money, save what was delivered to them by the superior for their necessary expenses upon a journey[989].

But this combination of rigid communism with rigid personal poverty was early discovered to be irksome. It seems as though the craving for a certain privacy of life, a certain minimum of private property, is a deeply rooted instinct in human nature. Certainly the attempt of monasticism to expel it with a pitchfork failed. Step by step the rule was broken down, more especially by a series of modifications in the prescribed method of feeding and clothing the community. Here, as in the enclosure question, the monks and nuns came into conflict with their bishops, though the conflict was never so severe. Here also, the result of the struggle was the same. A steady attempt by the bishops to enforce the rule was countered by a steady resistance on the part of the religious and the end was usually compromise.

The most marked breakdown of the communal way of life in the monasteries of the later middle ages is to be seen in the gradual neglect of the frater, in favour of a system of private messes, and in the increasing allocation of private rooms to individuals. The strict obligation upon all to keep frater daily was at first only modified in favour of the head of the house, who usually had her own lodgings, including a dining hall, in which the rule permitted her to entertain the guests who claimed her hospitality and such nuns as she chose to invite for their recreation. From quite early times, however, there existed in many houses a room known as the misericord (or indulgence), where the strict diet of the frater was relaxed. Here the occupants of the infirmary, those in their seynies and all who needed flesh meat and more delicate dishes to support them, were served. From the fourteenth century onwards, however, the rules of diet became considerably relaxed and flesh was allowed to everyone on three days a week[990]. This meant that the misericord was in constant use and in many monasteries the frater was divided into two stories, the upper of which was used as the frater proper, where no meat might be eaten, and the lower as a misericord[991]. According to this arrangement a nun might sometimes be dining in the upper frater, sometimes in the misericord and sometimes in the abbess’ or prioress’ lodgings; and, of these places, there was a distinct tendency for the upper frater to fall into disuse, since it could in any case only be used on fish (or, according to later custom, white meat) days.

But a habit even more subversive of strictly communal life and more liable to lead to disuse of the frater was rapidly spreading at this period. This was the division of a nunnery into familiae, or households, which messed together, each familia taking its meals separately from the rest. The common frater was sometimes kept only thrice a week on fish days, sometimes only in Advent and Lent, sometimes (it would seem) never. This meant the separate preparation of meals for each household, a practice which, though uneconomical, was possible, because each nun’s food allowance was fixed and could be drawn separately. Moreover, as we shall see hereafter, the growing practice of granting an annual money allowance to each individual, though used for clothes more often than for food, enabled the nuns to buy meat and other delicacies (if not provided by the convent) for themselves. The aristocratic ladies of Polsloe even had their private maids to prepare their meals[992].