Certainly the Wife of Bath was a host in herself, but the plural is ominous and the two nuns were the only other ladies in the company. The sterner moralists of the middle ages bear out Chaucer’s picture of a typical pilgrimage with most unchaucerian denunciation[1161]. Pilgrims got drunk at times, as drunk as the Miller, “so that vnnethe up-on his hors he sat,” on the very first day of the journey, as drunk as the “sory palled gost” of a cook, when the cavalcade reached that
litel toun
Which that y-cleped is Bob-up-&-doun
Under the Blee in Canterbury weye.
Again, there are pilgrims, says Etienne de Bourbon, “who when they visit holy places sing lecherous lays, whereby they inflame the hearts of such as hear them and kindle the fire of lechery”; and like an echo rise the well-known words:
Ful loude he song “Come hider, love, to me,”
This somnour bar to him a stif burdoun
Was never trompe of half so greet a soun,
and shrill and clear sound the miller’s bagpipes, bringing the pilgrims out of town[1162]. No place for a cloistered nun was the inn though one feels that mine host’s wife, “big in arme,” would have kept the Tabard respectable, whatever might be said of the Chequer-on-the-Hoop. No place for her the road to Canterbury, nor yet Canterbury itself, where the monk with the holy-water sprinkler was so anxious for a peep at her face and where she hobnobbed over wine in the parlour, with the hostess and the Wife of Bath[1163].
Madame Eglentyne, for all her simplicity, must have circumvented her Bishop before she got there. For the Bishops were quite clear in their minds that pilgrimages for nuns were to be discouraged. They were of Langland’s way of thinking:
Right so, if thow be religious, renne thow neuere ferther,
To Rome ne to Rochemadore, but as thi reule techeth,
And holde the vnder obedyence, that heigh wey is to heuene[1164].
As early as 791 the Council of Fréjus had forbidden the practice[1165] and in 1195 the Council of York decreed “In order that the opportunity of wandering about may be taken from them [the nuns], we forbid them to take the road of pilgrimage”[1166]. In 1318 Archbishop Melton strictly forbade the nuns of Nunappleton to leave their house “by reason of any vow of pilgrimage, which they might have taken; if any had taken such vows she was to say as many psalters as it would have taken days to perform the pilgrimage so rashly vowed”[1167]. One has a melancholy vision of Madame Eglentyne saying psalters interminably through her “tretys” nose, instead of jogging along so gaily with her motley companions and telling so prettily her tale of little St Hugh. But the nuns of Nunappleton retained their taste for pilgrimages and nearly two centuries later (in 1489) we find Archbishop Rotherham admonishing their successors:
yat ye prioresse lycence none of your susters to goe pilgremage or visit yer frendes wtoute a grete cause, and yen such a sister lycencyate by you to have wt her oon of ye most sadd and well disposid sistirs to she come home agayne[1168].
At Wix, twenty years later, the nuns were forbidden to undertake pilgrimages without the consent of the diocesan[1169], and in 1531 Bishop Longland wrote to the Prioress of Nuncoton: