Forasmoche as by your negligent sufferaunce dyuers of your susters hath wandred a brode in the world, some under the pretence of pylgrymage, some to see ther frends, and otherwise whereby hath growen many Inconuenyences insolent behauiours and moche slaunder, as well to your house as to those susters, as by the texts of my said visitation doth euydently appere, I chardge you lady priores that from hensforthe ye neyther licence ne suffre eny your susters to goo out of your monastery,
without good cause and company of a “wise sobre and discrete suster,” and an injunction not to “tary out of the monastery in the nighte tyme”[1170]. But most significant of all is a case which occurred at the little Cistercian priory of Wykeham in Yorkshire in the fifteenth century. In 1450 Archbishop Kemp wrote to the Prioress, bidding her readmit an apostate nun Katherine Thornyf:
who, seduced by the Angel of Darkness, under the colour of a pilgrimage in the time of the Jubilee, without leave of the archbishop, or officials or even of the prioress, set out on a journey to the court of Rome, in the company of another nun of the house, who, as it was reported, had gone the way of all flesh and on whose soul the Archbishop prayed for mercy. After the death of this nun, Katherine Thornyf had lived in sin with a married man in London.
Then she had been moved to penitence, after who knows what agony of soul, and had gone to the Archbishop seeking absolution; and so the prodigal, weary of her husks, came back to the nunnery she had left[1171]. The melancholy tale is borne out by all we know about medieval pilgrimages. Centuries before—in 774—an Archbishop of Milan had written to an Archbishop of Canterbury, advising that the Synod should prohibit women and nuns from travelling to Rome, on account of the dangers and temptations of the journey, “for very few are the cities in Lombardy ... France ... Gaul, wherein there is not to be found a prostitute of English race”[1172]; and the trouvère Rutebeuf, in the thirteenth century, spoke with less pity and a more biting satire of the pilgrimages of French nuns to Paris and Montmartre[1173].
Excursions on convent business or for attendance at ecclesiastical ceremonies (other than pilgrimages) were regarded as legitimate, though strict disciplinarians sought to restrict them to occasions of real urgency. But for the most part we hear about journeys undertaken for pleasure and not for business, or at any rate the elastic term business is stretched to cover some very pleasant wandering in the world and much hobnobbing with friends. In spite of the Bull Periculoso[1174] bishops were never able to prevent nuns from going to stay with their friends, and sometimes the ladies made very long journeys for this purpose. Bishop Stapeldon, for instance, ordained that when the nuns of Canonsleigh in Devon went to visit their friends “in Somerset, Dorset, Devonshire or in Cornwall” they might not stay for longer than a month; but if they went outside these four counties the Abbess might allow them to stay longer still, having regard to the distance of their destination and to the time which would be spent in travelling[1175]. The bishops indeed were forced to regard such visits as “reasonable occasions” for a breach of enclosure, and their efforts, as has already been shown, were confined to regulating rather than to stopping the practice; for the relatives of the nuns, as well as the ladies themselves, would have been the first to resent any interference with their visits. Whatever might be the theory of the Church on the subject, blood was thicker than holy water; family affections and family interests persisted in the cloister and the nun was welcomed at many a hospitable board for her family’s sake as well as for her own. All this seems natural and obvious today and few would think the worse of the nuns for their opposition to the stricter form of enclosure. Nevertheless the authorities of the Church had reason for their distrust of these absences from the convent. Once away from the cloister and staying in a private house there was nothing to keep a nun from joining in the secular revelries of friends, and though her behaviour might be exemplary the convent rule aimed at keeping her unspotted even by temptation. An anecdote related by Erasmus in his dialogue “Ichthyophagia” shows that the danger of allowing nuns to visit their friends might be a real one. Two nuns had gone to stay with their kinsfolk, and at supper
they began to grow merry with wine; they laughed and joked and kissed and not over-modestly neither, till you could hardly hear what was said for the noise they made.... After supper there was dancing and singing of lascivious songs and such doings I am ashamed to speak of, inasmuch as I am much afraid the night hardly passed very honestly[1176].
Moreover even if nuns visited their friends for a very short time, staying only one night, or even returning before nightfall to the convent, there was danger that they might join in the various revelries practised among secular folk, and reprobated by the Church as occasions for unseemly and licentious behaviour. Bishop Spofford of Hereford, indeed, found it necessary in 1437 to send a special warning against doing so to the nuns of Lymbrook; the Prioress was to “yife no lycence too noon of hur sustres her after to go to no port townes, no to noon othir townes to comyn wakes or festes, spectacles and othir worldly vanytees, and specially on holy-dayes, nor to be absent lyggying oute by nyght out of thair monastery, but with fader and moder, except causes of necessytee”[1177]. The words which the Good Wife spoke to her daughter come to mind:
Go not to þe wrastelings ne schotynge at cok
As it were a strumpet or a giggelot,
Wone at hom, douȝter, and love þi work myche[1178].
Clemence Medforde, Prioress of Ankerwyke, went to a wedding at Bromhale[1179]; yet weddings were of all those “comyn wakes and festes” most condemned by the Church for the unseemly revelries which followed them. The Christen State of Matrimony, written in 1543, throws a flood of light upon the subject:
When they come home from the Church, then beginneth excesse of eatyng and dryncking—and as much is waisted in one daye, as were sufficient for the two newe maried Folkes halfe a yere to lyve upon.... After the Bancket and Feast, there begynnethe a vayne, madde and unmanerlye fashion, for the Bryde must be brought into an open dauncynge place. Then is there such a rennynge, leapynge, and flyngynge among them, then is there suche a lyftynge up and discoverynge of the Damselles clothes and other Womennes apparell, that a Man might thynke they were sworne to the Devels Daunce. Then muste the poore Bryde kepe foote with al Dauncers and refuse none, how scabbed, foule, droncken, rude and shameles soever he be. Then must she oft tymes heare and se much wyckednesse and many an uncomely word; and that noyse and romblyng endureth even tyll supper[1180].