It may be urged that the Brides of Heaven need not necessarily have attended these merry-makings after the ceremony; but the example of Isabel Benet, nun of Catesby, and the tenour of certain episcopal injunctions, show that nuns by no means despised dancing[1181]. The strict disciplinarian’s view of weddings is shown in the fact that members of the Tertiary Order of St Francis were forbidden to attend them; and even the civic authorities of London found it necessary to regulate the disorders which were prevalent on such occasions[1182].
Again not only weddings, but also christenings, often involved unseemly revels and this could not fail to affect nuns who, despite canonical prohibition, were somewhat in demand as godmothers. Christening parties were gay affairs; the gossips would return to the house of the child’s parents to eat, drink and make merry: “adtunc et ibidem immediate venerunt in domam suam ad comedendum et bibendum et adtunc sibi revelaverunt de baptismo”[1183]. If Antoine de la Sale’s witty account of the “third joy of marriage” has any truth[1184], and it is upheld by more sober documents, bishops did well to mislike the christening parties for nuns; Mrs Gamp was quite at home in the middle ages; she was probably a crony of the Wife of Bath. It was in fact forbidden for monks and nuns to become godparents, not only, as Mr Coulton has pointed out, “because this involved them in a fresh spiritual relationship incompatible with their ideal, but because it entangled them with worldly folk and worldly affairs”[1185]. Thus in 1387 William of Wykeham wrote to the nuns of Romsey: “We forbid you all and singly to presume to become godmothers to any child, without obtaining our licence to do so, since from such relationships expense is often entailed upon religious houses”[1186]. At Nuncoton in 1440 two nuns asked that their sisters might be forbidden the practice and Alnwick enjoined “that none of yowe have no children at the fount ne confirmyng”[1187] and nearly a century later a similar injunction was sent by Bishop Longland to Studley[1188].
There does indeed seem a certain incongruity in the presence of one who had renounced the world at a wedding or a christening, even had such ceremonies not been accompanied by very worldly revels. But they were less incongruous than was the attendance of Mary, daughter of Edward I, the nun-princess of Amesbury, upon her step-mother Queen Margaret and later upon her niece Elizabeth de Burgh, during their confinements. A king’s daughter, however, could not be subjected to ordinary restraints; Mary led a particularly free life, constantly visiting court and going on pilgrimages, and there is no reason to suppose that ordinary nuns shared her privileges[1189].
Naturally occasions when a nun was away from her convent for the night, whether on business or on pleasure, were comparatively rare. For the most part the bishops had to deal with casual absences during the day and it was found extraordinarily difficult to confine such excursions to the “convent business” and “necessary reasons” laid down by the various enactments on enclosure. There seems to have been a great deal of wandering about without any specific purpose. Short errands perhaps took the nuns out for a few hours, or they went simply for air and exercise. Their rule and their bishops would have had them hear the “smale fowles maken melodye” and tread “the smalle, softe, sweete grass” within the narrow cloister court, or at least in the privacy of their own gardens[1190]. But the nuns liked highways and hedges, and often in springtime it was farewell their books and their devotion. Certainly the convent often did come out to take the air in its own meadows; John Aubrey (in a much-quoted passage) tells of the nuns of Kington in Wiltshire, and how “Old Jacques” could see them from his house
come forth into the nymph-hay with their rocks and wheels to spin: and with their sewing work. He would say that he had told threescore and ten, but of nuns there were not so many, but in all, with lay sisters and widows, old maids and young girls, there might be such a number[1191].
Sometimes, indeed, at the busy harvest-time, when every pair of hands was needed on the manor farm, the nuns even went hay-making in the meadows. The visitations of Bishop Alnwick provide two instances of this and show also the abuses to which it might give rise, since the fields were full of secular workers. At Nuncoton in 1440 the subprioress deposed that
in the autumn season the nuns go out to their autumn tasks, whereby the quire is not kept regularly[1192], and ... in seed time the nuns clear the crops of weeds in the barns, and there secular folks do come in and unbecoming words are uttered between them and the nuns, wherefrom, as is feared, there are evil consequences[1193].
At Gracedieu the subprioress mentioned that “sometimes the nuns do help secular folk in garnering their grain during the autumn season,” but the most amusing revelations concern the conduct of the haughty cellaress Margaret Belers, who, whether on account of her autocratic government or because she was of better birth than they, was regarded by her sisters with the utmost jealousy. Belers, ran one of the detecta to the Bishop,
goes out to work in autumn alone with Sir Henry [the chaplain], he reaping the harvest and she binding the sheaves, and at evening she comes riding behind him on the same horse. She is over friendly with him and has been since the doings aforesaid.
Here was a pretty scandal; the Bishop (hiding, we will hope, a smile) made inquiries; Sir Henry was charged with the heinous crime of going hay-making with Dame Belers. But Sir Henry specifically denied his solitary roaming in the fields with the cellaress; he said however “that he has been in the fields with the others and Belers, carting hay and helping to pile the sheaves in stacks in the barns”; and Alnwick contented himself with enjoining the Prioress “that ye suffre none of your susters to go to any felde werkes but alle onely in your presence”[1194].