Such field work, when it was undertaken, must have afforded not only wholesome exercise, but a very pleasant relaxation from the cramping life of the cloister; and the necessities of harvest overrode all rules. Whether the nuns took part in farm work at other seasons of the year is more difficult to discover; one is tempted to think that they must sometimes have given a helping hand with their own cattle and poultry, especially at very poor houses. The private cocks and hens which occasioned such rivalry at Saint-Aubin[1195], the never-to-be-forgotten donkey of Alfrâd[1196], bear witness not only to the sin of proprietas, but also to the personal care of the nuns for such livestock. But authority discouraged the practice at a later date, partly because it encouraged private property, partly because it brought the nuns into too close contact with the world[1197]. Nowhere has the attitude been better stated than in the amusing description given in the Ancren Riwle of the anchoress’ cow:
An anchoress that hath cattle appears as Martha was, a better housewife than anchoress: nor can she in any wise be Mary, with peacefulness of heart. For then she must think of the cow’s fodder and of the herdsman’s hire, flatter the heyward, defend herself when her cattle is shut up in the pinfold and moreover pay the damage. Christ knoweth it is an odious thing when people in the town complain of the anchoresses’ cattle. If, however, any one must needs have a cow, let her take care that she neither annoy, nor harm any one, and that her own thoughts be not fixed thereon[1198].
The more human bishops made allowance for a natural instinct by giving the convent permission to go for walks, though as a rule the grounds of the nunnery were specified:
“Let the door be closed at the right time,” wrote Archbishop Courtenay to Elstow in 1390, “And let no nun go out without licence of the abbess or other president, yet so that leave of walking for recreation in the orchard or in any other seemly and close place at suitable times be not out of malice denied to the nuns provided that the younger do not go without the society of the elder”[1199].
Bishop Spofford of Hereford went even further; after forbidding any revelries to be held in the nunnery of Lymbrook, he added:
“and what dysport of walkyng forward in dewe tyme and place, so that yee kepe the dewe houres and tymes of dyuyne seruyce with inforth, and with honest company, and with lycence specyally asked and obteyned [from] the pryoresse or suppryoresse in her absence, and at yee be two to geder at the leest, we holde us content” (1437)[1200].
So in 1367 Robert de Stretton, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, forbade any nun of Fairwell to go into Lichfield without the Prioress’ leave, ordering that she should be accompanied by two sisters and should “make no vain and wanton delays,” but added that “this is not intended to interfere with the laudable custom of the whole or greater part of the convent walking out together on certain days to take the air”[1201]. This forerunner of the schoolgirls’ “crocodile” was not, however, what the nuns desired. It was wandering about the roads in twos and threes (sometimes, alas, in ones also) that they really enjoyed, and against this freedom the bishops continually fulminated. It must be remembered that walking in the public streets in the middle ages was very different from what it is today; it is impossible otherwise, as Mr Coulton has pointed out, to explain the extraordinary severity of all rules for the deportment of girls[1202]. The streets were full of rough pastimes, hocking and hoodsnatching, football and the games of noisy prentices in the town; and in the country villages they resounded with the still more boorish sports of country folk and with the shrill quarrels of alewives and regrateresses and all the good-natured but short-tempered people, whom court rolls show us raising the hue and cry upon each other and drawing blood from each other’s noses. There is perhaps solicitude for the nuns in the injunction which Bishop Fitzjames sent in 1509 to the convent of Wix in Essex, forbidding them to permit “any public spectacles of seculars, javelin-play, dances or trading in streets or open places”[1203]. Manners were free in that age and the nuns would see and hear much that were best hidden from their cloistered innocence. Moreover if once they began to stop and pass the time of day with their neighbours, religious and secular, or to go into houses for some more private gossip, there was no knowing where such perilous familiarity would end; and the outspokenness with which bishops condemned such conduct by references to Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, leaves no doubt as to what they feared[1204].
But nothing availed to keep the nuns within their cloisters; and hardly a set of episcopal injunctions but bears witness to the freedom with which they wandered about the streets and fields. The nuns of Moxby are not to go out of the precincts of their monastery often, nor at any time to wander about the woods[1205]. Alas, poor ladies:
In somer when the shawes be sheyne,
And leves be large and long,
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song.
The nuns of Cookhill are more urban; they are not to wander about in the town (1285)[1206] and the nuns of Wroxall are not to go on foot to Coventry or to Warwick “cum eles ount fet desordement en ces houres” (1338)[1207]. The nuns of White Hall, Ilchester, “walk through the strets and places of the vill of Ilchester and elsewhere, the modesty of their sex being altogether cast off and they do not fear to enter the houses of secular men and suspected persons” (1335)[1208]. The nuns of Polsloe are not to go without permission into Exeter and are to return at once when their errand is accomplished, instead of “wascrauntes de hostel en hostel, si come eles unt maynte foiz fait, en deshonestete de lur estat et de la Religioun” (1319)[1209]—an echo here of the Good Wife’s advice, “and run thou not from house to house, like a St Anthony’s pig”[1210], or of the reminiscences of that other Wife of Bath: