For ever yet I lovede to be gay,
And for to walke, in March, Averille and May,
Fro hous to hous, to here sondry talis[1211].
The nuns of Romsey “enter houses of laymen and even of clerics in the town, eating and drinking with them” (1284)[1212]. The nuns of Godstow “have often access to Oxford under colour of visiting their friends” (1445)[1213]. The nuns of Elstow are a great trial to their diocesan; Bishop Gynewell finds that “there is excessive and frequent wandering of nuns to places outside the same monastery, whereby gossip and laxity are brought about” (1359)[1214]; Bishop Bokyngham boldly particularises:
We order the nuns on pain of excommunication, to abstain from any dishonest and suspicious conversation with secular or religious men and especially the access and frequent confabulations and colloquies of the canons of the Priory of Caldwell or of mendicant friars, in the monastery or about the public highways and fields adjoining (1387)[1215].
But the sisters of Elstow remain on good terms with their neighbours; Bishop Flemyng forbids the nuns “to have access to the town of Bedford or to the town of Elstow or to other towns or neighbouring places” and straitly enjoins the canons “that no canon of the said priory, under what colour of excuse soever, have access to the monastery of the nuns of Elstow; nor shall the same nuns for any reason whatever be allowed to enter the said priory, save for a manifest cause, from which reproach or suspicion of evil could in no way arise; nor even shall the same canons and nuns meet in any wise one with another, in any separate or private places; nor shall they talk together anywhere one with another, save in the presence and hearing of more than one trustworthy, who shall bear faithful witness of what they say or do” (1421-2)[1216]. The nuns of Nuncoton in the sixteenth century are even more addicted to the society of canons and Bishop Longland writes to them in stern language:
And that ye, lady prioresse, cause and compell all your susters (those oonly excepte that be seke) to kepe the quere and nomore to be absent as in tymes past they haue been wont to use, being content yf vj haue been present, the residue to goo att lybertie where they wold, some att thornton [Augustinian house at Thornton-upon-Humber], some at Newsom [or Newhouse, a Premonstratensian house close to Nuncoton, in the same parish of Brocklesby], some at hull, some att other places att their pleasures, which is in the sight of good men abhomynable, high displeasur to God, rebuke shame and reproache to religion and due correction to be doon according unto your religion frome tyme to tyme[1217].
Indeed these colloquies with monks and canons in their own monastery were nothing unusual. Bishops and Councils constantly forbade nuns to frequent houses of monks, or to be received there as guests, but the practice continued. Sometimes they had an excuse; the nuns of St Mary’s, Winchester, were in the habit of going to St Swithun’s monastery to confess to one of the brothers, who was their confessor and in ill-health, and Bishop Pontoise appointed another monk in his place, who should come to the nuns when summoned, thus avoiding the risk of scandal[1218]. Similarly Peckham forbade the nuns of Holy Sepulchre, Canterbury, to enter “any place of religious men or elsewhere, under colour of confessing,” unless they had no other confessor, in which case they were to return directly their business was accomplished and not to stay eating and drinking there[1219]. But sometimes the nuns had less good reason. At Elstow, as we know, they gossiped in the fields and highways; and if nuns were sometimes frivolous, so were monks. What are we to think of that nun of Catesby (gone to rack and ruin under the evil rule of Margaret Wavere), who
on Monday last did pass the night with the Austin friars at Northampton and did dance and play the lute with them in the same place until midnight (saltauit et citherauit usque ad mediam noctem) and on the night following she passed the night with the Friars preachers at Northampton, luting and dancing in like manner[1220].
There rises to the memory an irresistibly comic sonnet of Wordsworth:
Yet more—round many a convent’s blazing fire
Unhallowed threads of revelry are spun;
There Venus sits disguised like a nun,—
While Bacchus, clothed in semblance of a friar
Pours out his choicest beverage high and higher
Sparkling, until it cannot choose but run
Over the bowl, whose silver lip hath won
An instant kiss of masterful desire—
To stay the precious waste. Through every brain
The domination of the sprightly juice
Spreads high conceits to madding Fancy dear,
Till the arched roof, with resolute abuse
Of its grave echoes, swells a choral strain,
Whose votive burthen is “Our kingdom’s here.”
Alack, had the nun of Catesby forgotten that “even as the cow which goeth before the herd hath a bell at her neck, so likewise the woman who leadeth the song and dance hath, as it were, the devil’s bell bound to hers, and when the devil heareth the tinkle thereof he feeleth safe, and saith he: ‘I have not lost my cow yet’”?[1221] Had she forgotten the awful vision of that holy man, to whom the devil appeared in the form of a tiny blackamoor, standing above a woman who was leading a dance, guiding her about as he wished and dancing on her head?[1222] But indeed Isabel (or Venus) Benet was not the woman to care for so slight a matter as the rule of her order or the dreams of holy men[1223]. Her case provides an admirable illustration of the motives which prompted the extreme severity of episcopal attempts to enforce enclosure and to cut nuns off from the society of neighbouring monasteries[1224].