Even more disturbing to monastic discipline were the casual visits of friends in the neighbourhood, coming to see and talk with the nuns for a few hours. Visitation documents show that there was a steady intercourse between the convent and the world. Letters and messages passed between the nuns and their friends outside, and a great many of the private affairs of the convent found their way to the ears of seculars. “From miln and from market, from smithy and from nunnery, men bring tidings” ran the proverb[1237], and complaints were common that the secrets of the chapter were spread abroad in the country side. At the ill-conducted house of Catesby in 1442 the Prioress (herself the blackest sheep in all the flock) complained that
secular folk have often recourse to the nuns’ chambers within the cloister, and talkings and junketings take place there without the knowledge of the Prioress; ... also the nuns do send out letters and receive letters sent to them without the advice of the prioress. Also ... that the secrets of the house are disclosed in the neighbourhood by such seculars when they come there. Also the nuns do send out the serving-folk of the priory on their businesses and do also receive the persons for whom they send and with whom they hold parleyings and conversations, whereof the Prioress is ignorant[1238].
At Goring in 1530 the Prioress complained that one of the nuns persisted in sending messages to her friends[1239], and at Romsey in 1509 Alice, wife of William Coke, the cook of the nunnery, was enjoined “that she shall not be a messenger or bearer of messages or troths or tokens between any nun and any lay person on pain of excommunication and as much as in her lies shall hinder communications of lay persons with nuns at the kitchen window”[1240]. At St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, it was even necessary to order the nuns to refrain from kissing secular persons[1241].
Sometimes the visitation detecta or comperta or injunctions give specific details as to the visitors who were most assiduous in haunting a nunnery. It is amusing to follow the reference to scholars of Oxford in the records of those houses which were in the neighbourhood of the University. Godstow was the nearest and the students seem to have regarded it as a happy hunting ground constituted specially for their recreation. Peckham, in his set of Latin injunctions to the Abbey, wrote after giving minute regulations as to the terms upon which nuns might converse with visitors:
When the scholars of Oxford come to talk with you, we wish no nun to join in such conversations, save with the licence of the Abbess and unless they be notoriously of kin to her, in the third grade of consanguinity at least; we order the nuns to refuse to converse with all scholars so coming; nor shall you desire to be united in any special tie of familiarity with them, for such affection often excites unclean thoughts[1242].
The most detailed information, however, is to be found in the injunctions sent by Bishop Gray to Godstow in 1432:
That no nun receive any secular person for any recreation in the nuns’ chambers under pain of excommunication. For the scholars of Oxford say they can have all manner of recreation with the nuns, even as they will desire.... Also that the recourse of scholars of Oxford to the monastery be altogether checked and restrained.... Also that (neither) the gatekeeper of the monastery, nor any other secular person convey any gifts, rewards, letters or tokens from the nuns to any scholars of Oxford or other secular person whomsoever, or bring back any such scholars or persons to the same nuns, nay, not even skins containing wine, without the view and knowledge of the abbess and with her special licence asked and had, under pain of expulsion from his office (and) from the said monastery for ever; and if any nun shall do the contrary she shall undergo imprisonment for a year[1243].
In a commission addressed two years later to the Abbot of Oseney and to Master Robert Thornton the Bishop spoke in very severe terms of the bad behaviour of the nuns, and ordered the commissioners to proceed to Godstow and to inquire whether a nun, who had been with child at the time of his visitation, had been preferred to any office or had gone outside the precincts and whether his other injunctions had been obeyed, especially “if any scholars of the university of Oxford, graduate or non-graduate, have had access to the same monastery or lodging in the same, contrary to the form of our injunctions aforesaid”[1244]. But the situation was unchanged when, thirteen years later, Alnwick came to Godstow. Elizabeth Felmersham, the Abbess, deposed
that secular folk have often access to the nuns during the divine office in quire, and to the frater at meal-time.... She cannot restrain students from Oxford from having common access in her despite to the monastery and the claustral precincts. The nuns hold converse with the secular folk that come to visit the monastery, without asking any leave of the abbess.
Other nuns deposed that sister Alice Longspey[1245] often conversed in the convent church with Hugh Sadler, a priest from Oxford, who obtained access to her on the plea that she was his kinswoman and that Dame Katherine Okeley: