That there was laxity in the government of some of the convents which resulted in idleness and waste of money is evident. The Bishop of Lincoln, Longland, sent very peremptory orders to the Superior of the nuns of Cottam or Cottram, in Lincolnshire, respecting her duties:
“Ouer this I charge you lady prioresse undre the said payne that ye yereby make your accompte openly and truely in your chaptour house afore the mooste part, and the senours of your susters that they may knowe frome yere to yere the state of said house, and that ye streight upon sight hereof dymynishe the nombre of your seruants as well men as women, whiche excessyve nombre that ye kepe of them bothe is oon of the grette causes of your miserable povertye.”
This was in the second quarter of the sixteenth century.
As places of education the convents exercised the most important influence on the outside world. Even in the ninth century children were sent to England from the continent to be educated in the schools established by Theodorus and Hadrian.[24] This is the more remarkable, as in the seventh century there were so few convents in England that many of the nobility sent their daughters to be educated in France. The religious house of Brie, of which mention has already been made, as having a Saxon abbess, received the daughter of Earconberth, King of Kent, during the rule of the Abbess Fara in 640. Eight hundred years later Sir Thomas Boleyn sent his ill-fated daughter Anne, during her sojourn in France, to a convent at Brie to complete her education. It seems probable that it was the same religious house.
In the seventh and eighth centuries, the nuns were as much occupied with literary studies as the monks, reading theology and even classics, copying manuscripts, which they adorned with wonderful embellishments. They were able to correspond in Latin; some were acquainted with Greek, and they appear to have been very assiduous in the pursuit of such literature as was available.
The Abbess Eadburga and her pupil Leobgitha were both correspondents of the famous Archbishop Boniface, who lived in the eighth century. On one occasion Leobgitha sends Boniface some Latin hexameters of her own composition. In her letter she says—
“These underwritten verses I have endeavoured to compose according to the rules derived from the poets, not in a spirit of presumption, but with the desire of exciting the powers of my slender talents, and in the hope of thine assistance therein. This art I have learnt from Eadburga, who is ever occupied in studying the divine law.”
The lines run thus—
“Arbiter omnipotens solusqui cuncta creavit,
In regno patris semperqui lumine fulget;
Qua jugiter flagrans sit regnet gloria Christi,
Illæsum servet semper te jure perenni.”[25]
Another nun, St. Erkenwald, had as a teacher Hildelitha—