Among the possessions of the abbey of the Holy Trinity, were several estates[52] and advowsons in England; for the better administration of which, the presence of the abbess was occasionally required on this side of the water. The names of more than one of the holy ladies are on record, who honored our island with their presence. The journal of the tour of the abbess, Georgette du Molley Bacon, states her to have embarked at Caen, on the sixteenth of August, 1570, with fifteen persons in her suite, and to have landed in London, and proceeded to her manor-house at Felsted, in Essex, from which she did not return to Normandy till Trinity-Sunday in the following year.
Hence it may be easily inferred, that the rules of the convent were not of the strictest description. The establishment indeed was, from its origin, under the regulation of the order of St. Benedict, but the nuns, though they lived under the same roof, were not bound by vows: they were accustomed to receive their friends in their own apartments; and many of them had nieces or other relations with them, whom they brought up. The refectory was common; and they ate meat several days in the week. There were also stated times, on which it was allowable for them to take the air in a garden at a short distance from the convent. The abbess herself had her Country-house at Oistreham, where she frequently resided; and upon the occasion of those festivals which are distinguished by public processions, the whole body of the community used to go in procession to each of the different churches of Caen. Sometimes too the abbess attended with a party of her nuns at the performance of any mystery or similar scenical representation. The account of the revenues of the monastery in 1423, shews how Nicole de Rupalley, then abbess, was present at the acting of the Miracle of St. Vincent, and rewarded the performers with a gratuity of ten sols, a sum equivalent, at that time, to ten bushels of wheat.
About the year 1515, an attempt was made by the superior, Isabel of Bourbon, to curtail the indulgences of the sisterhood, by keeping them more closely confined, increasing the number of fast-days, and generally introducing a system of greater rigor. But the nuns remonstrated against the innovation, and had recourse to the Bishop of Bayeux, alledging the injustice of their being called upon to submit themselves to regulations, to which they had not originally subscribed. The prelate, who felt the point to be a delicate one, refused to decide; and the matter ended in an appeal to the Pope, who, finally, allowed the nuns to retire into other convents, where they might enjoy the freedom they claimed.
When, after the capture of Caen by Edward, in 1346, the inhabitants resolved upon fortifying the town anew, the abbeys of St. Stephen and of the Trinity, both of which lay in the suburbs, were excluded from the line of circumvallation; and the consequence was their exposure to insults and pillage. The monks and nuns were therefore obliged to look to their own defence; and, upon King John's coming to Caen, eight years afterwards, they obtained from him letters patent, authorizing them to encircle their convents with walls, towers, and fosses of their own. Hence originated the strange anomaly of a fortress and nunnery within the same precincts. The sisterhood, alarmed at their situation, sold their plate, and even the shrines of their relics, to provide for their safety; and permission was afterwards granted them to levy contributions upon their vassals, for the purpose of expediting and completing the task.—In the reign of Henry VI. during the wane of the British power in France, orders were issued by the monarch for the dismantling of the fort of the Trinity, lest it should be seized by the inhabitants of the neighborhood, who were endeavoring to get possession of Caen. But the abbess resisted the royal edict; and, under an apprehension, lest the attempt to carry it into effect should induce her to open the gates to the insurgents, her resistance was allowed to be effectual.—King Charles repeatedly took up his quarters in this monastery, while his army was laying siege to Caen, in 1450, and mention continues to be made of the fortress till the commencement of the following century; but after that time, it appears to have been suffered to go to ruin.
M. De la Rue rejects, as unfounded, the statement of the Bishop of Avranches, which has obtained general credence, that the spires of the western towers of the abbey were destroyed in 1360, by Charles the Bad, on account of their use for the detecting of the approach of an enemy. His principal argument against the fact is, that the King of Navarre was at that very time at peace with France; and therefore, supposing it to be certain that they were taken down by that prince, he is of opinion, that their demolition must have been ordered to prevent them from serving as landmarks to the English. At the same time, he is evidently inclined to think that the towers were never surmounted by spires at all; and he observes, with much apparent justice, that, if there really were any, and if they were really destroyed at the period alledged, the towers must have been left for a long time in a ruined state, as their present termination is known to be the work of the eighteenth century.
The original charters and title-deeds of the abbey of the Trinity were lost during the revolution. They perished in consequence of the extreme care of the last abbess, who, full of anxiety for their preservation, secured them in trunks, and hid them in the ceiling of the church. But, in those disastrous times, the lead that covered the churches was among the earliest objects of plunder; and the consequence was, that the roof was stripped; the boxes exposed to the rain; the wood and paper wholly destroyed; and the tin cases that held the charters so eaten by rust, that their contents were rendered illegible. It was in this state that they were found by the Abbé De la Rue, who was in possession of the secret, and who, on his return to France, after the cessation of the troubles and the death of the abbess, obtained permission from the prefect for the search to be made.
The church of the abbey of the Trinity had its own peculiar rites; and, till the period of the revolution, the community were in the habit of printing their liturgy annually in latin. A very beautiful quarto volume, containing the ritual, was published at Caen, in 1622, by the order of Laurence de Budos, then abbess. It was probably from pride at a privilege of this nature, and from a confidence in their strength, that the nuns persisted in celebrating the ridiculous, or, it might almost be called, blasphemous Fête des Fous, for a hundred years after the Council of Basle had decreed the suppression of it throughout Christendom. In imitation too of the Boy-Bishops of Bayeux, Salisbury, and other churches, the nuns of the Holy Trinity had their Girl-Abbesses. The ancient rolls of the monastery make mention, under the head of expenses in 1423, of six sols given, by way of offering, on Innocents'-Day, “aux petites Abbesses.” This was the day on which the Girl-Abbess was elected: the superior of the convent resigned to her the abbatial stall and crozier at vespers, as soon as they came to the verse of the Magnificat, beginning “Deposuit potentes de sede;” and the farce was kept up till the same hour the succeeding evening. The Abbé De la Rue, who mentions this fact, observes with justice, that another circumstance, which appears from these accounts, is still more extraordinary;—that, even as late as 1546, the abbess was in the habit of making an annual payment of five sols to the cathedral of Bayeux, for its Boy-Bishop. The entry is in the following terms: “Au petit évêque de Bayeux, pour sa pension, ainsi qu'il est accoutumé, V. sous.” During the early part of the preceding century, the abbot of St. Stephen was also accustomed to pay twenty sols per annum, on the same account; but his payment was probably discontinued immediately after the edict of the Council of Basle, though the ceremony of the Boy-Bishop was not suppressed at Bayeux till 1482. Indeed, only six years before that time, the inventory of the sacristy of the cathedral enumerated, among its other valuables,
“Two mitres for the Boy-Bishop,
The crozier belonging to the Boy-Bishop,
The Boy-Bishop's mittens,
And four small copes of scarlet satin, for the use
of the singing-boys on Innocents'-Day.”
The abbess of Caen, through the medium of her official, exercised spiritual jurisdiction over the parishes of St. Giles, Carpiquet, Oistreham, and St. Aubin-d'Arquenay, by virtue of a privilege granted by the bishops of Bayeux, as well for herself and her nuns, as for the vassals of the several parishes. This privilege, however, extended no farther than to an exemption from certain pecuniary fines, which the diocesans, in the middle ages, exacted from their flocks; and even in this confined acceptation, it was more than once the subject of litigation between the convent and the see. In like manner, the civil and criminal jurisdiction claimed by the abbess over the same parishes, brought her occasionally into disputes with the bailiff and viscount of Caen: her rights were repeatedly called in question, and she was obliged to have recourse to legal tribunals to establish them. The following very extraordinary suit is at once illustrative of the fact, and of the character of the times:—In the year 1480, an infant was eaten up in its cradle, by a bestia porcina, within the precincts of the parish of St. Giles. The abbess' officers seized the delinquent, and instituted a process for its condemnation before the seneschal of the convent. During the time, however, that the question was pending, the king's attorney-general interfered. He summoned the abbess before the high-bailiff, and, maintaining that the crime had been committed within the cognizance of the bailiwick, he claimed the beast, and demanded that its trial should take place before one of the royal tribunals. Debates immediately arose as to the limits of their respective jurisdictions: inquiries were set on foot; memorials and counter-memorials were presented; and the abbess finally succeeded in carrying her point, only by dint of proving that she had, some years previously, burned a young woman in the Place aux Campions, for having murdered a man in the self-same house where the hog devoured the child.
Among the obligations originally imposed upon this convent, was that of giving a dinner annually, on Trinity Sunday, to such of the inhabitants of the parish of Vaux-sur-Saulles and their domestics, as had resided there a year and a day. The repast was served up within the abbey walls, and in the following manner:—After the guests had washed their hands in a tub of water, they seated themselves on the ground, and a cloth was spread before them. A loaf, of the weight of twenty-one ounces, was then given to each individual, and with it a slice of boiled bacon, six inches square. To this was added a rasher of bacon, fried; and the feast concluded with a basin of bread and milk for every person, all of them having likewise as much beer and cider as they could drink. The dinner, as may naturally be supposed, lasted from three to four hours; and it will also not be difficult to imagine, that the entertaining of such a motley throng on such a day, could not fail to be attended with great annoyance to the nuns, and with various inconveniences. The convent had therefore, from a very early date, endeavored to free themselves from the obligation, by the payment of a sum of money; and, in times of war, the town of Caen had occasionally interposed, and forced the people to accept the composition, from an apprehension, lest the enemy should gain possession of the fort of the Trinity, by introducing themselves into it among the authorized guests. It appears that, in 1429, the abbess purchased an exemption at the price of thirty livres, a sum equivalent to thirty-seven and a half quarters of corn, at a time when wheat sold for two sols the bushel; and twenty-two years subsequently, Charles VII. then King of France, granted his letters patent, abolishing the dinner altogether, upon condition of a like sum being annually paid to the parochial chest.