As mentioned above the pensions given differed greatly, and the heads of wealthy houses were allowed considerable sums. Thus Elizabeth Souche, abbess of Shaftesbury, the yearly income of which house was taxed at £1166, received £133 a year and all her nuns to the number of fifty-five were pensioned. Dorothy Barley, abbess of Barking, a house taxed at £862, received a yearly pension of £133; while Elizabeth Shelley, abbess of St Mary’s, Winchester, received only £26 a year. The prioress of St Andrew’s, Marricks, a small house, received £5 annually, and her nuns a pension of from twenty to forty shillings each. Gasquet points out that a large number of those who were pensioned died during the first few years after the surrender[1135]. Probably many of them were old, but there is extant a pension roll of the year 1553 (reign of Philip and Mary) from which can be gathered that a certain number of pensioned monks and nuns were then alive and continued to draw their pensions. Gasquet further remarks that only a few of the nuns who were turned away are known to have married[1136]; considering that hardly any are known to have left their convents voluntarily, and that many of the younger ones were turned away through the act of 1535, this seems only natural.
Eye-witnesses as well as Cromwell’s agents have left descriptions which give a striking picture of the brutality of the proceedings[1137]. But the hardships to which the convent inmates were exposed, the terrible waste of their property, and the senseless destruction of priceless art treasures, must not blind us to the fact that the breaking up of the monastic system was but an incident in one of the most momentous revolutions within historic record. The dissolution of the monasteries at the time of the Reformation, to be rightly estimated, must be considered as part of a wider change which was remoulding society on an altered basis.
It is interesting to compare the view taken of monastic life at the time of the dissolution with the attitude taken towards convents in the following period. Some writings, as for example Lindesay in the play of the Three Estates, acted in the North in 1535[1138], severely censure the inclinations which are fostered in the convent.
But strong as the feeling against convents and their inmates was in some instances at the time of the Reformation, when the system was once removed little antagonism remained towards those who had represented it. The thought of the nun, fifty years after she had passed away in England, roused no acrimony. Shakspere had no prejudice against her, and Milton was so far impressed in her favour that he represented ‘Melancholy’ under the form of a ‘pensive nun, devout and pure,—Sober, steadfast and demure.’ It was only at a much later period that the agitation raised by the fear of returning ‘Popery’ caused men to rake up scandals connected with convents and to make bugbears out of them.
The losses incurred by the destruction of the convents were not however slow in making themselves felt; but as indifference towards women’s intellectual interests had made part of the movement, a considerable time went by before the loss of the educational possibilities which the convent had secured to women was deplored. ‘In the convents,’ says Gasquet[1139], ‘the female portion of the population found their only teachers, the rich as well as the poor, and the destruction of these religious houses by Henry was the absolute extinction of any systematic education for women during a long period.’ While devotion to domestic duties, exclusive of all other interests, continued to be claimed from women, the loss of their schools was a matter of indifference to society in general. But in proportion as shortcomings in women were felt, the thought arose that these might be due to want of training. The words in which the divine, Fuller († 1661), expressed such thoughts in the 17th century are well worth recalling. The vow of celibacy in his eyes remained a thing of evil, but short of this the convents had not been wholly bad.
‘They were good she schools wherein the girls and maids of the neighbourhood were taught to read and work; and sometimes a little Latin was taught them therein. Yea, give me leave to say, if such feminine foundations had still continued, provided no vow were obtruded upon them, (virginity is least kept where it is most constrained,) haply the weaker sex, besides the avoiding modern inconveniences, might be heightened to a higher perfection than hitherto hath been attained[1140].’
§ 2. The Memoir of Charitas Pirckheimer.
A memoir is extant from the pen of the abbess of a convent at Nürnberg. It was written (1524-28) during the stormy period following upon the outbreak of the Lutheran agitation, and it helps us to realize the effect which the rupture with Rome had on a convent of nuns. Charitas Pirckheimer, the author of this memoir, was the sister of Wilibald Pirckheimer († 1530), a well-known humanist, and through him she was in touch with some of the leading representatives of learning and art of her day. She was well advanced in life and had many years of active influence behind her when the troubles began of which she has left a graphic description.
An examination of the contents of her memoir must stand as a specimen of the effects which the Reformation had on women’s convent life on the Continent, effects which varied in almost every town and every province. For the breaking up of the monastic system abroad had none of the continuity and completeness it had in England. The absence of centralised temporal and spiritual authority left the separate townships and principalities free to accept or reject the change of faith as they chose. The towns were ruled by councils on which the decision in the first place depended, and in the principalities the change depended on the attitude of prince and magnate, so that the succession of the prince of a different faith, or the conquest of one province by another, repeatedly led to a change of religion. In some districts the first stormy outbreak was followed by a reaction in favour of Rome, and convents which had disbanded were restored on a narrowed basis; in others the monastic system which had received a severe shock continued prostrate for many years. But even in those districts where the change of faith was permanently accepted, its influence on conventual establishments was so varied that an account of the way in which it put an end to nunneries lies beyond the scope of this work. It must suffice to point out that some convents, chiefly unreformed ones, disbanded or surrendered under the general feeling of restlessness; and that others were attacked and destroyed during the atrocities of the Peasants’ War. The heads of others again, with a clearsightedness one cannot but admire, rejected Romish usages and beliefs in favour of the Lutheran faith, and their houses have continued to this day as homes for unmarried women of the aristocracy. Others were suffered to remain under the condition that no new members should be admitted, but that the old ones should be left in possession of their house till they died. To this latter class belonged the convent of St Clara at Nürnberg which we are about to discuss.