Within the walls of the monastery women were offered safety. There were many, of course, who might choose the quiet and the comparative ease of the cloister life from motives little better than worldly, and others who might enter with sentiments of romantic devoutness which it is hard for most of us to appreciate in this day; and both were doubtless satisfied with what they found in the convent. But there were many others who had been forced into a life absolutely distasteful to them and alien to their temperaments. How many of these withered away in discontent! how many revolted more actively and led lives that brought reproach and disgrace upon the Church! Among the earliest of the satires against social abuses we find those against hypocritical, avaricious, gluttonous, or licentious monks and nuns; and the stream of satire runs throughout the Middle Ages. Monks live in the pays de Cocagne, to gain admittance to which one had to wallow seven years in filth; monks and nuns are in Rabelais's Abbé de Thélème, and en leur reigle n'estoit que ceste clause: fais ce que vouldra; and monks and nuns again play anything but edifying roles in the fabliaux and their successors, the short tales such as one finds in the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles.
Monasteries for women abounded all over France, most of them under some form of the Benedictine rule. Within their own monasteries women could govern themselves, though the whole convent was usually dependent upon male ecclesiastical control, either attached to a neighboring monastery, or under the jurisdiction of a bishop. In the great double monastic community of Fontevrault, established about noo by Robert d'Arbrissel, women were exalted above men; the nuns sang and prayed, the monks worked, and the entire establishment was under the guidance of the abbess.
The abbess or prioress occupied a position of responsibility and dignity not unlike that of the chatelaine. She too had the control of a large domestic establishment, and she was responsible not only for religious discipline but for the temporal provision for her nuns. The abbess had the power of a bishop within the limits of her convent, and bore a crosier as the sign of her rank. She might even hold some feudal tenure in the name of her convent. She drew revenues from her holdings and was in every sense the executive head of her house. At first--always under some of the stricter rules--the abbess carried on business outside the convent through some male agent. Greater freedom undoubtedly prevailed at times, however, and the rule against her leaving the convent was ignored. She was in some cases appointed, but usually elected from among the nuns, though cases are found, of course, where the abbess was the mere creature of some powerful lay or ecclesiastical authority. To become abbess of a nunnery was not considered beneath even a princess of the blood; and in some convents probably the same caste distinctions were observed as prevailed outside, and the nuns were nothing more than elegant retired ladies of birth and fashion.
The abbess appointed her subordinates, who varied in number and rank according to the power of the convent. There was generally a sub-prioress, second in authority to the abbess, and certain minor executive officers, whose duties were nevertheless important, such as the chaplain, the sexton, and the cellaress. The chaplain was in most cases a monk chosen to celebrate Mass for the nuns, since women were not allowed to become actual priests; but in some cases the officer called the chaplain was a nun, whether or not she could officiate in all capacities. The sexton was a nun whose duties were to ring the bells for services, to keep in order the chapel, the altar, and the sacred vessels, and sometimes to act as a treasurer. The most interesting of these officers, however, and the one whose position must have been really most trying, was the cellaress. It was she who had general supervision of the commissariat. She was usually chosen upon the advice, if not by the election, of the whole community, and it was especially important that she should be a tactful person and a judicious manager. As housekeeper of the establishment, she had to control the servants and to satisfy the nuns. In providing food and drink for the household, she had to manage receipts and disbursements of considerable amounts. Very frequently a farm was attached to the nunnery, or there were several farms whose produce was to be used for the support of the institution. For whatever was bought or sold the cellaress had to make an accounting. With the proceeds of her sales or of the rent of the farms under her control, or with the money allowed her, she had to buy such provisions as were needed: grain, flesh, fish,--usually a very large item, especially in the Lenten season,--condiments, such as preserved fruits, spices, salt, etc., and, where the rule did not utterly forbid it, wine or ale. Of these details we shall speak more fully in connection with the rules for a model nunnery which Abélard wrote for Héloïse and upon which she based her government of the famous monastery of the Paraclete.
DROIT DU SEIGNEUR
After the painting by Lucien Mélingue
As feudalism meant oppression verging on slavery for Jacques Bonhomme, the peasant, his wife Jeanne could hardly have been in better case. With peasant marriages the seigneur could interfere even more tyrannically than with those of his feudal wards. In some places the bride and groom owed to the seigneur certain gifts called mets de mariage.... and that most infamous right known as the droit du seigneur was claimed, and we find a writer even as late as the seventeenth century recording the fact that the husband was sometimes required to purchase his bride's exemption from this right.
Aside from the protection they afforded to women who might otherwise have been utterly lost in the rough world, the monasteries were of great importance in other ways. Whatever it may have become during the period of the decline of monastic purity, the life in the nunneries, even in the comparatively dark period about the year 1000, was not an idle one. The day was carefully portioned off into periods of work, of religious devotion, and of leisure, which long custom fixed into a routine. The occupations included what we should now class chiefly as artistic work, though much of it was at the time really useful in a more homely way,--weaving of hangings and tapestries for the church, embroidery, painting and illuminating, and copying of manuscripts. This last was, of course, work of the highest utility, though the artistic skill displayed in the writing itself and in the beautiful illuminations made it also an art. We have few names of actual scribes of either sex, since they rarely signed the manuscripts they copied; but among these few there are some of women. The magnificent tapestries, sometimes large enough to cover in one piece the side of a church, are perhaps the most noteworthy of the products of the monasteries. So famous was the work of the nuns in this particular that tradition assigned to them, though perhaps mistakenly, the production of one of the most famous historical authorities for the Norman Conquest, the Bayeux tapestries, said to have been wrought for Bishop Odo of Bayeux by nuns under the direction of Queen Matilda.
Most important of all in the activities of the convent was education. At the time of which we write, the standard of learning in the convents was higher than one would think, and higher than it was some centuries later; for Latin was still used familiarly among some of the women educated in convents. The most famous instance of learning is that of the Saxon nun Hrotsvith, or Roswitha, of the tenth century, who wrote legends of the saints, dramas on the model of the comedies of Terence, and chronicles. There were other learned nuns, though none famous in the French literature of the time, all of whom gained their knowledge in convents; for it was in convents alone that women could ordinarily receive any education at all. One of the main purposes of the convent was to train young girls. Sometimes there was only such training as would fit them to became novices and eventually nuns, and the degree of education was of course determined in part by social standing; that is, a princess would be more carefully trained than a mere demoiselle; but some convents became famous schools, where education was given for its own sake, not merely to train those who meant to become nuns. In many cases, children of both sexes were taught, and girls and boys together learned Latin. In the romance of Flore et Blancheflore, the hero recalls how he and Blancheflore loved when they were children at school, "and told each other of our love in Latin, and none understood us." But the girls were probably better educated, in our sense of the word, than the boys; for teaching a boy to avoid breaking Priscian's head was then less necessary than teaching him to break that of his opponent in battle.