Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 Part 29

And yet agaynewarde shryked every nonne, The pange of love so strayneth hem to cry: "Now woo the tyme" quod thay "that we be boune!

This hatefull order nyse will done us dye!

We sigh and sobbe and bleden inwardly Fretyng oure self with thought and hard complaynt, That ney for love we waxen wode and faynt"[1563].

A kindred poem, _The Temple of Glas_, by Lydgate (who seems himself to have become a monk of Bury at the age of fifteen) contains the same idea.

Among the lovers in the Temple are some who make bitter complaint, youth wedded to age, or wedded without free choice, or shut in a convent:

And right anon I herd oer crie With sobbing teris and with ful pitous soune, To fore e G.o.ddes, bi lamentacioun, That were constrayned in hir tender youe And in childhode, as it is ofte coue, Y-entred were into religioun, Or ei hade yeris of discresioun, That al her life cannot but complein, In wide copis perfeccion to feine, Ful couertli to curen al hir smert, And shew e contrarie outward of her hert.

Thus saugh I wepen many a faire maide, That on hir freendis al i wite ei liede[1564].

The same idea is also repeated in King James I of Scotland's poem, _The King's Quair_[1565], and later (with more resemblance to the continental songs) in the complaint of the wicked Prioress in Sir David Lyndesay's morality play, _Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits_ [c. 1535]:

I gif my freinds my malisoun That me compellit to be ane Nun, And wald nocht let me marie.

It was my freinds greadines That gart me be ane Priores: Now hartlie them I warie.

Howbeit that Nunnis sing nichts and dayis Thair hart waitis nocht quhat thair mouth sayis; The suith I ghow declair.

Makand ghow intimatioun, To Christis Congregatioun Nunnis ar nocht necessair.

Bot I sall do the best I can, And marie sum gude honest man, And brew gude aill and tun.

Mariage, be my opinioun, It is better Religioun As to be freir or Nun[1566].

The concentrated bitterness of _The Court of Love_ and the social satire of Lindesay are only a literary expression of the theme treated more lightheartedly in the popular _chansons de nonnes_. The songs are one side of the popular view of asceticism, the gay side. The serious side may be found in the famous story of _The Nun who Loved the World_:

Some time there was a nun that hight Beatrice, a pa.s.sing fair woman, and she was sacristan of the kirk, and she had great devotion unto our Lady; and ofttimes men desired her to sin. So at last she consented unto a clerk to go away with him when compline was done, and ere she departed she went unto an altar of our Lady and said unto her; "Lady, as I have been devout unto thee, now I resign unto thee these keys, for I may no longer sustain the temptation of my flesh." And she laid the keys on the altar and went her ways unto the clerk. And when he had defouled her, within a few days he left her and went away; and she had nothing to live on and thought shame to gang home again unto her cloister and she fell to be a common woman. And when she had lived in that vice fifteen years, on a day she came unto the nunnery gate, and asked the porter if he knew ever a nun in that place that hight Beatrice, that was sacristan and keeper of the kirk. And he said he knew her on the best wise and said she was a worthy woman and a holy from when she was a little bairn, "and ever has kept her clean and in good name." And she understood not the words of this man and went her ways. And our Lady appeared unto her and said: "Behold, I have fulfilled thine office these fifteen years and therefore turn again now into thy place and be again in thine office as thou wast, and shrive thee and do thy penance, for there is no creature here that knows thy trespa.s.s, for I have ever been for thee in thy clothing and in thine habit." And anon she was in her habit and went in and shrove her and did her penance and told all that was happened unto her[1567].

This tale is interesting, because it is much more than a piece of nave piety. The story of Beatrice is intimately connected with the _chansons de nonnes_; it is the serious, as they are the gay, expression of a whole philosophy of life. The songs are, indeed, purely materialistic and do not attempt (how should the spinsters and the knitters in the sun attempt it?) to give a philosophical justification for their att.i.tude. The miracle is simple and seems on the surface to draw no moral, save that devotion to the Virgin will be rewarded. Nevertheless the philosophy and the moral are there; they are those of the most famous of all medieval songs, _Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus_. The theme of the miracle and of the songs alike is the revolt against asceticism, the revolt of the body, which knows how short its beauty and its life, against the spirit which lives forever, and yet will not allow its poor yokefellow one little hour. The fact that the story of Beatrice takes the form of a Mary-miracle is itself significant. For the "Nos habebit humus" argument can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand stands the human mult.i.tude, gathering rosebuds while it may, crying up and down the roads of the world to all who pa.s.s to rejoice today, for "ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuere?" On the other hand stands the moralist, singing the same song:

Were beth they biforen us weren, Houndes ladden and hauekes beren, And hadden feld and wode, That riche _levedies_ in _h.o.e.re_ bour, [ladies, their That wereden gold in h.o.e.re tressour, With h.o.e.re _brightle_ rode?-- [complexion

--but drawing how different a moral,

_Dreghy_ here man, thenne, if thou wilt [endure A luitel _pine_, that me the _bit_ [pain, bid Withdrau thine _eyses_ ofte[1568]. [ease

Often for long stretches at a time the wandering clerks and the singers were willing to leave to the moralist this heaven which was to be won by despising earthly beauty; they were content to go to h.e.l.l singing with Auca.s.sin and Nicolete and all the kings of the world. But at other times they ached for heaven too and would not believe that they might win there only by the narrow path of righteousness. So they invented a philosophical justification for their way of life. The Church had forgotten the love which sat with publicans and sinners; the people rediscovered it, and attributed it not to the Son but to the Mother. At one blow they outwitted the moralist by inventing the cult of the Virgin Mary[1569]. In their hands this Mary wors.h.i.+p became more than the wors.h.i.+p of Christ's mother; it became almost a separate religion, a religion under which jongleurs and thieves, fighters and tournament-haunters and the great host of those who loved unwisely found a mercy often denied to them by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The people created a Virgin to whom justice was nothing and law less than nothing, but to whom love of herself was all. "Imperatrix supernorum, supernatrix infernorum," h.e.l.l was emptied under her rule and heaven became a new place, filled with her disreputable, faulty, human lovers. She was not only the familiar friend of the poor and humble, she was also the confidante of the lover, of all the Auca.s.sins and Nicoletes of the world. It is not without significance that so great a stress was always laid upon her personal loveliness. Her cult became the expression of mankind's deep unconscious revolt against asceticism, their love of life, their pa.s.sionate sense of "beauty that must die." The story of Beatrice has kept its undiminished attraction for the modern world largely because in it, more than in all the other Mary-miracles, life has triumphed and has been justified of heaven[1570]. Even the cold garb given to it by ecclesiastics such as Caesarius of Heisterbach cannot conceal its underlying idea that all love is akin, the most earthy to the most divine; the idea which Malory expressed many years later, when he wrote of Queen Guinevere "that while she lived she was a true lover and therefore she had a good end." The theme most familiar to us in the didactic literature of the middle ages is the theme of the soul "here in the body pent"; for the moralist has his deliberate purpose and sets down his idea more directly and with more point than do the story-teller and the singer, who have no aim but to say and speak and tell the tale. But when we have been moved by the theme of the soul, let us not fail also to recognise when we meet it--whether in the wandering scholar's _Gaudeamus_ or in the miracle of the nun who loved the world--the theme of the body, despised and maimed and always beautiful, crying out for its birthright. Even in the middle ages the Greeks had not lived in vain.

The miracle of Sister Beatrice leads to the consideration of another type of popular literature, which throws much light on convent life. Sometimes the people grow tired of singing to themselves; they want to be told stories, which they can repeat in the long evenings, when the sun goes down and the rushlight sends its wan uneven flicker over the floor. Even in the households of rich men story-telling round the fire is the favourite after-dinner occupation[1571]. These stories come from every conceivable source, from the East, from the Cla.s.sics, from the Lives of the Fathers, from the Legends of the Saints, from the Miracles of the Virgin, from the acc.u.mulated experience of generations of story-tellers.

At first their purpose is simply to amuse, and the jongleur can always get a hearing for his _fabliau_; from village green to town market, from the ale house to the manor and the castle hall he pa.s.ses with his repertoire of grave, gay, edifying, ribald, coa.r.s.e or delightful tales and when he has gone his enchanted audience repeats and pa.s.ses on all that he has said[1572]. Then another professional story-teller begins to compete with the jongleur, a story-teller whose object is to point a moral rather than to adorn a tale. The Church, observing that attentive audience, adopts the practice. Preachers vie with jongleurs in ill.u.s.trating their sermons by stories, "examples" they call them. Often they use the same tales; anything so that the congregation keep awake; and though the examples are sometimes very edifying, they are sometimes but ill-disguised buffoonery, and moralists cry out against the preacher, who instead of the Gospel pa.s.ses off his own inventions, jests and gibes, so that the poor sheep return from pasture wind-fed[1573]. But the greatest preachers win many souls by a judicious use of stories[1574], and diligent clerks make huge collections of such _exempla_, wherein the least skilled sermon-maker may find an ill.u.s.tration apt to any text[1575]. Didactic writers and theologians also adopt the practice; they trust to example rather than to precept; their ponderous tomes are alive with anecdotes, but one half-pennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack[1576]. Then the literary men begin to seize upon the _fabliaux_ and _exempla_ for the purpose of their art; they borrow plots from this bottomless treasure-house; and so come the days of Boccaccio and _Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ and the short story is made at last[1577]. They all, jongleurs, preachers, theologians and men of letters repeat each other, for a tale once told is everyone's property; the people repeat them; and so the stories circulate from lip to lip through the wide lands of Europe and down the echoing centuries. And since these tales deal with every subject under the sun (and with many marvels which the sun never looked upon), it is not surprising that several of them deal with nuns.

Across six centuries we can, with the aid of a sympathetic imagination, slip into the skins of these inquisitive and child-like folk, and hear some of the stories to which they lent such an absorbed attention. Let us

Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, Forget the spreading of the hideous town; Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, And dream of London, small and white and clean, The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.

Or rather, let us imagine not London but some other little English town, on just such an April morning as moved Chaucer and his fellow-voyagers to seek the holy blissful martyr by way of the Tabard Inn. Having sloughed the film of those six hundred years from off our eyes, we can see more clearly the shadowy forms of our fathers that begat us. We can see a motley crowd gathered in the market place, chiefly made up of women. There are girls, demure or wistful or laughing, fresh from their spinning wheels or from church; there are also bustling wives, in fine well-woven wimples and moist new shoes, arm in arm with their gossips. By craning a neck we may see that flighty minx Alison, the carpenter's wife, "long as a mast and upright as a bolt," casting about her with her bold black eyes and looking jealously at the miller's wife from across the brook, who is as pert as a pye and considers herself a lady. There is a good wife of beside Bath, with a red face and ten pounds' weight of kerchiefs on her head; a great traveller and a great talker she is--we can hear her chattering right across the square; it is a pity she is so deaf. There, under her own sign-board, is the inn-keeper's ill-tempered dame, who bullies her husband and ramps in his face if her neighbours do not bow low to her in church; and there is the new-made bride of yonder merchant with the forked beard--they say she is a shrew too. There is Rose the Regrater, who also weaves woollen cloth and cheats her spinsters. There is Dame Emma, who keeps the tavern by the river--our neighbour Glutton's wife would like to scratch out her eyes, for Glutton always has to be carried home from that inn. There also are Elinor, Joan and Margery, Margaret, Alice and Cecily, merry gossips, their hearts well cherished with muscadel. Mingled with these good wives of the town we see, as we look about us, other folk; portly burgesses, returning from a meeting of the borough court, full of wine and merchant law; a couple of friars, their tippets stuffed with knives and pins, and a fat monk, with a greyhound slinking at his heel; an ale-taster, reeling home from duties performed too well; a Fleming or two, ever on the lookout for snarls and sharp elbows from the true-born native craftsmen; several pretty supercilious ladies "with browen blissful under hood," squired by a gay young gentleman, embroidered all over with flowers; two giggling curly-haired clerks (Absolon and Nicholas must be their names) ogling the carpenter's wife and sn.i.g.g.e.ring at their solemn faced companion--that youth there, with the threadbare courtepy and a book of Aristotle under his arm; a bailiff buying tar and salt for the home farm and selling his b.u.t.ter and eggs to the townsmen; numbers of beggars and idlers and children; and on the outskirts of the crowd little sister Joan from St Mary's Convent, who ought not to be out alone, but who cannot resist stopping to hear the sermon.

For we have all come running together in this year of our Lord 1380 to hear a sermon[1578]. We look upon sermons as an excellent opportunity "for to see and eek for to be seen"; in the same spirit, compact one-third of sociability, one-third of curiosity and one-third of piety, we always crowd

To vigilies and to processiouns, To preaching eek and to thise pilgrimages, To pleyes of miracles and mariages[1579].

There is the preacher under the stone market cross. He is bidding us shun the snares of the world; if we cannot shut ourselves up in a cloister (which is best), he says, we must make our hearts a cloister, where no wickedness will come. He will have to tell us a story soon, for we are restless folk and do not love to sit still on the cobbles at his feet, but with a story he can always hold us. Sure enough he has left his theme now and is giving us an example:

Jacobus de Vetriaco tells how some time there was a mighty prince that was founder of a nunnery that stood near hand him; and he coveted greatly a fair nun of the place to have her unto his leman. And not withstanding neither by prayer nor by gift he could overcome her; and at the last he took her away by strong force. And when men came to take her away, she was pa.s.sing feared and asked them why they took her out of her abbey, more than her other sisters. And they answered her again and said, because she had so fair een. And anon as she heard this she was fain and she gart put out her een anon and laid them in a dish and brought them unto them and said: "Lo, here is the een that your master desires and bid him let me alone and lose neither his soul nor mine." And they went unto him therewith and told him and he let her alone; and by this mean she kept her chast.i.ty. And within three years after she had her een again, as well as ever had she, through grace of G.o.d[1580].

A shudder of horror and admiration runs through us, but the preacher continues with a second example:

"How different," he says, "Was this most chaste and wise virgin from that wretched nun who was sought by a n.o.ble knight, that he might seduce her, and her abbess hid her in a certain very secret place in the monastery. And when that knight had sought her in all the offices and corners of the monastery and could in no wise find her he grew at length weary and tired of the quest and turned to depart. But she, seeing that he had stopped looking for her, because he had been unable to find her, began to call 'Cuckoo!', as children are wont to cry when they are hidden and do not wish to be found. Whereupon the knight, hearing her, ran to the place, and having accomplished his will departed therefrom, deriding the miserable girl"[1581].

"See how evil are the ways of the world," says our preacher; "how much better to be simple and unworldly, like that nun of whom you may read in the book of the wise Caesarius which he wrote to instruct novices. I will tell you of her,"

In the diocese of Treves is a certain convent of nuns named Lutzerath, wherein by ancient custom no girl is received, but at the age of seven years or less; which const.i.tution hath grown up for the preservation of that simplicity of mind, which maketh the whole body to s.h.i.+ne.

There was lately in that monastery a maiden full-grown in body, but such a child in worldly matters that she scarce knew the difference twixt a secular person and a brute beast, since she had had no knowledge of secular folk before her conversion. One day a goat climbed upon the orchard wall, which when she saw, knowing not what it might be, she said to a sister that stood by her: "What is that?" The other, knowing her simplicity, answered in jest to her wondering question, "That is a woman of the world," adding, "when secular women grow old they sprout to horns and beards." She, believing it to be the truth, was glad to have learned something new[1582].

All this time the preacher has been ill.u.s.trating his sermon with any story that came into his head. But he has been doing more; he has been describing for the information of posterity the raw material (so utterly different in different individuals), out of which the unchanging pattern of the nun had to be moulded. However we are not (for the moment) posterity; and we grow weary of this praise of austerity and simplicity.

But, brother John, we say (interrupting) here are we, living in the world; you would not have us tear out our eyes when our husbands would be fondling us? You would not have us take our good Dame Alison for a goat, which is (heaven save us) but a brute beast and no Christian? and what if we cry cuckoo sometimes, we girls, for a lover? there are some we know that have married five husbands at the church door, and still think themselves right holy women, and make pilgrimages to St James beyond the sea, and will ever go first to the offering on Sunday. What have your nuns to do with us? Tell us rather what we young fresh folk may do to be saved; or how we good housewives should bear ourselves day by day. And that I will (says the preacher with some acerbity). Shame upon you, with your chattering tongues. You cannot even keep quiet at ma.s.s; and at home it is well known to me how ye pester your husbands, with your screeching and scolding, and how ye chatter all day to your gossips, not minding what lewd words ye speak. Remember therefore holy St Gregory's example of the nun who spake naughty words, which brother Robert of Brunne of the order of Sempringham found in the French book and set into fair English rhymes:

Seynt Gregori of a nunne tellys at ghede to h.e.l.le for no yng ellys But for she spake ever vyleyny Among her felaws al ahy.

ys nunne was of dedys chaste, But at she spake wurdys waste She made many of here felawys enke on synne for here sawys.

And then she died, and she was buried at the steps of the altar; and in the night the sacristan of the place was awakened by a great crying and weeping, and beheld fiends around that wretched nun, who burnt half her body and left the other half unscathed:

Seynt Gregorye sey at hyt was synge at half here lyfe was nat dygne; for oghe here dedys were chaste, Here wurdys were al vyle and waste.

See how her tungge made here slayn and foule wurdys broghte here to payn[1583].

Mind therefore your tongues, and do not whisper so lightly among yourselves when you sit in the tavern (unknown to your husbands, fie upon you!), and stuff yourselves with capons and Spanish wine. Nay more, have a care that greed does not destroy you. _Gula_, he is one of the seven sins that be most deadly. Look to it lest you one day receive the devil into your bodies, with a mouthful of hot spices:

For the same blessed Gregory "telleth of a certain nun who omitted to make the sign of the cross when she was eating a lettuce, and the devil entered into her; and when he was ordered by a holy man to come forth he replied: 'What fault is it of mine and why do you rebuke me?

I was sitting upon the lettuce and she did not cross herself and so ate me with it'"[1584]. How different, now, was the reward of that saintly nun of whom Caesarius telleth. For when "a pittance, to wit fried eggs, was being distributed by the cellaress to the whole convent, she was by some chance neglected. But indeed I deem not that it befel by chance, but rather by divine ordering, that the glory of G.o.d might be manifest in her. For she bore the deprivation most patiently, rejoicing in the neglect, and therefore, when she was returning thanks to G.o.d, that great Father-Abbot set before her an invisible pittance; whereof the unspeakable sweetness so filled her mouth, her throat and all her body, that never in her life had she felt aught like to it. This was bodily sweetness, but next G.o.d visited her mind and soul so copiously with spiritual sweetness ... that she desired to go without pittances for all the days of her life"[1585].

Thus our preacher might be supposed to speak, but all nun tales are not so edifying; the ribald jongleur was fond of them too. A good example of the nun theme used as a _conte gras_ is Boccaccio's famous tale of the abbess, who went in the dark to surprise one of her nuns with a lover; but having, when aroused, had with her in her own cell a priest (brought thither in a chest) she inadvertently put upon her head instead of her veil the priest's breeches. She called all her nuns, seized the guilty girl and came to the chapter house to reprimand her; and

"the girl happened to raise her eyes, when she saw what the abbess bore upon her head, and the laces of the breeches hanging down on each side of her neck, and being a little comforted with that, as she conjectured the fact, she said: "Please, madam, to b.u.t.ton your coif, and then tell me what you would have." "What coif is it that you mean," replied she, "you wicked woman, you? Have you the a.s.surance to laugh at me? Do you think jests will serve your turn in such an affair as this?" The lady said once more, "I beg, madam, that you would first b.u.t.ton your coif and then speak as you please." Whereupon most of the sisterhood raised up their eyes to look at the abbess, and she herself put up her hand. The truth being thus made evident, the accused nun said, "The abbess is in fault likewise," which obliged the mother to change her manner of speech from that which she had begun, saying that it was impossible to resist the temptations that a.s.sail the flesh.

Therefore she bade them, as heretofore, secretly to make the best possible use of their time"[1586].

Another famous tale of Boccaccio's concerns the young man who pretended to be dumb and was made gardener at a nunnery[1587].

In a different category from these stories sacred and profane are the didactic works, wherein churchmen set down the reasons for which a conventual life was to be preferred to all others, or the spirit in which such a life was to be lived. In this cla.s.s fall poems and treatises in praise of virginity and books of devotion or admonition addressed to nuns.

The former are fairly common in the middle ages[1588] and, since they throw little light on the actual life of a professed nun, need not be considered at great length. Among the most graceful are a series of little German songs, probably composed by clerks and generally cla.s.sed with folk-songs, though they are as different as possible from the popular _Nonnenklagen_. The longest of these poems tells of a fair and n.o.ble lady who walked in a garden and cried out at the beauty of the flowers, vowing that could she but see the artist who created so much loveliness, she would thank him as he deserved. At that moment a youth entered the garden and greeted her courteously, answering her cry of surprise by saying that neither stone walls nor doors could withstand him, and that all the lovely flowers in the garden were his and he made them, for "I am called Jesus the flower-maker." Then the lady was stirred to the heart and cried: "O my dearest lord, with all my faith I love thee and I will ever be true to thee till my life ends." But "the youth withdrew himself and went his way to a convent which lay close by, and by reason of his great power he entered speedily into it." The lady did not linger, but fled after him to the convent and in great woe knocked upon the gates, crying, "Ye have shut him in who is mine only joy." Then the nuns in the convent bespake her wrathfully saying:

"Why dost thou lament so loudly? thou speakest foolishness. Our convent is locked and no man entered therein. If thou hast lost him, the loss is thine and thou must bear it." "Ye have let in the man to whom I am vowed. With mine own eyes I saw him pa.s.s through the gate.

Ye have let in mine own dear lord. Were the whole world mine I would give it up ere I gave up him. Ye have let in the man to whom I am vowed and truly I say to you that I will have him again. I will keep the vow which I sware to him and never shall my deathless loyalty fail."

Then the maidens in the convent became wroth and they said: