Medieval People Part 5

Except for certain periods of relaxation strict silence was supposed to be observed in the convent for a large part of the day, and if Eglentyne desired to communicate with her sisters, she was urged to do so by means of signs. The persons who drew up the lists of signs which were in use in medieval monastic houses, however, combined a preternatural ingenuity with an extremely exiguous sense of humour, and the sort of dumb pandemonium which went on at Eglentyne's dinner table must often have been more mirth-provoking than speech. The sister who desired fish would 'wag her hands displayed sidelings in manner of a fish tail'; she who wanted milk would 'draw her left little finger in manner of milking'; for mustard one would 'hold her nose in the upper part of her right fist and rub it'; another for salt would 'fillip with her right thumb and forefinger over the left thumb'; another desirous of wine would 'move her forefinger up and down the end of her thumb afore her eye'; and the guilty sacristan, struck by the thought that she had not provided incense for the Ma.s.s, would 'put her two fingers into her nostrils'. In one such table drawn up for nuns there are no less than 106 signs, and on the whole it is not surprising that the rule of the same nuns enjoins that 'it is never lawful to use them without some reason and profitable need, for oft-times more hurt hath an evil word, and more offence it may be to G.o.d'.[6]

The nuns, of course, would not have been human if they had not sometimes grown a little weary of all these services and this silence; for the religious life was not, nor was it intended to be, an easy one. It was not a mere means of escape from work and responsibility. In the early golden age of monasticism only men and women with a vocation, that is to say a real genius for monastic life, entered convents. Moreover, when there they worked very hard with hand and brain, as well as with soul, and so they got variety of occupation, which is as good as a holiday.

The basis of wise St Benedict's Rule was a nicely adjusted combination of variety with regularity; for he knew human nature. Thus monks and nuns did not find the services monotonous, and indeed regarded them as by far the best part of the day. But in the later Middle Ages, when Chaucer lived, young people had begun to enter monastic houses rather as a profession than as a vocation. Many truly spiritual men and women still took the vows, but with them came others who were little suited to monastic life, and who lowered its standard, because it was hard and uncongenial to them. Eglentyne became a nun because her father did not want the trouble and expense of finding her a husband, and because being a nun was about the only career for a well-born lady who did not marry.

Moreover, by this time, monks and nuns had grown more lazy, and did little work with their hands and still less with their heads, particularly in nunneries, where the early tradition of learning had died out and where many nuns could hardly understand the Latin in which their services were written. The result was that monastic life began to lose that essential variety which St Benedict had designed for it, and as a result the regularity sometimes became irksome, and the series of services degenerated into a mere routine of peculiar monotony, which many of the singers could no longer keep alive with spiritual fervour.

Thus sometimes (it must not be imagined that this happened in all or even in the majority of houses) the services became empty forms, to be hurried through with scant devotion and occasionally with scandalous irreverence. It was the almost inevitable reaction from too much routine.

Carelessness in the performance of the monastic hours was an exceedingly common fault during the later Middle Ages, though the monks were always worse about it than the nuns. Sometimes they 'cut' the services.

Sometimes they behaved with the utmost levity, as at Exeter in 1330, where the canons giggled and joked and quarrelled during the services and dropped hot candle wax from the upper stalls on to the shaven heads of the singers in the stalls below![7] Sometimes they came late to matins, in the small hours after midnight. This fault was common in nunneries, for the nuns always would insist on having private drinkings and gossipings in the evening after compline, instead of going straight to bed, as the rule demanded--a habit which did not conduce to wakefulness at 1 a.m. Consequently they were somewhat sleepy at matins and found an almost Johnsonian difficulty in getting up early. Wise St Benedict foresaw the difficulty, when he wrote in his rule: 'When they rise for the Divine Office, let them gently encourage one another, because of the excuses made by those that are drowsy.'[8] At the nunnery of Stainfield in 1519 the bishop discovered that half an hour sometimes elapsed between the last stroke of the bell and the beginning of the service, and that some of the nuns did not sing, but dozed, partly because they had not enough candles, but chiefly because they went late to bed;[9] and whoever is without sin among us, let him cast the first stone! There was a tendency also among both monks and nuns to slip out before the end of the service on any good or bad excuse: they had to see after the dinner or the guest-house, their gardens needed weeding, or they did not feel well. But the most common fault of all was to gabble through the services as quickly as they could in order to get them over.

They left out the syllables at the beginning and end of words, they omitted the dipsalma or pause between two verses, so that one side of the choir was beginning the second half before the other side had finished the first; they skipped sentences, they mumbled and slurred what should have been 'entuned in their nose ful semely', and altogether they made a terrible mess of the stately plainsong. So prevalent was the fault of gabbling that the Father of Evil was obliged to charter a special Devil called t.i.ttivillus, whose sole business it was to collect all these dropped syllables and carry them back to his master in a big bag. In one way or another, we have a good deal of information about him, for he was always letting himself be seen by holy men, who generally had a sharp eye for devils. One Latin rhyme distinguishes carefully between the contents of his sack: 'These are they who wickedly corrupt the holy psalms: the dangler, the gasper, the leaper, the galloper, the dragger, the mumbler, the fore-skipper, the fore-runner and the over-leaper: t.i.ttivillus collecteth the fragments of these men's words.'[10] Indeed, a holy Cistercian abbot once interviewed the poor little devil himself and heard about his alarming industry; this is the story as it is told in _The Myroure of Oure Ladye_, written for the delectation of the nuns of Syon in the fifteenth century: 'We read of a holy Abbot of the order of Citeaux that while he stood in the choir at matins he saw a fiend that had a long and great poke hanging about his neck and went about the choir from one to another and waited busily after all letters and syllables and words and failings that any made; and them he gathered diligently and put them in his poke. And when he came before the Abbot, waiting if aught had escaped him that he might have gotten and put in his bag, the Abbot was astonied and afeard of the foulness and misshape of him and said unto him: What art thou? And he answered and said, I am a poor devil and my name is t.i.ttivillus and I do mine office that is committed unto me. And what is thine office? said the Abbot. He answered: I must each day, he said, bring my master a thousand pokes full of failings and of negligences and syllables and words, that are done in your order in reading and singing and else I must be sore beaten.'[11] But there is no reason to suppose that he often got his beating, though one may be sure that Madame Eglentyne, busily chanting through her nose, never gave him the slightest help. In his spare moments, when he was not engaged in picking up those unconsidered trifles which the monks let fall from the psalms, t.i.ttivillus used to fill up odd corners of his sack with the idle talk of people who gossiped in church; and he also sat up aloft and collected all the high notes of vain tenors, who sang to their own glory, instead of to the glory of G.o.d, and pitched the chants three notes higher than the cracked voices of their elders could rise.

But the monotony of convent life sometimes did more than make the nuns unconscious contributors to t.i.ttivillus's sack. It sometimes played havoc with their tempers. The nuns were not chosen for convent life because they were saints. They were no more immune from tantrums than was the Wife of Bath, who was out of all charity when other village wives went into church before her; and sometimes they got terribly on each others' nerves. Readers of _Piers Plowman_ will remember that when the seven deadly sins come in, Wrath tells how he was cook to the prioress of a convent and, says he,

Of wycked wordes I, Wrath ... here wordes imade, Til 'thow lixte' and 'thow lixte' ... lopen oute at ones, And eyther hitte other ... vnder the cheke; Hadde thei had knyves, by Cryst ... her eyther had killed other.

To be sure, it is not often that we hear of anything so bad as that fifteenth-century prioress, who used to drag her nuns round the choir by their veils in the middle of the service, screaming 'Liar!' and 'Harlot!' at them;[12] or that other sixteenth-century lady who used to kick them and hit them on the head with her fists and put them in the stocks.[13] All prioresses were not 'ful plesaunt and amiable of port', or stately in their manner. The records of monastic visitations show that bad temper and petty bickering sometimes broke the peace of convent life.

But we must be back at Eglentyne. She went on living for ten or twelve years as a simple nun, and she sang the services very nicely and had a sweet temper and pretty manners and was very popular. Moreover, she was of good birth; Chaucer tells us a great deal about her beautiful behaviour at table and her courtesy, which shows that she was a lady born and bred; indeed, his description of this might have been taken straight out of one of the feudal books of deportment for girls; even her personal beauty--straight nose, grey eyes, and little red mouth--conforms to the courtly standard. The convents were apt to be rather sn.o.bbish; ladies and rich burgesses' daughters got into them, but poor and low-born girls never. So the nuns probably said to each other that what with her pretty ways and her good temper and her aristocratic connexions, wouldn't it be a good thing to choose her for prioress when the old prioress died? And so they did, and she had been a prioress for some years when Chaucer met her. At first it was very exciting, and Eglentyne liked being called 'Mother' by nuns who were older than herself, and having a private room to sit in and all the visitors to entertain. But she soon found that it was not by any means all a bed of roses; for there was a great deal of business to be done by the head of a house--not only looking after the internal discipline of the convent, but also superintending money matters and giving orders to the bailiffs on her estates, and seeing that the farms were paying well, and the t.i.thes coming in to the churches which belonged to the nunnery, and that the Italian merchants who came to buy the wool off her sheeps' backs gave a good price for it. In all this business she was supposed to take the advice of the nuns, meeting in the chapter-house, where all business was transacted. I am afraid that sometimes Eglentyne used to think that it was much better to do things by herself, and so she would seal doc.u.ments with the convent seal without telling them. One should always distrust the head of an office or school or society who says, with a self-satisfied air, that it is much more satisfactory to do the thing herself than to depute it to the proper subordinates; it either means that she is an autocrat, or else that she cannot organize. Madame Eglentyne was rather an autocrat, in a good-natured sort of way, and besides she hated bother. So she did not always consult the nuns; and I fear too (after many researches into that past of hers which Chaucer forgot to mention) that she often tried to evade rendering an account of income and expenditure to them every year, as she was supposed to do.

The nuns, of course, objected to this; and the first time the bishop came on his rounds they complained about it to him. They said, too, that she was a bad business woman and got into debt; and that when she was short of money she used to sell woods belonging to the convent, and promise annual pensions to various people in return for lump sums down, and lease out farms for a long time at low rates, and do various other things by which the convent would lose in the long run. And besides, she had let the roof of the church get into such ill repair that rain came through the holes on to their heads when they were singing; and would my lord bishop please to look at the holes in their clothes and tell her to provide them with new ones? Other wicked prioresses used sometimes even to p.a.w.n the plate and jewels of the convent, to get money for their own private purposes. But Eglentyne was not at all wicked or dishonest, though she was a bad manager; the fact was that she had no head for figures. I am _sure_ that she had no head for figures; you have only got to read Chaucer's description of her to know that she was not a mathematician. Besides the nuns were exaggerating: their clothes were not in holes, only just a little threadbare. Madame Eglentyne was far too fastidious to allow ragged clothes about her; and as to the roof of the church, she had meant to save enough money to have some tiles put on to it, but it really _was_ very hard to make two ends meet in a medieval nunnery, especially if (as I repeat) you had no head for figures.

Probably the bishop saw how the land lay, so he ordered her never to do anything without consulting the convent, and he shut up the common seal in a box with three different sorts of locks, to which Madame Eglentyne and two of the senior nuns had the keys, so that she could not open it alone and so could not seal any business agreement without their consent. And he ordered her to keep accounts and present them every year (there are bundles of her accounts still preserved in the Record Office). Finally he deputed a neighbouring rector to act as custodian of the business affairs of the house so that she should always have his help. Things went better after that.

Eglentyne, it seems, was never really interested in business, and was quite pleased to have her time taken up with looking after internal affairs and entertaining visitors, with an occasional jaunt outside to see how the estates were getting on. And she began to find that she could lead a much freer and gayer life now that she was a prioress; for the prioress of a convent had rooms of her own, instead of sharing the common dormitory and refectory; sometimes she even had a sort of little house with a private kitchen. The abbess of one great nunnery at Winchester in the sixteenth century had her own staff to look after her, a cook, and an under cook, and a housemaid and a gentlewoman to wait upon her, like any great lady in the world, and never dined with the nuns except on state occasions. But a superior generally had with her one nun to act as her companion and a.s.sist her in the choir and be a witness to her good behaviour; this nun was called her chaplain, and was supposed to be changed every year, to prevent favouritism. It will be remembered that when Madame Eglentyne went on her pilgrimage she took her nun chaplain with her, as well as three priests; that was because no nun was ever allowed to go out alone. One of Madame Eglentyne's duties as prioress was to entertain visitors with her celebrated cheer of court, and we may be sure that she had a great many. Her sisters, who were now grand ladies with husbands and manors of their own, and her old father, and all the great people of the county came to congratulate her; and after that they used often to drop in for a dinner of chickens and wine and wastel bread if they pa.s.sed the house on a journey, and sometimes they spent the night there. One or two ladies, whose husbands were away at the wars or on a pilgrimage to Rome, even came as paying guests to the convent and lived there for a whole year, for nothing pleased the country gentlemen or wealthy burgesses better than to use nunneries as boarding-houses for their women-kind.

All this was very disturbing to the peace and quiet of the nuns, and especially disturbing were the boarders, for they wore gay clothes, and had pet dogs and callers, and set a very frivolous example to the nuns.

At one nunnery we find a bishop ordering: 'Let Felmersham's wife, with her whole household and other women, be utterly removed from your monastery within one year, seeing that they are a cause of disturbance to the nuns and an occasion to bad example, by reason of their attire and of those who come to visit them.'[14] It can be easily imagined _why_ the bishops objected so much to the reception of these worldly married women as boarders. Just subst.i.tute for 'Felmersham's wife' 'the Wife of Bath' and all is explained. That lady was not a person whom a prioress would lightly refuse; the list of her pilgrimages alone would give her the _entree_ into any nunnery. Smiling her gap-toothed smile and riding easily upon her ambler, she would enter the gates, and what a month of excitement would pa.s.s before she rode away again. I am sure that it was she who taught Madame Eglentyne the most fas.h.i.+onable way to pinch a wimple; and she certainly introduced hats 'as broad as is a buckler or a targe' and scarlet stockings into some nunneries. The bishops disliked it all very much, but they never succeeded in turning the boarders out for all their efforts, because the nuns always needed the money which they paid for their board and lodging.

It is easy to understand that this constant intercourse with worldly visitors would give rise to the spread of worldly habits in Madame Eglentyne's nunnery. Nuns, after all, were but women, and they had the amiable vanities of their s.e.x. But Authority (with a large A) did not consider their vanities amiable at all. It was the view of Authority that the Devil had dispatched three lesser D's to be the d.a.m.nation of nuns, and those three D's were Dances, Dresses, and Dogs. Medieval England was famous for dancing and mumming and minstrelsy; it was Merry England because, however plague and pestilence and famine and the cruelties of man to man might darken life, still it loved these things.

But there were no two views possible about what the Church thought of dancing; it was accurately summed up by one moralist in the aphorism, 'The Devil is the inventor and governor and disposer of dances and dancing.' Yet when we look into those accounts which Madame Eglentyne rendered (or did not render) to her nuns at the end of every year, we shall find payments for wa.s.sail at New Year and Twelfth Night, for May games, for bread and ale on bonfire nights, for harpers and players at Christmas, for a present to the Boy Bishop on his rounds, and perhaps for an extra pittance when the youngest schoolgirl was allowed to dress up and act as abbess of the convent for the whole of Innocents' Day. And when we look in the bishops' registers we shall find Madame Eglentyne forbidden 'all manner of minstrelsy, interludes, dancing or revelling within your holy place'; and she would be fortunate indeed if her bishop would make exception for Christmas, 'and other honest times of recreation among yourselves used in absence of seculars in all wise'.

Somehow one feels an insistent conviction that her cheer of court included dancing.[15]

Then, again, there were the fas.h.i.+onable dresses which the visitors introduced into nunneries. It is quite certain that Madame Eglentyne was not unmoved by them; and it is a sad fact that she began to think the monastic habit very black and ugly, and the monastic life very strict; and to decide that if some little amenities were imported into it no one would be a penny the worse, and perhaps the bishop would not notice. That is why, when Chaucer met her,

Ful fetis was hir cloke, as I was war, Of smal coral aboute hir arm she bar A peire of bedes, gauded al with grene, And ther-on heng a broche of gold ful shene.

Unfortunately, however, the bishop did notice; the registers are indeed full of those clothes of Madame Eglentyne's, and of the even more frivolous ones which she wore in the privacy of the house. For more than six weary centuries the bishops waged a holy war against fas.h.i.+on in the cloister, and waged it in vain; for as long as nuns mingled freely with secular women, it was impossible to prevent them from adopting secular modes. Occasionally a wretched bishop would find himself floundering unhandily, in masculine bewilderment, through something like a complete catalogue of contemporary fas.h.i.+ons, in order to specify what the nuns were _not_ to wear. Synods sat solemnly, bishops and archbishops shook their grey heads, over golden hairpins and silver belts, jewelled rings, laced shoes, slashed tunics, low necks and long trains, gay colours, costly cloth, and valuable furs. The nuns were supposed to wear their veils pinned tightly down to their eyebrows, so that their foreheads were completely hidden; but high foreheads happened to be fas.h.i.+onable among worldly ladies, who even shaved theirs to make them higher, and the result was that the nuns could not resist lifting up and spreading out their veils, for how otherwise did Chaucer _know_ that Madame Eglentyne had such a fair forehead ('almost a spanne broad, I trowe')?

If she had been wearing her veil properly, it would have been invisible, and the father of English poetry may be observed discreetly but plainly winking the other eye when he puts in that little touch; his contemporaries would see the point very quickly. And that brooch and that fetis cloak of hers.... Here is what some tale-bearing nuns told the Bishop of Lincoln about their Prioress, fifty years after Chaucer wrote the _Canterbury Tales_. 'The Prioress,' they said with their most sanctimonious air, wears golden rings exceeding costly, with divers precious stones and also girdles silvered and gilded over and silken veils and she carries her veil too high above her forehead, so that her forehead, being entirely uncovered, can be seen of all, and she wears furs of vair. Also she wears s.h.i.+fts of cloth of Rennes, which costs sixteen pence the ell. Also she wears kirtles laced with silk and tiring pins of silver and silver gilt and has made all the nuns wear the like.

Also she wears above her veil a cap of estate, furred with budge. Item, she has on her neck a long silken band, in English a lace, which hangs down below her breast and there on a golden ring with one diamond.[16]

Is it not Madame Eglentyne to the life? Nothing escaped our good Dan Chaucer's eye, for all that he rode always looking on the ground.

Moreover, it was not only in her dress that the Prioress and her sister nuns aped the fas.h.i.+ons of the world. Great ladies of the day loved to amuse themselves with pet animals; and nuns were quick to follow their example. So,

Of smale houndes had she, that she fedde With rosted flesh, or milk and wastel-breed.

But sore weep she if oon of hem were deed, Or if men smoot it with a yerde smerte.

The visitation reports are full of those little dogs and other animals; and how many readers of the Prologue know that the smale houndes, like the fair forehead and the brooch of gold full sheen, were strictly against the rules? For the bishops regarded pets as bad for discipline, and century after century they tried to turn the animals out of the convents, without the slightest success. The nuns just waited till the bishop had gone and then whistled their dogs back again. Dogs were easily the favourite pets, though monkeys, squirrels, rabbits, birds and (very rarely) cats were also kept. One archbishop had to forbid an abbess whom he visited to keep _monkeys and a number of dogs_ in her own chamber and charged her at the same time with stinting her nuns in food; one can guess what became of the roasted flesh or milk and wastel-breed!

It was a common medieval practice to bring animals into church, where ladies often attended service with dog in lap and men with hawk on wrist; just as the highland farmer brings his collie with him today.

This happened in the nunneries too. Sometimes it was the lay-boarders in the convents who brought their pets with them; there is a pathetic complaint by the nuns of one house 'that Lady Audley, who boards there, has a great abundance of dogs, insomuch that whenever she comes to church there follow her twelve dogs, who make a great uproar in church, hindering the nuns in their psalmody and the nuns thereby are terrified!'[17] But often enough the nuns themselves transgressed.

Injunctions against bringing pet dogs into choir occur in several visitation reports, the most amusing instance being contained in those sent to Romsey Abbey by William of Wykeham in 1387, just about the same year that Chaucer was writing the _Canterbury Tales_: 'Item,' runs the injunction, 'whereas we have convinced ourselves by clear proofs that some of the nuns of your house bring with them to church birds, rabbits, hounds and such like frivolous things, whereunto they give more heed than to the offices of the church, with frequent hindrance to their own psalmody and to that of their fellow nuns and to the grievous peril of their souls--therefore we strictly forbid you all and several, in virtue of the obedience due to us that ye presume henceforward to bring to church no birds, hounds, rabbits or other frivolous things that promote indiscipline.... Item, whereas through hunting dogs and other hounds abiding within your monastic precincts, the alms that should be given to the poor are devoured and the church and cloister ... are foully defiled ... and whereas, through their inordinate noise divine service is frequently troubled--therefore we strictly command and enjoin you, Lady Abbess, that you remove the dogs altogether and that you suffer them never henceforth, nor any other such hounds, to abide within the precincts of your nunnery.'[18] But it was useless for any bishop to order Madame Eglentyne to give up her dogs, she could not even be parted from them on a pilgrimage, though they must have been a great nuisance in the inns, especially as she was so fussy about their food.

For Chaucer's prioress, we must admit, was rather a worldly lady, though her pretty clothes and little dogs were harmless enough on modern standards and one's sympathies are all against the bishops. She probably became more worldly as time went on, because she had so many opportunities for social intercourse. Not only had she to entertain visitors in the convent, but often the business of the house took her away upon journeys and these offered many opportunities for hobn.o.bbing with her neighbours. Sometimes she had to go to London to see after a law-suit and that was a great excursion with another nun, or perhaps two, and a priest and several yeomen to look after her. Sometimes she had to go and see the bishop, to get permission to take in some little schoolgirls. Sometimes she went to the funeral of a great man, whom her father knew and who left her twenty s.h.i.+llings and a silver cup in his will. Sometimes she went to the wedding of one of her sisters, or to be G.o.dmother to their babies; though the bishops did not like these worldly ties, or the dances and merry-makings which accompanied weddings and christenings. Indeed her nuns occasionally complained about her journeys and said that though she pretended it was all on the business of the house, they had their doubts; and would the bishop please just look into it. At one nunnery we find the nuns complaining that their house is 20 in debt 'and this princ.i.p.ally owing to the costly expenses of the prioress, because she frequently rides abroad and pretends that she does so on the common business of the house although it is not so, with a train of attendants much too large and tarries too long abroad and she feasts sumptuously, both when abroad and at home and she is very choice in her dress, so that the fur tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of her mantle are worth 100s'![19]

As a matter of fact there was nothing of which the church disapproved more than this habit, shared by monks and nuns, of wandering about outside their cloisters; moralists considered that intercourse with the world was at the root of all the evil which crept into the monastic system. The orthodox saying was that a monk out of his cloister was like a fish out of water; and it will be remembered that Chaucer's monk thought the text not worth an oyster. Indeed most of the monks managed to swim very well in the air, and the nuns too persisted in taking every sort of excuse for wandering in the world. Right through the Middle Ages council after council, bishop after bishop, reformer after reformer, tried in vain to keep them shut up. The greatest attempt of all began in 1300, when the pope published a Bull ordering that nuns should never, save in very exceptional circ.u.mstances, leave their convents and that no secular person should be allowed to go in and visit them, without a special licence and a good reason. This will make the modern reader pity the poor nuns, but there is no need, for n.o.body ever succeeded in putting it into force for more than five minutes, though the bishops spent over two centuries in trying to do so and were still trying in vain when King Henry VIII dissolved the nunneries and turned all the nuns out into the world for ever, whether they liked it or not.

At one nunnery in the Lincoln diocese, when the bishop came and deposited a copy of the Bull in the house and ordered the nuns to obey it, they ran after him to the gate when he was riding away and threw the Bull at his head, screaming that they would never observe it.[20] The more practical bishops indeed, soon stopped trying to enforce the Bull as it stood and contented themselves with ordering that nuns were not to go out or pay visits too often, or without a companion, or without licence, or without a good reason. But even in this they were not very successful, because the nuns were most prolific in excellent reasons why they should go out. Sometimes they said that their parents were ill; and then they would go away to smooth the pillow of the sick. Sometimes they said that they had to go to market to buy herrings. Sometimes they said that they had to go to confession at a monastery. Sometimes it is really difficult to imagine _what_ they said. What are we to think, for instance, of that giddy nun 'who on Monday night did pa.s.s the night with the Austin friars at Northampton and did dance and play the lute with them in the same place until midnight, and on the night following she pa.s.sed the night with the Friars' preachers at Northampton, luting and dancing in like manner'?[21] Chaucer told us how the friar loved harping and how his eyes twinkled like stars in his head when he sang, but failed perhaps to observe that he had lured Madame Eglentyne into a dance.

It is indeed difficult to see what 'legitimate' excuses the nuns can have made for all their wandering about in the streets and the fields and in and out of people's houses, and it is sorely to be feared that either they were too much of a handful for Madame Eglentyne, or else she winked at their doings. For somehow or other one suspects that she had no great opinion of bishops. After all Chaucer would never have met her, if she had not managed to circ.u.mvent her own, since if there was one excuse for wandering of which the bishops thoroughly disapproved, it was precisely the excuse of pilgrimages. Madame Eglentyne was not quite as simple and coy as she looked. How many of the literary critics, who chuckle over her, know that she never ought to have got into the Prologue at all? The Church was quite clear in its mind that pilgrimages for nuns were to be discouraged. As early as 791 a council had forbidden the practice and in 1195 another at York decreed, 'In order that the opportunity of wandering may be taken from nuns we forbid them to take the path of pilgrimage.' In 1318 an archbishop of York strictly forbade the nuns of one convent to leave their house 'by reason of any vow of pilgrimage which they might have taken. If any had taken such vows she was to say as many psalters as it would have taken days to perform the pilgrimage so rashly vowed.'[22] One has a melancholy vision of poor Madame Eglentyne saying psalters interminably through her tretys nose, instead of jogging along so gaily with her motley companions and telling so prettily her tale of little St Hugh. Such prohibitions might be multiplied from medieval records; and indeed it is unnecessary to go further than Chaucer to understand why it was that bishops offered such strenuous opposition to pilgrimages for nuns; one has only to remember some of the folk, in whose company the prioress travelled and some of the tales they told. If one could only be certain, for instance, that she rode all the time with her nun and her priests, or at least between the Knight and the poor Parson of a town! But there were also the Miller and the Summoner and (worst of all) that cheerful and engaging sinner, the Wife of Bath. It is really quite disturbing to think what additional details the Wife of Bath may have given the prioress about her five husbands.

This then was Chaucer's prioress in real life, for the poet who drew her was one of the most wonderful observers in the whole of English literature. We may wade through hundreds of visitation reports and injunctions and everywhere the grey eyes of his prioress will twinkle at us out of their pages, and in the end we must always go to Chaucer for her picture, to sum up everything that historical records have taught us. As the bishop found her, so he saw her, aristocratic, tender-hearted, worldly, taking pains to 'countrefete there of court'; liking pretty clothes and little dogs; a lady of importance, attended by a nun and three priests; spoken to with respect by the none too mealy-mouthed host--no 'by Corpus Dominus' or 'c.o.kkes bones' or 'tel on a devel wey' for her, but 'cometh neer, my lady prioress,' and

My lady Prioresse, by your leve If that I wiste I sholde yow nat greve, I wolde demen that ye tellen sholde A tale next, if so were that ye wolde.

Now wol ye vouche-sauf, my lady dere?

He talks to no one else like that, save perhaps to the knight. Was she religious? Perhaps; but save for her singing the divine service and for her lovely address to the Virgin, at the beginning of her tale, Chaucer can find but little to say on the point;

But for speken of hir conscience (he says) She was so charitable and so pitous,

and then, as we are waiting to hear of her almsgiving to the poor--that she would weep over a mouse in a trap, or a beaten puppy, says Chaucer.

A good ruler of her house? again, doubtless. But when Chaucer met her the house was ruling itself somewhere at the 's.h.i.+re's ende'. The world was full of fish out of water in the fourteenth century, and, by seynt Loy, said Madame Eglentyne, swearing her greatest oath, like Chaucer's monk, she held that famous text not worth an oyster. So we take our leave of her, characteristically on the road to Canterbury.

CHAPTER V

_The Menagier's Wife_

A PARIS HOUSEWIFE IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

The sphere of woman is the home.

--_h.o.m.o Sapiens_

The men of the middle, as indeed of all ages, including our own, were very fond of writing books of deportment telling women how they ought to behave in all the circ.u.mstances of their existence, but more particularly in their relations with their husbands. Many of these books have survived, and among them one which is of particular interest, because of the robust good sense of its writer and the intimate and lively picture which it gives of a bourgeois home. Most books of deportment were written, so to speak, in the air, for women in general, but this was written by a particular husband for a particular wife, and thus is drawn from life and full of detail, showing throughout an individuality which its compeers too often lack. If a parallel be sought to it, it is perhaps to be found not in any other medieval treatise but in those pa.s.sages of Xenophon's _Economist_, in which Isomachus describes to Socrates the training of a perfect Greek wife.

The Menagier de Paris (the Householder or Goodman of Paris, as we might say) wrote this book for the instruction of his young wife between 1392 and 1394. He was a wealthy man, not without learning and of great experience in affairs, obviously a member of that solid and enlightened _haute bourgeoisie_, upon which the French monarchy was coming to lean with ever-increasing confidence. When he wrote he must have been approaching old age, and he was certainly over sixty, but he had recently married a young wife of higher birth than himself, an orphan from a different province. He speaks several times of her 'very great youth', and kept a sort of duenna-housekeeper with her to help and direct her in the management of his house; and indeed, like the wife of Isomachus, she was only fifteen years old when he married her. Modern opinion is shocked by a discrepancy in age between husband and wife, with which the Middle Ages, a time of _menages de convenance_, was more familiar. 'Seldom,' the Menagier says, 'will you see ever so old a man who will not marry a young woman.' Yet his att.i.tude towards his young wife shows us that there may have been compensations, even in a marriage between May and January. Time after time in his book there sounds the note of a tenderness which is paternal rather than marital, a sympathetic understanding of the feelings of a wedded child, which a younger man might not have compa.s.sed. Over all the matter-of-fact counsels there seems to hang something of the mellow sadness of an autumn evening, when beauty and death go ever hand in hand. It was his wife's function to make comfortable his declining years; but it was his to make the task easy for her. He constantly repeats the a.s.surance that he does not ask of her an overweening respect, or a service too humble or too hard, for such is not due to him; he desires only such care as his neighbours and kinswomen take of their husbands, 'for to me belongeth none save the common service, or less'.

In his Prologue, addressed to her, he gives a charming picture of the scene which led him to write his book: 'You, being of the age of fifteen years and in the week that you and I were wed, did pray me that I would please to be indulgent to your youth and to your small and ignorant service mewards, until that you should have seen and learned more, to the hastening whereof you did promise me to set all care and diligence, ... praying me humbly, in our bed as I remember, that for the love of G.o.d I would not correct you harshly before strangers nor before our own folk, 'but that I would correct you each night or from day to day in our chamber and show you the unseemly or foolish things done in the day or days past, and chastise you, if it pleased me, and then you would not fail to amend yourself according to my teaching and correction, and would do all in your power according to my will, as you said. And I thought well of, and praise and thank you for, what you said to me and I have often remembered it since. And know, dear sister[D], that all that I know you have done since we were wed up to this day, and all that you shall do hereafter with good intent has been and is good and well hath pleased, pleases and shall please me. For your youth excuses you from being very wise, and will still excuse you in everything that you do with good intent to please me. And know that it doth not displease, but rather pleases me that you should have roses to grow and violets to care for and that you should make chaplets and dance and sing, and I would well that you should so continue among our friends and those of our estate, and it is but right and seemly thus to pa.s.s the time of your feminine youth, provided that you desire and offer not to go to the feasts and dances of too great lords, for that is not seemly for you, nor suitable to your estate nor mine[1].'

[Footnote D: He addresses her throughout as 'sister', a term of affectionate respect.]

Meanwhile he has not forgotten her request that he would teach and correct her in private, and so he writes a little book (but it was a big book before he had finished) to show her how to comport herself; for he is sorry for this child, who has for long had neither father nor mother, and who is far from kinswomen who might counsel her, having 'me only' he says, 'for whom you have been taken from your kinsfolk and from the land of your birth.' He has often deliberated the matter and now here is 'an easy general introduction' to the whole art of being a wife, a housewife, and a perfect lady. One characteristic reason, apart from his desire to help her and to be comfortable himself (for he was set in his ways), he gives for his trouble and recurs to from time to time, surely the strangest ever given by a husband for instructing his wife. He is old, he says, and must die before her, and it is positively essential that she should do him credit with her second husband. What a reflection upon him if she accompanied his successor to Ma.s.s with the collar of her _cotte_ crumpled, or if she knew not how to keep fleas from the blankets, or how to order a supper for twelve in Lent! It is characteristic of the Menagier's reasonableness and solid sense that he regards his young wife's second marriage with equanimity. One of his sections is headed, 'That you should be loving to your husband (whether myself or another), by the example of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel.' How different from those husbands (dog-in-the-manger, or anxious for the future of their children under a possibly harsh stepfather) whose wills so often reveal them trying to bind their wives to perpetual celibacy after their deaths, such husbands as William, Earl of Pembroke, who died in 1469, admonis.h.i.+ng his lady: 'And wyfe, ye remember your promise to me to take the ordere of wydowhood, as ye may be the better mastre of your owne to performe my wylle.'

The plan of the book 'in three sections, containing nineteen princ.i.p.al articles', is most exhaustive. The first section deals with religious and moral duties. In the words of the Menagier, 'the first section is necessary to gain for you the love of G.o.d and the salvation of your soul, and also to win for you the love of your husband and to give you in this world that peace which ought to be had in marriage. And because these two things, to wit the salvation of your soul and the comfort of your husband, are the two things most chiefly necessary, therefore are they here placed first.' Then follows a series of articles telling the lady how to say her morning prayer when she rises, how to bear herself at Ma.s.s, and in what form to make her confession to the priest, together with a long and somewhat alarming discursus upon the seven deadly sins, which it a.s.suredly never entered into her sleek little head to commit, and another, on the corresponding virtues.[2] But the greater part of the section deals with the all-important subject of the wife's duty to her husband. She is to be loving, humble, obedient, careful and thoughtful for his person, silent regarding his secrets, and patient if he be foolish and allow his heart to stray towards other women. The whole section is ill.u.s.trated by a series of stories (known as _exempla_ in the Middle Ages), culled from the Bible, from the common stock of anecdotes possessed by jongleur and preacher alike, and (most interesting of all) from the Menagier's own experience. Among the Menagier's longer ill.u.s.trations is the favourite but intolerably dull moral tale of Melibeu and Prudence, by Albertano of Brescia, translated into French by Renault de Louens, whose version the Menagier copied, and adapted by Jean de Meung in the _Roman de la Rose_, from which in turn Chaucer took it to tell to the Canterbury Pilgrims. Here also are to be found Petrarch's famous tale of patient Griselda, which Chaucer also took and gave a wider fame, and a long poem written in 1342 by Jean Bruyant, a notary of the Chatelet at Paris, and called 'The Way of Poverty and Wealth', inculcating diligence and prudence.[3]

The second section of the book deals with household management and is far the most interesting. The range of the Menagier's knowledge leaves the reader gasping. The man is a perfect Mrs Beeton! The section comprises a detailed treatise on gardening and another on the principles which should govern the engagement of servants and the method by which they should be managed when hired; the modern problem of servants who leave does not seem to have presented itself to him. There are instructions how to mend, air, and clean dresses and furs, get out grease spots, catch fleas and keep flies out of the bedroom, look after wine, and superintend the management of a farm.

At one point he breaks off, addressing his wife thus: 'Here will I leave you to rest or to play and will speak no more to you; and while you disport yourself elsewhere I will speak to Master John, the Steward, who looks after our possessions, so that if there is anything wrong with any of our horses, whether for the plough or for riding, or if it is necessary to buy or exchange a horse, he may know a little of that it behoves him to know in this matter.' There follow several pages of wise advice as to the good points of horses, how to examine them and to find their ages and defects under the eye of the horse dealer, the practical 'tips' of a man who evidently knew and loved his horses, together with advice upon the treatment of their various diseases. Among the various recipes which the Menagier gives to this intent are two charms; for instance, 'when a horse has glanders, you must say to him these three words, with three paternosters: _abgla_, _abgly_, _alphard_, _asy_, _pater noster_, etc.'[4]

Last, but not least, there is a magnificent cookery book, arranged in the form sacred to cookery books from that day to this, beginning with a list of specimen menus for dinners and suppers, hot or cold, fast or feast, summer or winter, giving hints on the choice of meat, poultry, and spices, and ending with a long series of recipes for all manner of soups, stews, sauces, and other viands, with an excursus on invalid's cookery!