Chapter VI · (continued 2)

Apparently she never went back to the nunnery, and a few years later it was dissolved:

A word should perhaps be added as to the “piety and breeding,” which Lady Bridget and other little schoolgirls learned from the nuns, for good sentimentalists of later days often looked back and regretted the loss of a training, presumably instinct with religion and morality. It is well nigh impossible to generalise in this matter, so greatly did convents differ from each other. St Mary’s Winchester was of very good repute, and for this we have not only the testimony of the local gentlemen, who were commissioned to visit it by Henry VIII in 1536, but also of the visitation which was held by Dr Hede in 1501. Undoubtedly the aristocratic young ladies who went there did not lack the precept and example of pious and well bred mistresses. The statement of the commissioners at Polesworth that the children there were “right virtuously brought up” has often been quoted. So also has the plea of Robert Aske, who led the ill-fated Pilgrimage of Grace, by which the people of Yorkshire sought to bring back the old religion, and in particular the monastic houses; in the abbeys, he said, “all gentlemen (were) much succoured in their needs, with many their young sons there assisted and in nunneries their daughters brought up in virtue”[903]. Less well-known is the tribute of the reformer Thomas Becon (1512-67), the more striking in that he was a staunch Protestant, who had suffered for his faith. Although he refers in disparagement to the nunneries of his own day, his description of the relations between nuns and their pupils cannot be founded solely upon an imaginary golden age:

“The young maids,” he writes, “were not enforced to wear this or that apparel; to abstain from this or that kind of meats; to sing this or that service; to say so many prayers; to shave their heads; to vow chastity; and for ever to abide in their cloister unto their dying day. But contrariwise, they might wear what apparel they would, so that it were honest and seemly and such as becometh maidens that profess godliness. They might freely eat all kinds of meats according to the rule of the gospel, avoiding all excess and superfluity, yea, and that at all times. Their prayers were free and without compulsion, everyone praying when the Holy Ghost moved their hearts to pray; yea, and that such prayers as present necessity required, and that also not in a strange tongue, but in such language as they did right well understand. To shave their heads and to keep such-like superstitious observances as our nuns did in times past and yet do in the kingdom of the pope, they were not compelled. For all that they were commanded to do of their schoolmistresses and governesses was nothing else than the doctrine of the gospel and matters appertaining unto honest and civil manners; whom they most willingly obeyed. Moreover, it was lawful for them to go out of the cloister when they would, or when they were required of their friends; and also to marry when and with whom they would, so that it were in the Lord. And would God there were some consideration of this matter had among the rulers of the christian commonwealth, that young maids might be godly brought up, and learn from their cradles ‘to be sober-minded, to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, housewifely, good, obedient to their husbands’”[904].

These eulogies are all necessarily tinged by the knowledge that the nunneries either were about to disappear, or had disappeared, from England. They had filled a useful function and men were willing to be to their faults a little blind. It cannot be doubted that the gentry and the substantial middle class appreciated them; up to the very eve of the Dissolution legacies to monastic houses are a common feature in wills. Only an inadequate conclusion, however, is to be reached from a study of tributes such as those of the commissioners at St Mary’s Winchester and Polesworth and of Robert Aske. If we turn to pre-Reformation visitation reports, which are free from the desire to state a case, the evidence is more mixed. It is only reasonable to conclude that many nunneries did indeed bring children up, with the example of virtue before their eyes, and the omnia bene of many reports reinforces such a conclusion. But it is impossible also to avoid the conviction that other houses were not always desirable homes for the young, nor nuns their best example. When Alnwick visited his diocese in the first half of the fifteenth century there were children at Godstow, where at least one nun was frankly immoral and where all received visits freely from the scholars of Oxford; nor was the general reputation of the house good at other periods. There were children also at Catesby and at St Michael’s Stamford, which were in a thoroughly bad state, under bad prioresses. At Catesby the poor innocents lay in the dorter, where lay also sister Isabel Benet, far gone with child; and they must have heard the Prioress screaming “Beggars!” and “Whores!” at the nuns and dragging them round the cloister by their hair[905]. At St Michael’s Stamford, all was in disorder and no less than three of the nuns were unchaste, one having twice run away, each time with a different partner. The visitation of Gracedieu on the same occasion shows too much quarrelling and misrule to make possible a very high opinion of its piety or of its breeding. If we turn to another set of injunctions, the great series for the diocese of York, it must be conceded that though the gentry of the county doubtless found the convents useful as schools and lodging houses, it is difficult to see how Aske’s plea that “their daughters (were) brought up in virtue” could possibly have been true of the fourteenth century, when the morals and manners of the nuns were extremely bad. There is not much evidence for the period of which Aske could speak from his own knowledge; but at Esholt, where two children were at school in 1537, one of the nuns was found to have “lyved incontinentlie and vnchast and ... broght forth a child of her bodie begotten” and an alehouse had been set up within the convent gates, in 1535[906]. The only safe generalisation to make about this, as about so many other problems of medieval social history, is that there can be no generalisation. The standard of piety and breeding likely to be acquired by children in medieval nunneries must have differed considerably from time to time and from house to house.