Chapter XIII: The Nun in Medieval Literature (1)

"Or dient et content et fablent."
_Aucassin et Nicolette._

"La science," said a wise Frenchman, "atteint l'exactitude; il appartient a l'art seul de saisir la verite." And another, "L'histoire vit de documents, mais les documents sont pareils aux lettres ecrites avec les encres chimiques; ils veulent, pour livrer leur secret, qu'on les rechauffe, et les eclaire par transparence, a la flamme de la vie." The quotations are complementary, for what, after all, is literature but a form of life; the quintessence of many moods and experiences, the diffused flame concentrated and burning clearly in a polished lamp. The historian who wishes to reach beyond accuracy to truth must warm those invisible writings of his at the flame of literature, as well as at his own life. He must vitalise the visitation reports for himself (it is not difficult, they move and live almost without him); but he must make use also of the life of writers long since dead. There is hardly a branch of literature which has not its contribution for him. The story-teller has his tale, which holdeth children from play and old men from the chimney corner. The ballad-man has his own pithy judgment in the guise of an artless rhyme. The teacher has his admonitions, whence may be learnt what men conceived to be the nun's ideal and purpose in this cloistered life. The moralist has his satire, to show wherein she fell short of such lofty heights. And the poet himself will hold his mirror up to nature, that we may see after five hundred years what he saw with his searching eyes, when Madame Eglentyne rode to Canterbury, or when the nuns of Poissy feasted a cavalcade from court. The world was subject matter for all these, whether they wrote with a purpose or without one; there is life even in the crabbed elegiacs of Gower, grumbling his way through the _Vox Clamantis_; there is much life in the kindly counsels of the _Ancren Riwle_; there is God's plenty indeed in the stories and songs which the people told. It is the historian's business to call in these literary witnesses to supplement his documents. To the account-roll and the bishop's register must be added the song, the satire and the sermon. Alnwick's visitations, with the story of "Beatrix the Sacristan" behind them, have twice as much significance; Madame Eglentyne and Margaret Fairfax lend to each other a mutual illumination; little captured Clarice Stil needs Deschamps' Novice of Avernay by her side before her case can be well understood. It is of these composite portraits that truth is put together and history made.

An analysis of the classes of medieval literature in which there is mention of nuns shows from how wide a field the historian can draw. The most obvious of these classes is that which contains biographies and autobiographies of saints and famous women who were nuns. Such are the writings of the great trio who made famous the nunnery of Helfta in the thirteenth century, the beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg and the nuns Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrud the Great[1539]; the lives and writings of Luitgard of Tongres[1540], of St Clare[1541] and of St Agnes of Bohemia[1542]; the memoir and letters of Charitas Pirckheimer, Abbess of a Franciscan convent at Nuremberg, who was a sister of the humanist Wilibald Pirckheimer and herself a scholar of repute[1543]. The autobiographies of one or two nuns in the later sixteenth century (for instance St Theresa[1544] and Felice Rasponi[1545]) have a certain retrospective value; and the lives of the three beguine mystics, St Douceline[1546], St Lydwine of Schiedam[1547] and St Christina of Stommeln[1548] afford supplementary evidence, which is interesting as showing the similarities and dissimilarities between regular and secular orders. For present purposes, however, these works may be neglected. Their interest is always rather particular than general, since they deal with great individuals, and the information which they give as to the life of the average nun is conditioned always by the fact that a woman of genius will mould her surroundings to her own form, even in a convent. This is true of the medieval saints; while the careers of women such as Charitas Pirckheimer, Felice Rasponi and St Theresa owe much of their significance to the special circumstances of the time. An additional reason for neglecting biographies and autobiographies lies in the fact that the class is unrepresented in English literature belonging to this period. The short panegyric of Euphemia of Wherwell is the sole approach to a biography of an English nun which has survived, unless we are to count the description of Joan Wiggenhall's building activities. For some reason which it is impossible to explain, monasticism did not produce in England during the later middle ages any women of sanctity or genius who can compare with the great Anglo-Saxon abbesses[1549].

Outside the personal records of great individuals, our informants fall (as has already been suggested) into four classes: the people, with their songs and stories, the teachers, with their didactic works, the moralists, with their satires and complaints, and finally the men of letters, poets and "makers," for whom the nun is sometimes subject-matter. First, and perhaps most interesting of all, must come the people and the people's songs, for in the literature of the continent there exists a class of lyrics ("Klosterlieder," "Nonnenklagen," "Chansons de Nonnes") which is specially concerned with nuns[1550]. There is much to be learned about all manner of things from such popular poetry. So the people feel about life, and so (reacting upon them) it makes them feel. Songs crooned over the housework or shouted at the plough steal back into the singer's brain and subtly direct his conscious outlook; this was the wise man's meaning, who said that he cared not who made the laws of a nation if he might make its ballads. Now it is extremely significant that almost all the popular songs about nuns, the songs which

The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones
Do use to chant,

are upon one theme. They deal always with the nun unwillingly professed. It was the complaint of the cloistered love-birds which these knitters sang.

How can a bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?

What, one may ask, is the reason for this unanimity of outlook? Why do the people see a nun only as a love-bird shut within a cage and beating its wings against the bars? Partly, no doubt, because such songs always "dally with the innocence of love"; the folk are capable of a deep melancholy, as of a gaiety which is light as thistledown; but Love is and was their lord and king, and so even the nun must be in love when they sing her. It may be, however, that there is a deeper meaning in the _chansons de nonnes_. The nunneries were aristocratic; the ideal of the religious life was out of the reach of women who lived among fields and beasts of the field. These spinsters and these knitters in the sun, who seem so gay and peaceful, we know what their lives were like:

Poure folke in cotes,
Charged with children, and chef lordes rente,
That thei with spynnynge may spare spenen hit in hous-hyre,
Bothe in mylk and in mele to make with papelotes[1551];

carding and combing, clouting and washing, suffering much hunger and woe in winter time; no time to think, and hardly time to pray; but always time to sing. "The wo of those women that wonyeth in cotes" solaced itself in song; but when the echo of the convent bell came to the singer at her clouting, or to her husband, as he drove his plough over the convent acres, they recognised a peace which was founded upon their labours and which, though it could not exist without them, they could never share[1552]. If the songs which the slaves of Athens sang among themselves in the slave quarter at night had come down to us, they would surely have thrown a new light upon those grave philosophers, artists and statesmen, to whom the world owes almost all that it cherishes of wisdom and of beauty. Nor would the Athenians be less great because we knew the slaves. Even so it is no derogation to the monastic ideal to say that the common people, shut out of it, looked at it differently from the great churchmen, who praised it; and, unlike those of the Athenian slaves, their songs still live. The popular mind (these songs would seem to say) had little sympathy for that career in which the daughters of the people had no share. It is immaterial whether they looked upon it with the eye of the fox in the fable, declaring that the grapes were sour, or whether the lusty common sense of those living close to nature gave them a contempt for the bloodless ecstasies they could not understand. At all events the cloister mirrored in their songs is a prison and a grave:

Mariez-vous, les filles,
Avec ces bons drilles,
Et n'allez ja, les filles,
Pourrir derrier' les grilles[1553].

That was how the people and the nightingale envisaged it; and no mystic will be the less wise for pondering that brutal last line, the eternal revolt of common sense against asceticism.

All over western and southern Europe this theme was set to music, now with gaiety and insouciance, now with bitterness. The wandering clerk goes singing on his way:

Plangit nonna fletibus The nun is complaining,
Inenarrabilibus, Her tears are down raining,
Condolens gemitibus She sobbeth and sigheth,
Dicens consocialibus: To her sisters she crieth:
Heu misella! Misery me!

Nichil est deterius O what can be worse than this
Tali vita, life that I dree,
Cum enim sim petulans When naughty and lovelorn,
Et lasciva. and wanton I be.

And he can tell the nun's desire

Pernoctando vigilo All the night long I unwillingly wake,
Cum non vellem How gladly a lad in mine arms would I take.
Iuvenem amplecterer
Quam libenter![1554]

For those who know no Latin it is the same. "In this year," [1359] says a Limburg chronicle, "Men sang and piped this song":

Gott geb im ein verdorben jar God send to him a lean twelve months
der mich macht zu einer nunnen Who in mine own despite,
und mir den schwarzen mantel gab A sooty mantle put on me,
der weissen rock darunten! All and a cassock white!

Soll ich ein nunn gewerden And if I must become a nun,
dann wider meinen willen Let me but find a page,
so will ich auch einem knaben jung And if he is fain to cure my pain
seinen kummer stillen, His pain I will assuage.

Und stillt he mir den meinen nit His be the loss, then, if he fail
daran mag he verliesen[1555]. To still my amorous rage.

In Italy at Carnival time in the fifteenth century the favourite songs tell of nuns who leave their convents for a lover[1556]. But above all the theme is found over and over again in French folk songs: "the note, I trowe, y maked was in Fraunce." Two little thirteenth century poems have survived to show how piquant an expression the French singers gave to it. In one of these the singer wanders out in the merry month of May, that time in which the "chanson populaire" is always set, in deep and unconscious memory of the old spring festivals, celebrated by women in the dawn of European civilisation. He goes plucking flowers, and out of a garden he hears a nun singing to herself:

ki nonne me fist Jesus lou maldie.
je di trop envie vespres ne complies:
j'amaisce trop muels moneir bone vie
ke fust deduissans et amerousete.

Je sant les douls mals leis ma senturete.
malois soit de deu ki me fist nonnete.

Elle s'escriait comceux esbaihie!
e deus, ki m'ait mis en cest abaie!
maix ieu en istrai per sainte Marie;
ke ne vestirai cotte ne gonnette.

Je sant les douls mals leis ma senturete.
malois soit de deu ki me fist nonnete.

Celui manderai a cui seux amie.
k'il me vaigne querre en ceste abaie;
s'irons a Parix moneir bone vie,
car it est jolis et je seux jonete.

Je sant les douls mals leis ma senturete.
malois soit de deu ki me fist nonnete.

quant ces amis ot la parolle oie,
de joie tressaut, li cuers li fremie,
et vint a la porte do celle abaie:
si en gatait fors sa douce amiete.

Je sant les douls mals leis ma senturete.
malois soit de deu ki me fist nonnete[1557].

"The curse of Jesus on him who made me a nun! All unwillingly say I
vespers and compline; more fain were I to lead a happy life of gaiety
and love. _I feel the delicious pangs beneath my bosom. The curse of
God on him who made me be a nun!_ She cried, God's curse on him who
put me in this abbey. But by our Lady I will flee away from it and
never will I wear this gown and habit. _I feel, etc._ I will send for
him whose love I am and bid him come seek me in this abbey. We will go
to Paris and lead a gay life, for he is fair and I am young. _I feel,
etc._ When her lover heard her words, he leapt for joy and his heart
beat fast. He came to the gate of that abbey, and stole away his
darling love. _I feel, etc._"

In the other song the setting is the same;

L'autrier un lundi matin
m'an aloie ambaniant;
s'antrai an un biau jardin,
trovai nonette seant.
ceste chansonette
dixoit la nonette
"longue demoree
faites, frans moinnes loialz
Se plus suis nonette,
ains ke soit li vespres,
je morai des jolis malz"[1558].

"Lately on a Monday morn as I went wandering, I entered into a fair
garden and there I found a nun sitting. This was the song that the nun
sang: 'Long dost thou tarry, frank, faithful monk. If I have to be a
nun longer I shall die of the pains of love before vespers.'"

The end hardly ever varies. The nun is either taken away by a lover (as in the first of these songs), or finds occasion to meet one without leaving her house (as in the second); or else she runs away in the hope of finding one like the novice of Avernay in Deschamps' poem, who had learned nothing during her sojourn "fors un mot d'amourette," and who wanted to have a husband "si comme a Sebilette."

Adieu le moniage:
Jamaiz n'y entreray.
Adieu tout le mainage
Et adieu Avernay!
Bien voy l'aumosne est faitte:
Trop tart me suy retraitte,
Certes, ce poise my,
Plus ne seray nonnette
(Oez de la nonnette
Comme a le cuer joly:
S'ordre ne ly puet plere)[1559].

"Farewell nunhood, never shall I enter thy state. Farewell all the
household and farewell Avernay! The alms are given, too late have I
left the world. Of a truth this wearies me; I will be a nun no more.
(Hear this tale of the nun, whose heart was gay and whose order could
not please her)."

It is but rarely that the singer's sympathy is against the prisoned nun; and although one or two charming songs may be found which convey a warning, the moral sits all awry. A Gascon air (intended, like so many, to accompany a dance and having the favourite refrain "Va leger, legere, va legerement") threatens an altogether inadequate punishment for a nun who enjoys the sweets of this world.

"Down in the meadow, there is a convent. In it a nun lies ill." "Tell
me, little nun, for what do you hunger?" "For white apples and for a
young lad." "Do not eat, little nun, they will bury you not in the
church, nor even in the convent, but out in the graveyard with the
poor people"[1560].

A Provencal song with a haunting air tells how the Devil carried off a nun who rebelled against her imprisonment:

Dedins Aix l'y a'no moungeto,
Tant pourideto,
Di que s'avie soun bel amic
Sera la reino dou pays....

"In Aix there is a little nun, a wicked little nun; she says that with
her handsome lover she will be queen of all the land. She weeps and
weeps, that wicked little nun, and every day she grows thinner and
thinner, because she may not put off her habit. But her father has
sent her a message, a solemn message, that she cannot do as she would,
that in the convent she must stay. The little nun has cursed her
father, who made her leave her handsome lover and take the veil and
habit. The little nun has cursed the trowel that made the church and
the mason who built it and the men who worked for him. The little nun
has cursed the priest who said mass and the acolytes who served him
and the congregation who listened to him. The little nun has cursed
the cloth which made the veil and the cord of St Francis and the vow
of poverty. One day when she was all alone in her room, the devil
appeared to her. 'Welcome, my love!' 'I am not your love whom you
desire, my pretty. I am the devil, don't you see? I am come to rescue
you from the convent.' 'You must first ask my father and also my
mother and my friends and my kinsmen, to see if they will consent.'
'No, I will not ask your father, nor yet your mother, nor your friends
nor your kinsmen. Now and at once we will go.' 'Farewell, my sister
nuns, so little and young, do not do as I did, but praise God well in
the convent.' The devil has taken the little nun, the wicked little
nun; he has carried her high up into the sky and then he has hurled
her down into hell, down, down into hell"[1561].

There is a moral here to be sure, but it is the moral of a fairy tale, not of a sermon. As to the many variants of the "Clericus et Nonna" theme in which sometimes the nun makes love to a clerk and is repulsed and sometimes the clerk makes love to a nun and is repulsed[1562] it is possible that the Church had a hand in them all. Wandering clerks and cloistered monks were capable of the most unabashed love-poetry; but sometimes they chose to set themselves right with heaven.

In England the theme of the nun unwillingly professed is not found in popular songs, such as abound in France, Italy and Germany. It received, however, a literary expression towards the close of the fourteenth century. In the pseudo-Chaucerian _Court of Love_ the lover sees among those who do sacrifice to the King and Queen of Love a wailing group of priests and hermits, friars and nuns:

This is the courte of lusty folke and gladde,
And wel becometh hire abite and arraye;
O why be som so sory and so sadde,
Complaynyng thus in blak and white and graye?
Freres they ben, and monkes, in gode faye:
Alas for rewth! grete dole it is to sene,
To se hem thus bewaile and sory bene.

Se howe thei crye and wryng here handes white,
For thei so sone wente to religion!
And eke the nonnes with vaile and wymple plight,
Here thought is, thei ben in confusion.
"Alas," thay sayn, "we fayne perfeccion,
In clothes wide and lake oure libertie
But all the synne mote on oure frendes be.

For, Venus wote, we wold as fayne do ye,
That ben attired here and wel besene,
Desiren man and love in oure degree
Ferme and feithfull right as wolde the quene:
Oure frendes wikke in tender youth and grene,
Ayenst oure wille made us religious;
That is the cause we morne and waylen thus."

* * * * *

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 oşer crie
With sobbing teris and with ful pitous soune,
To fore şe goddes, bi lamentacioun,
That were constrayned in hir tender youşe
And in childhode, as it is ofte couşe,
Y-entred were into religioun,
Or şei 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 şe contrarie outward of her hert.
Thus saugh I wepen many a faire maide,
That on hir freendis al şi wite şei 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 passing 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 trespass, 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 naive 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 attitude. 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 multitude, gathering rosebuds while it may, crying up and down the roads of the world to all who pass 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 _hoere_ bour, [ladies, their
That wereden gold in hoere tressour,
With hoere _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 hell singing with Aucassin 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 worship became more than the worship 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," hell 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 Aucassins 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 passionate 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 Classics, from the Lives of the Fathers, from the Legends of the Saints, from the Miracles of the Virgin, from the accumulated 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 passes with his repertoire of grave, gay, edifying, ribald, coarse or delightful tales and when he has gone his enchanted audience repeats and passes 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 illustrating 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 passes 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 illustration 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 sniggering 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 butter 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 passing 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 chastity. And within three
years after she had her een again, as well as ever had she, through
grace of God[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 noble 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 constitution hath grown up for the preservation
of that simplicity of mind, which maketh the whole body to shine.
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 illustrating 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 mass; 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
Şat ghede to helle for no şyng ellys
But for she spake ever vyleyny
Among her felaws al ahy.
Şys nunne was of dedys chaste,
But şat she spake wurdys waste
She made many of here felawys
Şenke 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 seyş şat hyt was synge
Şat half here lyfe was nat dygne;
for şoghe 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
God might be manifest in her. For she bore the deprivation most
patiently, rejoicing in the neglect, and therefore, when she was
returning thanks to God, 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 God 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 button 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 assurance 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
button 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 assail 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 class 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 classed with folk-songs, though they are as different as possible from the popular _Nonnenklagen_. The longest of these poems tells of a fair and noble 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 pass 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:

"Thou spakest foolish things and against our honour. Our convent is
shut and no man is allowed therein and the dear Lord Jesus knoweth
well that this is true." "How little ye know him," said the lovely
lady, "Ye have spoken the name of mine own dear lord. Ye have named
him and well is he known to me; he is also called Jesus the
flower-maker."

The maidens in the convent deemed then that her words were of God and marvelled thereat:

"Let Jesus our beloved lord stay with us for ever, for all who are in
this convent have vowed themselves to him." "If all ye who are in the
convent have vowed yourselves to him, then will I stay with you all my
days and I will keep the troth I plighted with him and never will I
waver in my firm faith in him"[1589].

Another song contrasts the love of the lord of many lands with that of the lord of life, to the disparagement of the former[1590]. A similar contrast between earthly and heavenly love is the _motif_ of the beautiful English poem called _A Luue Ron_, made by the Franciscan Thomas of Hales at the request of a nun[1591]; of a somewhat similar (though poetically inferior) poem entitled _Clene Maydenhod_[1592]; and of a coarse and brutal treatise in praise of virginity known as _Hali Meidenhad_[1593]. This alliterative homily of the thirteenth century is startlingly different from the two other contemporary works in middle English, with which its subject would cause it to be compared. It has none of the delicate purity of the _Luue Ron_, nor even of the mystical, ascetic visions of Mary of Oignies, Luitgard of Tongres, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and the many saints and song writers who realised the marriage of the soul with Christ in the concrete terms of human passion[1594]. Neither, on the other hand, has it the moderation and urbanity of the _Ancren Riwle_, though the same hand was once supposed to have written both treatises. The author of _Hali Meidenhad_ persuades his spiritual daughter to vow her virginity to God by no better means than a savage and entirely materialistic attack upon the estate of matrimony. He admits that wedlock is lawful for the weak, for

this the wedded sing, that through God's goodness and mercy of his
grace, though they have driven downwards, they halt in wedlock and
softly alight in the bed of its law, for whosoever falleth out of the
grace of maidenhood, so that the curtained bed of wedlock hold them
not, drive down to the earth so terribly that they are dashed limb
from limb, both joint and muscle[1595].

And again:

of the three sorts, maidenhood and widowhood and thirdly wedlockhood,
thou mayst know by the degrees of their bliss, which and by how much
it [maidenhood] surpasses the others. For wedlock has its fruit
thirtyfold in heaven, widowhood sixtyfold; maidenhood with a
hundredfold overpasses both. Consider then, hereby, whosoever from her
maidenhood descended into wedlock, by how many degrees she falleth
downward[1596].

This comparative moderation of tone does not, however, last long and the author proceeds to draw a picture of the discomforts of wifehood and of motherhood so gross and so entirely one-sided that it is difficult to imagine any sensible girl being converted by it: