Woman under Monasticism
These rules suggest many points of similarity to the combined settlements of canons and nuns previously founded abroad, but there are also some differences.
In the Gilbertine settlements the dwellings of the men and women were contiguous, and the convent precincts and the church were divided between them. The men’s dwelling was under the rule of a prior, but three prioresses ruled conjointly in the women’s house. The arrangements in both convents were alike, and the duties of prior and prioress similar, but in all matters of importance the chief authority belonged to the prior who was at the head of the whole settlement. The property owned by Gilbertine settlements apparently consisted largely of sheep, and among the men we note a number of shepherds and a ‘procurator’ who bought and sold the animals. The ewes were regularly milked and the wool was either used in the house for making clothes, or sold. The lay-sisters were appointed to spin and weave and the nuns to cut out and make the garments.
There was one cellar and one kitchen for the whole settlement, for the cellaress in the women’s house acted as caterer both for the canons and the nuns. Domestic duties fell to the share of the women. They cooked the canons’ food as well as their own and handed the meals into the men’s quarters through a hole in the wall with a turn-table, through which the plates and dishes were returned to them. They also made clothes for the whole establishment.
At the daily chapter held in the women’s house the prioresses presided in turn, with a companion on either side. The cellaress reported to the prioress, who settled the allowances and gave out the food. She received information also from the ‘scrutatrices,’ the nuns whose duty it was to go the round of the house and report disorders, and according to whose reports she imposed the various penances.
We also hear in the women’s house of a librarian (‘precentrix593’), who had the keys of the book-case (‘armarium’), which was kept locked except during reading time when the nuns were allowed the use of the books. There was to be no quarrelling over the books; the nun like the canon was directed to take the one allotted to her and not to appropriate that given to another. Simplicity of life was studied. Pictures and sculpture were declared superfluous and the crosses used were to be of painted wood. Only books for choir use were to be written in the convent, but while this holds good alike for the women and for the men, there is this further prohibition with regard to the nuns, that talking in Latin was to be avoided. ‘Altogether,’ says the rule594, ‘we forbid the use of the Latin tongue unless under special circumstances.’
The cooking was done by the nuns in turn for a week at a time in compliance with a regulation contained in the rule of St Benedict. The librarian also had her week of cooking, and when she was on duty in the kitchen, gave up her keys to another nun. We hear also of the mistress appointed to teach the novices, and of the portress who guarded the approaches to the house.
The injunctions drafted for the canons and the lay members of the settlement are equally explicit. Directions are also given about tending the sick, who were to be treated with tenderness and care.
Girls were admitted into the company of the nuns at the age of twelve, but several years passed before they could be enrolled among the novices. At the age of twenty the alternative was put before the novice of joining the nuns or the lay-sisters. If she decided in favour of the latter she could not afterwards be promoted to the rank of nun; she was bound to observe chastity and obedience while she remained in the house, but she was not consecrated. A certain amount of knowledge of the hymns, psalms and books of service was required from the novice before she could make profession.
The scheme of life worked out by Gilbert met with success and numerous patrons were found to endow settlements on the plan of that at Sempringham. As the chronicler says, ‘many wealthy and highborn Englishmen, counts and barons, seeing and approving of the undertaking the Lord had initiated and holding that good would come of it, bestowed many properties (‘fundos et praedia’) on the holy father (Gilbert) and began to construct on their own account numerous monasteries in various districts.’
The greater number of these settlements were situated in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, but judging by the extant charters the conditions and purposes of their foundations were not always the same. Sometimes the grant is made conjointly to men and women, sometimes reference is made to the prior only. In the earlier charters the women are especially noticed, in the later ones more account is taken of the men. As time went on the order gradually ceased to have any attraction for women, and at the time of the dissolution several foundations originally made for men and women were occupied only by canons.
Gilbert himself did not accept a position of authority in his order but became a canon at Bullington, one of its settlements. He appears to have been influential in wider circles and we find him several times at court. King Henry II visited him, and both the king and Queen Eleanor made grants of land to the order. Henry regarded Gilbert with so much favour that when he was summoned before the King’s Court in London on the charge of having supported Beket in his exile, the king sent a message from abroad ordering his case to be reserved for royal judgment, which practically meant his acquittal595.
Rapidly as the number of Gilbertine houses increased, the order did not remain entirely free from trouble, for even in Gilbert’s lifetime distressing incidents happened which justified to some extent the scornful remarks of contemporary writers. One of these difficulties arose sometime between 1153 and 1166 in connection with a girl at Watton. A full account of the affair was written and forwarded to Gilbert by Ailred, abbot of Rievaulx596. This account illustrates pointedly the readiness of the age to accept a miraculous rendering of fact, and gives a curious insight into the temper of a community of nuns. Indeed such violence of conduct, and details of such behaviour as are here described show that the barbarity of the age, which so often strikes us in connection with camp and court, was reflected in the monastery.
Watton was among the older Gilbertine houses and had been founded before 1148 by a nobleman Eustace Fitz-John on property which had belonged to a nunnery during the early English period597. The settlement was among the larger Gilbertine houses; it owned property to the extent of twenty acres.
The girl had been placed under the care of the nuns of Watton at the suggestion of Murdach, abbot of Fountains († 1153), and had given endless trouble by her unbecoming levity and hopeless laziness. ‘She is corrected by word of mouth but without result, she is urged by blows but there is no improvement,’ writes Ailred, who speaks of her as a nun without telling us that she had actually made profession.
She made the acquaintance of one of the lay-brothers who were engaged in repairing the women’s dwelling. The two contrived to meet frequently out of doors until at last the nun’s condition became obvious. Her fellow-nuns were so incensed at this discovery that they treated her with barbarous cruelty and would have put her to death had not the prioress intervened and had her chained and imprisoned. The anger of the nuns now turned against the lay-brother who had brought disgrace on their convent, and with a mixture of cunning and deceit they managed to discover him and have him terribly mutilated. ‘I do not praise the deed, but the zeal,’ says Ailred; ‘I do not approve of bloodshed, but for all that I praise the virgins’ hatred of such wickedness.’ The esprit de corps among the nuns and their indignation evidently went far in his eyes to excuse behaviour which he would not describe as he did if he had not felt it altogether reprehensible.
Meanwhile the nun overcome by contrition was awaiting her delivery in prison; there she had visions of abbot Murdach who had died some years before. He first rebuked her, but then miraculously relieved her of her burden and restored her to her normal condition. The nuns though greatly surprised were convinced of the truth of the statement concerning the miraculous doings of Murdach because they found the nun’s chains loosened. The prior of Watton sent for Ailred to enquire more closely into the matter. Ailred came, collected all possible evidence, and was convinced that there had been divine intervention on the girl’s behalf. He wrote an account of what had happened to Gilbert, with these words as preface: ‘to know of the Lord’s miracles and of his proofs of divine love and to be silent about them were sacrilege.’ What became of the girl we are not told. For trespasses such as hers the rule of Gilbert decreed life-long incarceration, but the canon for a like trespass suffered no punishment beyond being expelled from the settlement.
The old age of Gilbert was further troubled by the evil conduct of two men, Gerard a smith, and Ogger a carpenter. He had taken them into the order out of charity, but they greatly abused his kindness, appropriated the revenues of the order, and encouraged dishonesty and sexual irregularities. Their behaviour was productive of such results that it called forth a letter from Beket to Gilbert in which he says ‘the greater our love, the more we are troubled and perturbed by hearing of things happening in your order, which are a grievance not only before the eyes of men but before the eyes of God.’
However letters in defence of Gilbert were written by Roger archbishop of York († 1181), Henry bishop of Winchester († 1171) and William bishop of Norwich († 1174), who treat the occurrence as a misfortune and praise the order generally in the warmest terms. Praise from other quarters is not wanting, which shows that Gilbert’s work was considered remarkable, especially with regard to the influence he had over women. William of Newburgh wrote of him: ‘As far as this is concerned, in my opinion he holds the palm above all others whom we know to have devoted their energies to the control and government of religious women598.’
Gilbert lived to an advanced age. Walter Map, writing between 1182 and 1189, speaks of him as over a hundred and well-nigh blind. He was buried at Sempringham, where his tomb became the goal of many pilgrimages and the scene of many miracles. He was canonised a saint of the Church by Pope Innocent II in 1202. One of the accounts of his life, written shortly after his death, says that the order at that time numbered thirteen conventual churches and contained seven hundred men and fifteen hundred women.
The East Riding Antiquarian Society has recently begun excavating on the site of Watton Priory, one of the oldest Gilbertine settlements, and has ascertained many particulars about the inner arrangements of this house599. It has found that the church, built on the foundations of a Norman church which had been destroyed by fire in 1167, was divided throughout its entire length by a substantial partition wall nearly five feet thick. The church served for both sexes of the community, which were kept separate by this partition. In some places remains of this wall were found up to the height of four feet; this was part of the solid foundation upon which, above the height of the eye, was erected an open arcade which made it possible for the whole community to hear the sermon preached on festal days from the pulpit. The parts into which the church was divided were of unequal size. Dr Cox, the president of the Society, who read a paper on the Gilbertine statutes, said that the full complement of the double house at Watton consisted of a hundred and forty women and seventy men, and that the larger part of the church was appropriated to the women and the smaller to the men.
It was further shown by the excavations that the dividing wall had in one place an archway, covering the door which was opened for the great processions of both sexes which took place on the fourteen great festivals of the year and at funerals. Remains were also found of an opening in the wall with a turn-table, so arranged that articles could be passed through without either sex seeing the other. Through this the chalice, when the canons’ mass was over, would be passed back and restored to the custody of the nuns; no doubt this was constructed on the same plan as the opening through which the food was passed.
The cloister of the nuns lay on the north side of the transept and must have been about a hundred feet square, an alley of ten feet wide surrounding it. It is thought that the stone of which the house was built must have been brought up the Humber from Whitby. An early writer tells us that the nuns’ dwelling at Watton was connected by an underground passage with the holy well at Kilnwick, and that the nuns by means of these waters performed wonderful cures600.
CHAPTER VII
ART INDUSTRIES IN THE NUNNERY
§ 1. Art Industries generally
From consideration of the nuns of different orders we turn to enquire more closely into the general occupations and productive capacities of nuns during early Christian times and the Middle Ages. It seems worth while collecting the information scattered here and there on the work done by these women, since the grouping together of various notices gives some, though necessarily an incomplete, idea of the pursuits to which nuns were devoted when not engaged in religious service. The work done, as we shall see, includes art productions of every kind, weaving, embroidery, painting and illuminating as well as writing, which during the period under consideration must be looked upon as an art.
From the first monastic life had been dominated by the idea that idleness is at the root of all evil. In a well ordered religious house the times for work and for leisure, for eating, sleeping and for attendance at divine service were fixed by custom and were enforced by routine; we shall treat later of the way in which the day was divided by the canonical hours. The purpose of the ordinary settlement, beyond observing the hours, was to educate girls, to train novices and to provide suitable occupation for the nuns of the convent. In all houses reading and copying books of devotion was included among the occupations, and in some, the cultivation of art in one or more of its branches. Between the 8th and the 14th century religious settlements were the centres of production in handicrafts and in art industry; to study the art of this period, it is necessary to study the productions of the monasteries.
A sense of joint ownership united the members of each of the religious settlements, and this was especially true of the older Benedictine houses which have fitly been likened to small republics. To the convent inmate the monastery was the centre of his interests and affections, and the house’s possessions were in a sense his own. He was proud of them and proud if he could add to their store. Increased communication with the south and the east brought books, materials and other beautiful objects which the inmates of the religious settlement zealously copied and multiplied. During times of political and social unrest, while states were in their making, the goldsmith, the scribe, the illuminator, and the embroiderer, all found protection and leisure in the religious house. The so-called dark ages, the centuries between 800 and 1200, cease to be dark as soon as one enquires into the contents of monastic libraries, and the monotony of convent routine ceases to appear monotonous on entering one of the old treasuries and reflecting on the aims and aspirations which were devoted to producing this wealth in design and ornamentation, the bare fragmentary remains of which are to us of to-day a source of unending delight and wonder.
Some of the houses ruled by women like so many of those ruled by men became important centres of culture, where the industrial arts were cultivated, and where books were prized, stored and multiplied. Nuns as well as monks were busy transcribing manuscripts, a task as absorbing as it was laborious, for the difficulties in the way of learning to write can hardly be overestimated considering the awkwardness of writing materials and the labour involved in fabricating parchment, ink and pigment. But as the old writer with a play on the words armarium, book-case, and armatorium, armoury, remarks, ‘a monastery without its book-case is what a castle is without its armoury.’ And all houses, whether for monks or nuns, took rank as centres of culture in proportion to their wealth in books.
Of the books over which the early scribe spent so much time and trouble, comparatively speaking only a few survive. All books are worn out by use, especially books of devotion; many were destroyed when printing came in and parchment was handy to the book-binder; many when the Reformation destroyed convents. The early scribe usually omitted to add his name to the book he was copying. In the books which are preserved the names of men scribes are few, and the names of women scribes fewer still, though they do occasionally occur. Wattenbach, a student of manuscripts and of the mediæval art of writing, has collected a number of names of women whom he has found mentioned as scribes. He gives them, adding the remark that other books no doubt were written by nuns where mention of the fact is omitted601.
It will be profitable to recall these names and examine the references to work done by nuns as calligraphists and miniature painters, for here and there women attained great proficiency in these arts. The amount of writing done in women’s houses compared with that done by men was no doubt small, for it was not in this direction that the industry of the nun lay. But what remains shows that where scope to activity was given talents of no mean kind were developed.
In some departments of art industry, especially in weaving church hangings, and embroidering altar cloths and church vestments, nuns greatly distinguished themselves. In his comprehensive work on church furniture Bock is eloquent on the industry of nuns. He first praises their early proficiency in the art of weaving and passes on to the art of embroidery. ‘This art also,’ he says, ‘was chiefly cultivated in religious houses by pious nuns up to the 12th century. The inmates of women’s establishments were especially devoted to working decorations for the altar. Their peaceful seclusion was spent in prayer and in doing embroidery. What work could seem worthier and nobler than artistic work intended for the decoration of the altar? It is in the nunnery that the art of design as well as the technique of weaving were brought to their highest perfection602.’
Owing to the perishable material of this work the amount which was done of course far exceeded what has been preserved. We often come across remarks on such work, rarely across remains of it, and we are obliged to take on trust the praise bestowed by early writers as so little exists by which we can judge for ourselves. But enough remains to bear out the praise which contemporaries bestow on the beauties of hangings and vestments manufactured by nuns, and to give us the highest opinion of their industry and their artistic skill.
Among women generally embroidery has always had votaries, and in the nunnery it found a new development. During early Christian ages nuns worked large hangings for decorating the basilica walls, and short hangings for the square altar; and when the Gothic style took the place of the earlier Byzantine in architecture, rendering such hangings superfluous, they devoted their energies to working church vestments and furniture.
The proficiency acquired by the girl in the convent was not lost if she returned to the world. We hear a good deal of badges and standards worked by ladies at baronial courts during the age of romance, and their work was no doubt influenced by what had been evolved in church decoration.
In studying the art industry of the convent, we needs must treat of work produced with the brush and the pen side by side with work produced with the needle. At two periods in history, the 8th and 13th centuries, England takes the lead in art industry, and at both periods there is reference to excellent work done by nuns.
A former chapter has mentioned how Eadburg, the friend of Boniface, was at work in her monastery in Thanet in the 8th century, transcribing scriptural writings on parchment in gold lettering, an art in which she excelled603. Among the gifts sent to Boniface by lady abbesses in England vestments and altar-cloths are mentioned which had without a doubt been worked in the houses over which these ladies presided if not actually made by themselves604.
The importance and the symbolical meaning which early Christians attached to death supplies the reason why the abbess of Repton in Mercia sent a winding-sheet to St Guthlac during his lifetime605. Cuthberht of Lindisfarne was wrapped in a shroud which his friend Aelflaed, abbess of Whitby, had sent606. Both were of linen, for early Christians, who were content to wear rough woollen clothes during their lifetime, thought it permissible to be buried in linen and silk. Thus we read that Aethelthrith the abbess of Ely sent to Cuthberht a present of silk stuffs which she decorated with gold and jewels and which were shown at his resting-place at Durham till the 12th century607. The silk robe on which the body of Wilfrith († 709) had been laid was sent as a present to an abbess Cynethrith608.
About this time silk, which had been rarely seen north of the Alps, was frequently sent from the east and was greatly prized. It has been mentioned in a previous chapter how Radegund at Poitiers received a gift of silk from a relation in Constantinople609, and among the charges brought by the turbulent Chrodield against the abbess Leubover was that she had appropriated part of an altar-cloth to make a robe for her niece. Caesarius of Arles in his rule for women forbade their working embroidery except for purposes of church decoration. Repeated complaints were made during the early ages in England against nuns for wearing embroidery and silks. The council of Cloveshoe of the year 747 censures the undue attention given to dress. ‘Time shall be devoted more to reading books and to chanting psalms than to weaving and decorating (plectendis) clothes with various colours in unprofitable richness610.’ But to control the standard of clothes remained a standing difficulty in all convents, and especially in those of women611.
Apart from personal decoration the arts of weaving and embroidering were encouraged in every way. ‘Towards the 10th century the art of making large hangings had so far progressed in England,’ says Bock, ‘that large scenes with many figures were represented612.’
Inside the cloister and out of it the art flourished, and the mention of gifts of hangings becomes frequent. Thus Ealdhelm in his ‘Praise of Virginity’ (c. 7) speaks of hangings made by the nuns, while reference is made to secular women at the time of the Conquest who did remarkable work. Among them were Alwid and Liwid who practised the air of embroidery and taught it613. Emma, otherwise Aelfgifu († 1052), after her marriage to King Knut, made a gift of hangings and vestments to the abbey of Ely, some of which were embroidered with gold and jewels on silk, others of green and purple colour were of such splendour that their like could not be found elsewhere in England614. Again, Aelflaed, the wife of Edward the Confessor († 1066), made hangings with pictures of the apostles for Frithstan of Winchester.
‘We know,’ says Michel in his work on silk and the use of it in embroidery615, ‘that the women of England, long before the Conquest, worked assiduously at weaving and embroidering, and that they were as distinguished in this branch of art as men were in others.’ Unfortunately no specimens of the work done in religious settlements during this early period have been preserved, so far as I am aware. We do not know what artist designed and executed the famous Bayeux tapestry which is worked in woollen cross-stitch on a strip of linen; but it was certainly not the work of nuns.
The references to weaving and embroidering during the later period are fewer, but a certain amount of the work done in England has been preserved, though the clue as to where and by whom it was done is generally wanting. While weaving and embroidery were throughout important branches of home industry, art-needlework seems to have owed its higher development to nuns.
