Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/281

 1920 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 273 obtained his election by a simoniacal bargain. His friends had paid the debts of the priory, which had at once resumed the practice of selling corrodies, pawning its plate, and letting its buildings fall into decay. Huntingdon was as ruinous, morally and structurally, as when Bishop Fleming made his injunctions. The two houses nearest to extinction were Elsham, with four canons whose complaints against each other were bitter, and Breedon, reduced to a prior and one pensioned inmate. Speaking generally, the rules had been found unworkable. A really common life was being abandoned ; allowances, as for clothes and food, were taking the place of an official supply, and it is but rarely that com- plaints are made against ' proprietary ' monks, though it is evident that this breach of rule was common. The most interesting case is at Dunstable, where two canons confess to owning nineteen and twenty hives of bees respectively. They are bidden to part with them, or retain them on terms to be fixed by the prior. And almost everywhere the head was an autocrat, refusing to show his accounts and often using the revenues for the benefit of his kinsfolk. The complaints may in many cases be no more than evidence of discontent, but this was as prevalent as at the time of sup- pression. The houses of women were almost all poor. At Goring eight nuns were maintained on £40 a year ; £5 was the wage of a chantry priest. At Legbourne only half a gallon of beer could be given a day ; a gallon was the normal allowance for religious of either sex. Ankerwyke is so ruinous that hay is kept in the church and there is no chalice. The abbess, it is alleged, wastes the goods for the profit of her relations. At Langley, a poor but respectable house, the widowed Lady Audley is a boarder. She comes to church with twelve dogs. Boarders are a perennial trouble at Godstow. The abbess asks that the injunction of 1432 against their reception should be renewed. It is difficult to see how a renewal could add force to so recent a command, and what excuse the abbess can have had for disobedience. But Godstow had peculiar difficulties, which it failed to overcome, from its nearness to Oxford. The Oxford clerks were a trouble at Littlemore also. Godstow was not poor. Elstow, the other house of comfortable income that was visited, is quite blameless in the conduct of its inmates, but the abbess has to confess that the formal side of the rule is completely neglected. The worst house is the Cistercian nunnery of Catesby, where gross charges were beheved true by the bishop. At Gracedieu the bishop begins his injunctions with the reproach that ' love, charity, peace, and concord are utterly excluded and exiled from you '. Yet poor and disorderly as these houses might be they, unlike those of men, had no difficulty in finding inmates. There were no openings in the world for superfluous daughters. At Heynings it is alleged that the irregular practice of making a fixed charge for admission of twelve marks has grown up. Even at Ankerwyke there are four jxmiors, untrained and unhappy. The boarding of children, no doubt as pupils, seems to be universal. At Heynings the nuns are enjoined not to keep boys above twelve or girls above fourteen. In other houses lower ages are prescribed. There are curious differences between nunneries in regard to menial work. In some of the poorest it is resented ; elsewhere it is taken as a matter of course, though comment is excited VOL. XXXV. — NO. cxxxvni. T