Page:Medieval English nunneries c. 1275 to 1535.djvu/40

16 the admission of more than two or three nuns of one family to Nunappleton, without special licence, for fear of discord.

Probably the real factor in determining the social class from which the convents were recruited, was not one of rank, but one of money. The practice of demanding dowries from those who wished to become nuns was strictly forbidden by the monastic rule and by canon law. To spiritual minds any taint of commerce was repugnant; Christ asked no dowry with his bride. The didactic and mystical writers of the period often draw a contrast between the earthly and the heavenly groom in this matter. The author of Hali Meidenhad in the thirteenth century, urging the convent life upon his spiritual daughter, sets against his picture of Christ's virgin-brides that of the well-born girl, married with disparagement through lack of dower:

What thinkest thou of the poor, that are indifferently dowered and ill-provided for, as almost all gentlewomen now are in the world, that have not wherewith to buy themselves a bridegroom of their own rank and give themselves into servitude to a man of low esteem, with all that they have? Wellaway! Jesu! what unworthy chaffer. Thomas of Hales' mystical poem A Luue Ron, in the same century, also lays stress upon this point, half in ecstatic praise of the celibate ideal, half as a material inducement, and the same idea is repeated at the end of the next century in Clene Maydenhod:

He asketh with the nouther lond ne leode, Gold ne selver ne precious stone.

To such thinges hath he no neode,

Al that is good is with hym one,

Gif thou with him thi lyf wolt lede

And graunte to ben his owne lemman.

In ecclesiastical language the same sentiment is expressed by the injunction of Archbishop Greenfield of York, who forbade the nuns of Arden to receive any one as a nun by compact, since that involved guilt of simony, but only to receive her "from promptings of love".