Page:Medieval English nunneries c. 1275 to 1535.djvu/54

30 Wencilian (Gwenllian) daughter of Llewelyn was sent to Sempringham as a child, after her father's death in 1283, and died a nun there in 1337, and the two daughters of Hugh Despenser the elder were forced to take the veil at the same convent after their father's fall. The nunnery must often have served the purpose of lesser men, desirous of shaking off an encumbrance. The guilty wife of Sir Thomas Tuddenham, unhappily married for eight years and ruined by an intrigue with her father's servant, was sent to Crabhouse, where she lived for some forty years; and none thought kindly of her save—strangely enough—her husband's sister. Sir Peter de Montfort, dying in 1367, left ten shillings to the lady Lora Astley, a nun at Pinley, called by Dugdale "his old concubine" Illegitimate children too were sometimes sent to convents. One remembers Langland's nunnery, where

Nor were the clergy loath to embrace this opportunity of removing the fruit of a lapse from grace. Hugh de Tunstede, rector of Catton, left ten shillings and a bed to his daughter Joan, a nun of Wilberfoss, and at the time of the Dissolution there was a child of Wolsey himself at Shaftesbury. It is