Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/357

Rh Item 5th. “To take care that the doors of their church and priory be so attended to that no suspected and disorderly females, ‘suspectæ et aliæ inhonestæ,’ pass through their choir and cloister in the dark; “and to see that the doors of their church between the nave and the choir, and the gates of their cloister opening into the fields, be constantly kept shut until their first choir service is over in the morning, at dinner time, and when they meet at their evening collation.*

Item 6th mentions that several of the canons are found to be very ignorant and illiterate, and enjoins the prior to see that they be better instructed by a proper master.

Item 8th. The canons are here accused of refusing to accept of their statutable clothing year by year, and of demanding a certain specified sum of money, as if it were their annual rent and due. This the bishop forbids, and orders that the canons shall be clothed out of the revenue of the priory, and the old garments be laid by in a chamber and given to the poor according to the rule of Saint Augustine.

In Item 9th is a complaint that some of the canons are given to wander out of the precincts of the convent without leave; and that others ride to their manors and farms, under pretence of inspecting the concerns of the society, when they please, and stay as long as they please. But they are enjoined never to stir either about their own private concerns or the business of the convent without leave from the prior: and no canon is to go alone, but to have a brave brother to accompany him.

The injunction in Item 10th, at this distance of time appears rather ludicrous; but the visitor seems to be very serious on the occasion, and says that it has been evidently proved to him that some of the canons, living dissolutely after the flesh, and not after the spirit, sleep naked in their beds without their breeches and shirts, “absque femoralibus et camisiis.”† He enjoins that these