I have just finished writing the next book in my Meonbridge Chronicles series, set in medieval England. This story centres, not on Meonbridge, as the other novels do for the most part, but on a priory, to which one of the characters in the first Chronicle, Fortune’s Wheel, departed under something of a cloud. I always wanted to follow up what happened to her, but wasn’t sure that setting a novel almost entirely in a nunnery would make for an engaging story. So, I wrote other novels, about other characters, as the idea for this latest one gradually developed in my mind.
Then I discovered – or, actually, I think, re-discovered – Medieval English Nunneries, c. 1275 to 1535, a vast tome written in the 1920s by the well-known medieval historian, Eileen Power.
To digress briefly, I’ve often wondered who Eileen Power presumed her readership was… I have two others of her books, Medieval People and Medieval Women, and both include a few snatches of medieval texts, but I think I’m right in saying the quotes are translated into modern English. So perhaps those books were intended for a more-or-less inexpert readership. But Medieval English Nunneries is not only vast, with great quantities of notes, but is also littered with Middle English, Medieval French, and Latin, some of which is translated but a lot of which is not. Which overall makes it a challenging read for one who is not a trained, academic historian!
Nonetheless, I have read Medieval English Nunneries from cover to cover, and what I learned from it really opened my eyes, and soon enough I understood that writing a story about a medieval nunnery could indeed be engaging, not to say surprising and even exhilarating.
For what I read was that some medieval nunneries weren’t at all the havens of peace and prayer I might have expected them to be.…
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| Hildegard von Bingen and her nuns 13th century. Public domain. |
There were apparently around 140 nunneries (priories and a few abbeys) in England in the later Middle Ages. Most were very poor, despite being largely inhabited by the aristocracy and gentry and, later, some women from upper-middle-class mercantile families. Many nunneries were small, very few with more than thirty nuns, a little over a quarter with between 10 and 20, well over half fewer than 10. As economic units, some of them must have struggled.
From what I gather, nunneries were not necessarily poor from lack of good management, but simply because their income was low. They would have relied on donations from benefactors, either permanent or long-term endowments, or shorter term or even one-off gifts from friends, relatives or people who wanted the nuns to pray for their or their loved-ones’ souls. The nunnery would also have the income from its estate, such as rents from tenants and money from the sale of crops. But their expenses were many: the costs of day-to-day living, food, clothing, candles, firewood; wages for servants (of which there could be several, even in relatively poor establishments); the costs of maintaining the buildings, which clearly could be huge; alms-giving to the poor, something nuns were supposed to do, albeit they were poor themselves! A few houses were wealthy, and presumably didn’t really struggle, but in many, if not most, the expenses often outstripped the income. Even in well-managed houses, the battle to keep their heads above the choppy waters of destitution must have been a real challenge.
That this was a problem can be construed from the measures put in place by bishops to safeguard nunneries’ financial health. The prioress was not supposed to make decisions by herself, but together with all the nuns – this communality of decision-making was a requirement of the Benedictine rule, and likely that of other orders too. Accounts were to be presented regularly to the bishop’s representatives, and it might seem obvious that a nunnery should have someone with specific responsibility for its finances (i.e. a treasuress), rather than letting the prioress have sole oversight.