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Show order’. In fact some very determined people did try and impose reforms. In 1421 Henry v proposed to end separate establishments for abbots, all excessive display, bright or rich clothes, long holidays, meat-eating and extravagant meals, private rooms for eating and sleeping, and all contact with women; and he laid down strict limits on money payments and visits to relatives and friends. Nothing came of this reform. The bishops lacked the power to impose radical changes, and were scared of getting involved in expensive lawsuits. The abbots had long since lost the authority needed to effect internal reform. We have a revealing glimpse of what happened at Thornton, in 1440, following a visitation by the reforming Bishop of Lincoln, Williams Ainwick: ‘A discussion was held in chapter among them all concerning defaults that should be reformed. . . but when some complained of certain things they were immediately met by others with terrible retorts, and the abbot said, clasping his hands, "Woe to me! What shall | do? | am undone"; and had he not been hindered and kept back by force, he would have rushed away from the chapter-house like a madman.’ Nunneries presented an even bigger problem in some ways. Many of them were very strict. But the most lax were also the most aristocratic. Widows and virgins from the upper classes were put there for a variety of non-religious reasons, and did not see why they should sacrifice any of the comforts to which they were accustomed. This could not be prevented, in practice, provided the endowment would stand it; more serious, from the authorities’ point of view, was the habit of well-born nuns of breaking bounds. English bishops, for instance, spent over two hundred years trying in vain to keep nuns within their cloisters; they were still hard at it when Henry VIII dissolved the lot. Celibate upper-class women, living communally, and with too little to occupy them, tended to become eccentric and very difficult to control. There is a note of exasperation in the letter the great William of Wykeham addressed to the Abbess of Romsey in 1387:".. . we strictly forbid you all and several. . . that ye presume henceforth to bring to church no birds, hounds, rabbits or other frivolous things that promote indiscipline. . . through hunting dogs and other hounds abiding within your monastic precincts, the alms that should be given the poor are devoured and the church and cloisters. . . foully defiled. . . and through their inordinate noises divine service is frequently troubled. . . we Strictly command and enjoin you, Lady Abbess, to remove the dogs altogether. ' Nuns, however, often defied bishops, even bishops backed up by the secular authorities. When a bishop of Lincoln deposited a papal disciplinary bull at one of the nunneries in his diocese, the nuns ran after him to the gate, threw it at his head, and said they would never observe it. Johann Busch, the great Augustinian reformer, who held a commission from the Council of Basle to tackle recalcitrant nuns and monks, left a graphic description of his battle with the nuns of Wennigsen, near Hanover, in the mid fifteenth century. He says they had abandoned poverty, chastity and obedience, apparently with the connivance of the Bishop of Minden; but when, accompanied by armed local officials, he read out his disciplinary charge to them ‘the nuns laid forthwith with one accord flat on the choir pavement, with arms and legs outstretched in the form of a cross and chanted at the top of their voices, from beginning to end, the antiphon Jn the Midst of Life We are in Death.’ The object of this performance of part of the burial service was to invoke an evil death on the intruders. Busch had to use physical violence before the nuns submitted; and he came across similar opposition to reform in seven out of twenty-four nunneries in this diocese. Of the new types of religious organization developed in the central Middle Ages, few were making a positive contribution to Christian standards and morale by the fifteenth century. The Cistercians had abandoned their pioneering agricultural role by the end of the thirteenth century. Their numbers declined: those that remained were mostly administrators and rent collectors. The barriers they had erected against the luxuries which inevitably crept into the lives of monks who belonged to a well-endowed order were progressively dismantled. Wine was administered first to the sick; then to all on special feast-days; then on Sundays; then on Tuesdays and Thursday as well; then daily; then the ration was increased to a pint. And so on. The Cistercians were even more aristocratic than the Benedictines. Such ‘country’ orders were disliked Qy middle-class townsmen. But then the townsmen grew to view the urban orders, too, with 73 |