It will be remembered that the practice roused the disapprobation of Gargantua, whose abbey of Thélème contained only beautiful and amiable persons.
Item, parcequ'en icelluy temps on ne mettoit en religion des femmes, sinon celles qu'estoyent borgnes, boiteuses, bossues, laides, deffaictes, folles, insensees, maleficiees et tarees,...("a propos, dist li moyne, une femme qui n'est ny belle, ny bonne, a quoi vault elle?—A mettre en religion, dist Gargantua.—Voyre, dist le moine, et a faire des chemises.")...feut ordonne que la (i.e. à Thélème) ne seroyent receues, sinon les belles, bien formees et bien naturees, et les beaux, bien formez et bien naturez[1].
Occasionally the nuns seem to have resented or resisted these attempts to foist the deformed and the half-witted upon them. One of the reasons urged by the obstinate inmates of Stratford against receiving little Isabel Bret was that she was deformed in her person[2]. It was complained against the Prioress of Ankerwyke at Alnwick's visitation in 1441 that she made ideotas and other unfit persons nuns[3]; and in 1514 the Prioress of Thetford was similarly charged with intending shortly to receive illiterate and deformed persons as nuns and especially one Dorothy Sturges, a deaf and deformed gentlewoman. Her designs were frustrated, but the nuns of Blackborough were less particular and in 1532 Dorothy answered among her sisters that nothing was in need of reform in that little house[4].
At the time of the Dissolution the Commissioners found that one of the nuns of Langley was "in regard a fool"[5]; and a certain Jane Gowring (the name of whose convent has not been preserved) sent a petition to Cromwell, demanding whether two girls of twelve and thirteen, the one deaf and dumb and the other an
- ↑ Rabelais, Gargantua, ch. lii.
- ↑ Reg. Epis. Johannis Peckham (Rolls Ser.), i, p. 367. Cf. pp. 191 ff. below.
- ↑ Linc. Visit. ii, p. 4. She was also charged with the introduction of unsuitable persons as lay boarders, etc. "Item priorissa introducit in prioratum diuersos extraneos et ignotos, tam mares quam feminas et eos sustentat communibus expensis domus et aliquas quasi ideotas et alias inhabiles fecit moniales. Negat articulum." But ideota probably simply means unlearned here, and in the case of Agnes Hosey, below p. 33. Compare the case at Bival in Normandy 1251. "Ibi est quedam filia burgensis de Vallibus que stulta est." Reg. Visit. Archiep. Rothomag, ed. Bonnin, p. 111.
- ↑ Visitations of the Diocese of Norwich (Camden Soc.), pp. 91, 311.
- ↑ Gasquet, Henry VIII and the English Monasteries (pop. ed. 1899), p. 293.
