more than twelve years old, and at the present time is more than fourteen years old, and is well contented with the rehgious life.
The Bishop also found that no guards had been placed over Clarice by Walter, or by the Prioress. So David lost his suit and was in mercy for a false claim; and he also lost, upon a technical point, another suit which he had brought against the Prioress of Buckland. Nevertheless one's sympathies remain obstinately on his side. That touch about the devil assuredly never sprang even from the fertile brain of a lawyer[1].
The illegitimate, the deformed, the feeble-minded and the unwilling represent a not very pleasant side of the conventual system. The nunneries contained other and less tragic inmates, who may be distinguished from the majority; for to them went in voluntary retirement a large number of widows[2]. If the nun unwillingly professed has always been a favourite theme in popular literature, so also has the broken-hearted wife or lover, Guinevere hiding her sorrows in the silent cloister.
Many of the widows who took the veil were, however, less romantic figures. Although their presence as secular boarders was discouraged, because it brought too much of the world
- ↑ Year Book of 12 Richard II, ed. G. F. Deiser (Ames Foundation, 1914), pp. 71-7. Cf. pp. 150-3. It may be noticed that Marvell, in his poem "Upon Appleton House" (dedicated to the great Lord Fairfax), preserves the tradition of another of these cases. In the time of Anna Langton, the last Prioress of Nunappleton, a certain Isabella Thwaites, who had been placed in her charge, fell in love with William Fairfax. The Prioress, who wished her to become a nun, shut her up, but eventually Fairfax, having got the law upon his side, broke his way into the nunnery and released her and she married him in 1518. It was her sons who obtained the house on its dissolution (see Markham, Life of the great Lord Fairfax, pp. 3, 4). For a somewhat similar case to that of Clarice Stil, see Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 102, p. 615. A widow Joan de Swainton married a widower Hugh de Tuthill. She had four daughters by her first husband, and of these Hugh married two to his own two sons by his first wife, and placed the other two (they being under twelve years of age) in the nunnery of Kirklees, in order that his two sons might obtain through their wives the whole inheritance of the co-heiresses. But the wardship of the girls belonged to a certain William de Notton, who prepared to dispute the arrangement, but was dissuaded by one of the young nuns.
- ↑ It was probably more common for widows to take a simple vow of chastity and to remain in the world. But the will of Thomas de Kent, fishmonger, seems to show that it would be considered quite natural for a widow to take the veil, even in the burgess class, which possibly remarried more frequently than the nobles. He left his wife a tenement for life, adding that should she wish to enter any religious house the same was to be sold and half the proceeds given for her maintenance (Sharpe, op. cit. i, p. 124).
