Sins of the Blood

by Margaret Frazer

  In practice, though, the bar is usually left set aside during the day and only put in place across the door at night or if there should be, God and the saints forbid, some manner of trouble. There is no hostility between the nuns and the world as such, and while they do indeed spend most of their life inside the cloister, as by the Rule they should, the world is not a forbidding or frightful place, merely somewhere with which they should have as little to do as possible. So the door remains unbarred, and whoever among the nuns is presently hosteler, charged with overseeing guests and guesthalls, is able to pass freely in and out of the cloister in the discharge of her duties.

  Beyond the door a short, low-ceilinged passageway leads into the cloister walk. For those who choose to see it, there is a degree of symbolism in going through that narrow, dark way from The World into the openness and light of The Cloister, but in the bustle of the day a consideration of symbolism rarely intrudes. The passageway is simply the way between guesthall yard and the cloister walk.

  The cloister walk itself is a square, open on its inner side to a garth that brings sunlight (and rain and snow in their seasons) into the heart of the cloister. The garth is crossed by paths between beds of flowers and herbs lovingly tended by the nuns for their colors and odors and medicinal uses. A bell hung in a pentice at the center of the garth is used to call the nuns to prayers.

  The cloister walk itself is stone-paved and separated on its inner side from the garth it surrounds by a low stone wall wide enough for sitting and surmounted by pillars that hold the slate-and-timber roof that shelters the walk. Wide enough for two nuns to walk side by side and a third to pass them, the walk is the way between most of the cloister’s rooms as well as to the church, and so there is constant movement along it through most hours of daylight and again in the night when the nuns pass along it to the church for the Offices of Matins and Lauds.

  Prioress' Rooms

  Just to the right of where the passageway comes into the cloister walk are the stairs up to the prioress’ rooms. Her parlor and bedchamber are the only private rooms in the cloister, allowed her because she must perforce spend much of her life here, dealing not only with cloister matters but the wider, worldly responsibilities that come to her as head of the priory and all its properties and interests. Not least among these duties are long sessions with the priory’s steward, reviewing account rolls and reports, learning what is going well and going ill among the nunnery’s properties and people, and making decisions regarding it all. For a prioress, privacy does not equal leisure.

  The parlor is the larger of the two chambers, with white-plastered walls, one of the cloister’s only three fireplaces, and a long window overlooking the guesthall yard. Upon a time, instead of the single window, there were three narrow ones, and in the nunnery’s early decades, the draughts through them too often offset the benefit of the fireplace. More than that, they often failed even to provide much light since in bitter or wet weather they needed too often to be shuttered, leaving the first prioresses here in much gloom and lamplight. St. Frideswide’s prioress Domina Matilda changed that in King Richard II’s time. Having occasion to go to the law court at Westminster concerning a piece of property willed to St. Frideswide’s but contested by an heir, she caught something of the spirit of exuberance and excess in the midst of King Richard’s reign and found a way to pay for having the parlor windows glassed without raising too many mutters among her nuns about the expense. (She also won her case at Westminster.)

  Now, as times and desires and possibilities change, a single, wide, glassed window has replaced the narrow three, adding to the comfort of the chamber. Indeed, because the prioress must also receive and entertain the occasional important visitor – and because important visitors tend to be more impressed by show that the nunnery is flourishing and therefore worth their time and money, rather than poverty-stricken – the parlor has been made altogether more comfortably and impressively furnished than other parts of the nunnery. Not only is there a tall-backed chair with carved arms and cushioned seat for the prioress herself, there is a second one, nearly as fine, for a guest. A sturdy table in the middle of the room is covered by a fringed Spanish carpet (too precious to be laid of the floor) that came as part of a nun’s dowry two generations ago. The nunnery’s six silver goblets (all gifted separately over the years) are kept in a closed aumbry, to be brought out along with a silver ewer and bowl for special visitors. There are bright, embroidered cushions on the long bench below the window, and various other comforts have come in (and sometimes gone) according to each prioress: Domina Philippa in King Edward’s reign was particularly skilled at fine embroidery; although most of what she made in her time as prioress went as gifts to patrons, some of her work is still to be found in the nunnery. Domina Edith had a small greyhound for many years, its wicker bed remaining beside the hearth even after it had died in its (and Domina Edith’s) old age. Domina Elisabeth had a cat (and its attendant kittens), but most prominently a slant-topped desk beside the window where she worked at the copying of books to be sold for the nunnery’s profit. And so with other prioresses.

  All of St. Frideswide’s prioresses have brought her own strengths and weaknesses to the office. Each has shaped her life here in the parlor to her own need and, at the same time, been shaped by her office – has strengthened to meet its needs or sadly, with a few, failed its necessities. Either way, the parlor’s comforts come with their price.

  It is a price reflected more clearly in the prioress’ bedchamber than in the parlor. In contrast to the parlor, her bedchamber is severely plain, its only furnishings the narrow bed with its thin mattress and few covers, the prie dieu for her to kneel to her prayers, and a wall-hung crucifix. Its single window is small and high, showing nothing but a slit of sky. Here all St. Frideswide’s prioresses have spent their nights, the more acutely aware among them perhaps with thoughts of those who have lain there before them – and of those who will come after.

  Guest Parlors and Smaller Chambers

  Next along the cloister walk from the prioress’ stairs is the small guest parlor where nuns may talk with such relatives or other visitors as their prioress permits. Family ties remain strong between nuns and their families. Though cloistered, most nuns are still a close part of their families, and their families take an interest in their welfare. The guest parlor is supposed to be the one place left in the world where their lives may briefly intersect.

  The room is kept deliberately plain, to show the nuns take their vow of poverty seriously. A small table, a bench, and several stools suffice for furnishing, while a woven rush mat eases the floor. A crucifix hangs on one wall, and a tapestry of the Virgin and St. Frideswide standing among flowers and angels – made by Domina Philippa long ago, unfaded in the shadowy room – is on another. A small, high, grilled window brings in light, or, on an overcast day, a fine pewter-and-glass lamp can be brought (having been given as a gift for the parlor by a relative who said she was tired of seeing her sister only in gloom).

  Between the guest parlor and the northwest corner of the walk are several other small rooms for various uses as needed, and a stairway that goes up to the only other upper chamber on this side of the cloister. It is used to accommodate such occasional wealthy female guests as may wish a longer and more prayerful stay in the nunnery than the guesthall affords, and whom the nunnery may particularly wish to oblige and favor. It is furnished much like the best chamber in the guesthall, with curtained bed, table, chair, stools, rush matting, all of good quality. For chill weather, a brazier is provided. The window here is still the original tall and narrow one in the thickness of the stone wall, but it overlooks the guesthall yard, for whoever stays there is still part of the world and invariably enjoys watching the world’s coming and going below her.

  Infirmary Wing

  At the northwest corner of the cloister walk, a short passageway leads away from the walk to the infirmary wing, first into a small chamber that serves as the workroom for the nunnery�
�s infirmarian. Here she makes her compounds and keeps her medicines. A solid, well-scrubbed worktable takes up much of the space, with marble grinding slab and brazier. Gatherings of dried and drying herbs hang from the rafters. Shelves hold various bowls and pestles, jars, baskets, boxes, and – most preciously – the book of herbs and medicines given to St. Frideswide’s first infirmarian by the founding widow.

  Concerned with her nuns’ bodily health as well as their spiritual and being a practical woman, she spent her money not for a handsome book better to look at than use but on a thick, plain-bound volume filled with practical information and plentiful illustrations of the plants being detailed and the treatments being discussed. Although she is routinely prayed for by all the nuns here, she has received particular prayers and remembrance from every infirmarian since the first. They have all likewise added what they could to the book, using the deliberately wide margins for their own notes, suggestions, and observations, until now it is a valuable compendium of generations of knowledge and experience.

  Early in King Henry IV’s reign, Dame Dionisia brought as part of her dowry a copy of Mondeville’s book on surgery that was seized on gladly by the then-infirmarian. The idea of their infirmarian attempting surgery met no resistance from her prioress or fellow nuns because she (and all St. Frideswide’s infirmarians before her) had from the first been called on for help by Prior Byfield’s villagers when they were hurt or ill beyond what their own herbwife could do, and very often the help needed was for wounds from accidents (or otherwise) needing surgery that forced the nuns to learn as they went. Mondeville’s book of surgery was a boon to all, and in due time Dame Dionisia, having trained with her predecessor, became – as she had always hoped – infimarian in her turn, skilled in both medicine and surgery and able to train Dame Claire who followed her.

  Beyond the workroom is the infirmary itself, a narrow room with several beds for nuns too ill or contagious to continue their duties for the while. Larger monasteries often have their infirmary separate from the main cloister, with an infirmary chapel and even a cloister walk and garden all its own, but St. Frideswide’s is nothing near to so grand. The narrow, white-plastered room with thickly rushed floor and line of plain bedsteads suffices for its needs, Christ willing. A nun beyond healing, with death a certainty, can rest here in privacy, tended by her sisters and eased as much as may be by the infirmarian. Since most deaths among the nuns come from old age and only sometimes from a wasting illness and rarely from virulent disease, it is a peaceful place in its way.

  Refectory and Kitchen

  Turning at the northwest corner of the cloister walk to go along the south side of the cloister, the walk passes the refectory – the nuns’ dining room. Like most of the rooms here, it is very plain, with bare, white walls. Its single long table is of well-scrubbed wood; the benches along its sides and the prioress’ stool at the head are all unbacked. In one corner is a reading desk where nuns take turns to stand at the duty of reading aloud to their sisters through the meals.

  There are two doors to the refectory. One leads in from the cloister walk. Outside it, bowls and pitchers of water are set and towels hung for the nuns to clean their hands and faces before and after meals. The other door, in the east end wall, opens to a narrow passageway with the door to the kitchen directly across from it, for the ready bringing of meals from kitchen to refectory by the servants.

  Of necessity, the kitchen has the second of the cloister’s three fireplaces as well as scrubbed and well-scarred wooden worktables, an array of utensils, pots, pans, and dishes, and locked cabinets for keeping such costly items as spices, sugar, and dried fruits. The nuns take turns being responsible for kitchen matters, both supervising and helping the few servants the priory can afford for the cloister.

  What is prepared varies widely with the seasons, on what is available, and with feast and fast days. The nunnery’s goal is to be as self-sustaining as possible, drawing on everything that comes to it from its desmesne lands in Prior Byfield – grains, dried legumes, fruits, meats, milk, cheeses, eggs. There are also its fishpond, and a large kitchen garden that supplies summer greens and fresh vegetables as well as such things as cabbage that can be stored into the winter, and there is the nunnery orchard with its apple, pear, and cherry trees.

  But the fishpond cannot supply enough fish for all the fast days there are in a year, and a time of extended bad weather or a murrain among the livestock can have severe impact on the rest of what the nuns depend on. So purchases are constantly being made, usually only for what they cannot supply for themselves but sometimes in the necessity of emergency. Decisions toward this are made between the prioress and whichever nun may presently be cellarer, charged with supervising the cloister’s supplies of all kinds. The steward is informed of what is needed and consulted about what can be afforded, and it is his duty then to determine where and when purchases should be made, with an eye to which great fairs in reasonable reach are being held when and the prices likely there against what things may cost in Oxford or Northampton. Fortunately, salt is something that can be had fairly readily, being made in various places around England, but sometimes it is worth going all the way to London for such imports as sugar and foreign spices like pepper, cinnamon, galingale, ginger, nutmeg, and mace, among others, while the transport costs of barrels of dried, salted fish make purchasing them from a nearer fishmonger usually more reasonable, and the same with casks of wine and cider.

  Since purchases are usually made for a whole year at time, always, always there must be a balance attempted between what is needed, what is available, and what St. Frideswide’s can afford in any particular year.

  The passageway between refectory and kitchen leads out to the walled yard reached also from the inner yard as mentioned earlier, where work not reasonably done inside the cloister, such as laundry and ale-brewing, has its place convenient to the kitchen. A small door on the yard’s outer side opens into the nunnery’s kitchen gardens and a field path to the village, used by the village women who come to work in the cloister.

  Necessarium and Slype

  Turning the southeast corner by the refectory and kitchen, the cloister walk’s east side passes along the blank wall of a narrow storeroom that opens off the kitchen. Set down half a flight of steps, it serves as a cold cellar for the storing of the more hardy harvested vegetables from the kitchen garden, apples that dry and toughen through the winter but cook well even into Lent, and the precious yearly cask or two of wine and cider.

  The storeroom is narrow because what would be the outer wall is actually the inner side of a stone-walled tunnel through which the deliberately diverted branch of a stream flows, while above storeroom and tunnel is the necessarium where a long seat along one wall has appropriate holes above the water that serves to carry away both kitchen and bodily wastes.

  Here the necessarium is reached by a short stairway in the slype, which is yet another short passageway out of the cloister proper. When the rule of silence was still strongly maintained in the cloister, the slype was the one place nuns might go for any urgent, immediately necessary conversation. It leads out to the high-walled gardens where the nuns spend their daily hour of recreation when the weather permits.

  Private Orchard

  From the slype there is also access to their private orchard. Made private by a long curve of high earthen bank, the orchard is an added recreational space that provides fresh fruit in season and to dry for winter. St. Frideswide’s, being neither large enough nor wealthy enough to have such exotica as apricot, almond, and fig trees, is content with its apple, pear, and cherries – although Dame Juliana would love to attempt a peach tree if only there were a south wall here to trellis it across. Other fruits, such as plums and mulberries, may be had wild, nor are there any nut trees in the orchard because walnuts and hazelnuts can likewise be gathered from the woodland and hedgerows. Doing so is a service owed to the nunnery by several villagers.

  The orchard also serves as the nuns’
burial ground, serene with their unmarked graves. With expectation of the centuries St. Frideswide’s will exist, at its founding ample space was left between the orchard’s outer trees and the earthen bank, and there the generations of nuns have been laid to rest side by side, each one remembered by name for a time until those who knew her have joined her here, their names remembered for a time in their turn and in their turn forgotten as the years pass. Yet their souls if not their names are remembered and forever prayed for; and there is something as peaceful in that anonymity as in the apple-shadows that move gently over the long grass of their graves.

  Warming Room

  Further along the east side of the cloister walk from the slype is the door to the warming room that also serves for the daily chapter meetings, held in the mornings for discussion of nunnery business between the prioress with her nuns. Group decisions are made then, orders given, and discipline meted out as need be. These are called chapter meetings because every day another chapter of the Benedictine Rule is read aloud, cycling through it three times in a year, reminding prioress and nuns together of the right form of the life to which they have dedicated themselves.

  Larger, richer monasteries will have a separate chapter house – a usually very grand space elaborate with stonework, paintings, and stained glass windows. The one at Westminster Abbey near London is large enough for Parliament to meet in it on occasion. Here in St. Frideswide’s with its far more modest income and needs, the room serves many purposes. Most importantly, perhaps, it has the cloister’s third fireplace, used as the prioress deems necessary for the nuns’ comfort on particularly cold days. Here, if the extra cost of firewood or coal seems warranted, the nuns are able to do tasks that cannot be done elsewhere, and in inclement weather their hour of evening recreation can be spent here in talk and warmth after a day of all their various chores and duties and prayers, before saying the last of the day’s eight Offices, and going up to their unheated dormitory.