Dormitory
The stairs up to the dormitory are just beyond the warming room. The dormitory – or dorter – is a long, unceilinged chamber, open through the rafters to the roof. Rather than the single open space dictated by the Rule (things do shift over hundreds of years, and the Rule is 800 years old by the 1400s), head-high wooden walls now make separate sleeping cells for the nuns. As wide as a woman’s out-stretched arms and curtained at the outer end, each cell has a plain, narrow bedstead with straw-filled mattress and pillow and minimal bedding, usually only a linen sheet and woolen blanket. A small chest beside the head of the bed holds such personal items as may be allowed by the prioress, and can also serve as a prie dieu where a nun may kneel to pray beneath the crucifix hung on the wall there in each cell. Lest a nun become too attached to “her” place in the dorter, the prioress sometimes has a general move among them to other cells.
Since the nuns are to go to bed at dark, the only light here comes from a small window high in the east gable end and a nightly lamp kept burning at the head of the stairs for when they rise to go to church to say the Offices of Matins and Lauds sometime near midnight.
From one side of the dorter, there is access to the necessarium.
Sacristy
Still along the east side of the cloister walk, just beyond the foot of the dorter stairs, is the sacristy where the nunnery’s most precious objects are kept in various lockable chests and coffers. Here are stored the vestments used by the priory’s priest for Mass and other solemn occasions; the equally fine altar cloths; and the rich altar goods of silver and even (a very few) of gold. Some of the altar goods were given by the widow at the priory’s founding. Others have been given by other patrons over the years. Likewise, many of the vestments have been gifts, most particular two chasubles of silk. Expensively made to order in London and heavily embroidered with silken and shimmering gold thread, they are among the nunnery’s treasures, carefully kept and, when need be, even more carefully mended, since one of them is nearly seventy years old and aging accordingly.
The nuns themselves have embroidered many of the altar cloths and lesser vestments. St. Frideswide’s resources rarely run to gold thread, or even silver, but bright-dyed silken thread is a must, and the nuns have no hesitation about soliciting relatives for gifts of finest linen and even sometimes (rarely) silk cloth for their embroidering. Though only some of the nuns are skilled needleworkers, every nun stitches some part of everything they make, that it may come from all and the few not grow prideful.
Here, too, in the lockable chests are kept the nunnery’s more vital documents – account rolls and deeds to properties and records of such legal matters as have happened over the years.
Also here – and no less precious in their way – is the nunnery’s small store of books. Some have come as gifts; others have been copied by the nuns themselves from borrowed copies; but all are devotional and include most notably Dame Julian of Norwich’s Showings, Richard Rolle’s Fire of Love, Walter Hilton’s Ladder of Perfection, Mechtild of Hackeborn’s The Book of Ghostly Grace, various saints’ lives including John Capgrave’s Life of St. Katherine, and a volume of the Psalms in English.
Scribal Stalls
The northeast corner turns into the north side of the cloister walk. Here in recent years a short line of unroofed booths with a writing desk in each have been set up to accommodate the nunnery’s scribes – the several nuns with handwriting good enough for the copying out of books, not for the nunnery’s use but for sale to help the nunnery’s faltering income after their one regrettable prioress’ term of mismanagement. The stalls are set along this side of the cloister walk for the sake of the southern light slanting across the garth, saving the cost of candles or lamps. In warm, sunny weather it is a pleasant place to work. In other weather and winter, work may be impossible. But in winter the cold is only part of it, since the daylight hours are very short anyway and readily taken up with the nuns’ regular duties and the Offices.
Church
Most importantly along this side of the walk is the nuns’ door into the church. All else about the cloister is merely there to support the lives whose purpose of being is centered in the church. Most hours of the nuns’ days are taken up with necessary duties and chores around the nunnery, or else with blessed sleep at night, but eight times in every twenty-four hours they cease all else to come to the church for the Offices of prayer and praise and petition that shape the Benedictine day. Matins and Lauds in the middle of the night; Prime at dawn; Tierce, Sext, and None during the day; Vespers as evening comes on; Compline to end the day in quiet hope for the night and morrow.
Although the most intense part of the nuns’ lives is, ideally, lived here in the church, the church itself is essentially a simple place, lacking the grand stone columns, aisles, and chapels of greater churches. Instead, its nave is a plain, open rectangle stretching from the west door where ordinary folk may enter from the guesthall yard, eastward to the rood screen that separates the nave from the choir that is the nuns’ domain. The floor is stone-paved, and the walls are simply plastered and white-washed, not yet painted with the saints and scenes from Bible stories that are usual in many churches (here, there has not been money yet to spare for hire of a worthy artist), while above are the massive wooden rafters and beams holding up the slate-covered roof. High along each long wall are unglassed windows that let in daylight, moonlight, starlight, and weather.
Anyone may come to hear the daily morning Mass and the Offices and make their own prayers if they choose, but the church’s public space ends at the rood screen, beyond which – in the ordinary way of things – no one except the nuns and their priest should be. Of wood, the screen stands twice head-high, surmounted at its center by a crucifix (the rood) flanked by statues of Mary and St. John, but it is more a figurative barrier into an elaborate open work of arches and swirls and with an open doorway in the middle that allows view from the nave to the choir stalls and altar and tall east window at the church’s far end.
In two double lines facing each other, the nuns’ choir stalls stretch between the rood screen and the altar. A nun’s stall is her most personal place in the nunnery. She is given it when she first enters St. Frideswide’s and there she will spend the very many prayerful hours of her life through all her years to come, unless she should be elected prioress. Of wood like the rood screen, the stalls are tall-backed to keep off draughts, deep-seated but without the comfort of any cushions, with a shared arm between each place and a slanted ledge in front of every seat as a resting place for the books from which the nuns read, chant, and sing the Offices. There have always been more seats than there are nuns in St. Frideswide’s, the priory never having grown as its founder had hoped. With the choir being as unheated as the rest of the church and most of the cloister, the realities of winter cold and the hunger pangs of fasting and simply the bothers of daily life sometimes inevitably intrude on the nuns’ heed to the Offices, but the prioress in her own somewhat higher stall at one end sees to keeping them to their task.
In an unexpected display of richness, the narrow stretch of floor between the facing rows of stalls is bright with glazed tiles patterned with floriated roundels and animals imaginary and otherwise. (It helps that an allegory can be found for everything in nature, so that nothing is unsuitable.) The widow who founded St. Frideswide’s had a cousin who was a tiler; he gave the tiles in answer to the widow’s endless urging of friends and relatives (and sometimes strangers) to help with her nunnery’s building and was perhaps more grudging in his giving than he might have been, but the colors and patterns of his tiles have given pleasure to St. Frideswide’s nuns for decades and earn his long-departed soul an occasional prayer of thanks, nameless though he is to anyone now living.
Beyond the line of choir stalls is the altar. Raised on its several stone steps above the level of the common floor and containing a finger bone of St. Frideswide, it is of pale, beautifully worked stone, overhung by the nuns’ lovin
gly worked altar cloths rich with glowing colors and silk-work and changed with the seasons of the Church. A lamp burns here continuously, sometimes the only brightness in the church at night or during gray days, drawing the eye to where the heart should be.
Beyond the altar, the church ends at the east wall with its tall, stone-fretted window of stained glass through which dawn light falls in a splendor of colors across altar and choir, reminder to the nuns and on-lookers of the bright promise of Heaven that is the reason St. Frideswide’s exists at all and why they have chosen to be here.
Bibliography
To those who know only somewhat about medieval England, I trust the above has been helpful in understanding more.
To those who know a great deal about medieval England, I express my regret for the short shrift I have given to so many things that entire scholarly books have been written about.
I offer the following bibliography – a general array of hopefully reasonably available books about aspects of medieval village and nunnery life – as some slight compensation for all the things I have left unsaid.
Ault, Warren O. – Open-Field Farming in Medieval England (valuable on many points and especially because it includes some translated excerpts from manorial court rolls)
Bennett, H. S. – Life on the English Manor: A Study of Peasant Conditions 1150-1400 (down-to-earth details of manor life)
Coldicott, Diana K. – Hampshire Nunneries (a scholarly, graceful study of four specific nunneries over their centuries of existence)
Coulton, G. G. – The Medieval Village (considered classic)
DeWindt, Edwin B. – A Slice of Life: Selected Documents of Medieval English Peasant Experience (gives actual documents, rather than only talk about them)
Chapelot, Jean and Robert Fossier – The Village House in the Middle Ages (deals mostly with structures many centuries before our time, but careful searching through it will find excellent details of later English medieval villages and houses, drawing much on archaeology)
Fryde, E. B. – Peasants and Landlords in Later Medieval England (a detailed scholarly study)
Hanawalt, Barbara – The Ties That Bound (a sensitive study of ordinary people’s lives, drawn from coroner’s rolls)
Hartley, Dorothy – Food in England (with helpful illustrations and discussion not only of food but cooking and cooking utensils)
Kirk, Malcolm – Silent Spaces: The Last of the Great Aisled Barns (for the wonderful photographs especially)
McLean, Teresa – Medieval English Gardens (should you ever need to know about medieval gardens in general...)
Peplow, Elizabeth and Reginald – In a Monastery Garden (...or a monastic garden in particular)
Power, Eileen – Medieval English Nunneries: c.1275 to 1535 (the classic study; somewhat heavy on “things gone wrong” rather than what was ordinary in nunnery life)
Wood, Michael – Domesday: A Search for the Roots of England (and there’s a television show to go with it)
And I cannot recommend highly enough a visit to the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum – fifty acres in a lovely valley in West Sussex where dozens of old houses that could not be saved in situ have been rescued, restored, and in some cases provided with the surrounding environment they would have had in their medieval or later centuries. A wonderful place. (http://www.wealddown.co.uk/)
A Special Preview of The Novice's Tale
A Dame Frevisse Novel by Margaret Frazer
* * * * *
Help us, Seinte Frideswyde!
A man woot litel what him shal bityde.
The Miller's Tale - Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer
* * * * *
Chapter One
Mid-September in the year of Our Lord’s grace 1431 had perfect weather, warm and dry. There was a drowse of autumn to the air, and in the fields beyond St. Frideswide’s priory walls the harvest went its steady pace under the clear sky. There had been rain enough and sun enough since mid-July to bring the grain to full ripeness. Now most of it lay in golden swaths behind the reapers or was already gathered into shocks to dry.
All month long the days had become familiar with the calling of the men and women back and forth at their work, the cries of children scouting birds away, and the creak of carts along the tracks to bring the harvest home.
Inside St. Frideswide’s walls there was awareness of the harvest but none of its haste or noise; only, as nearly always, a settled quiet. A sway of skirts along stone floors, the muted scuff of soft leather soles on the stair; rarely a voice, and then only briefly and in whispers since the rule of silence held here except for the hour of recreation and the proper, bell-regulated hours of prayer sung and chanted in the church.
A Benedictine peace ruled there, Thomasine thought as she paused to gaze out the narrow window on the stairs to the prioress’s parlor, a plate of honey cakes in her hands, still warm from the oven. She had been told to hurry with the cakes, that they were meant for an important guest, but she could not bear to pass this view over the nunnery’s cream-pale stone walls. Framed in the narrow window was a scene of stubbled fields scattered with shocks of grain and small-with-distance figures bent to their work. Beyond them was the green edge of the forest and, over all, the Virgin-blue of sky, all of it as finely detailed and remote as a miniature painted for a lady’s prayer book, precise and wonderful to look at.
And soon to be far beyond her reach.
Slender with youth and the haste of growing up, narrow-boned from many childhood illnesses, and desperately pious, Thomasine meant to be a nun before autumn was done. In two weeks and a little more, on St. Michael’s day, she would finally kneel before the altar to take her final vows. She was seventeen and had been waiting almost nine years to be granted the precious black veil and to be safe behind priory walls for all her earthly days to come.
Through each day between herself and safety, Thomasine had been hugging that certainty ever closer to herself, and now with a deep breath of contentment, she leaned forward to look down at the little nunnery orchard just outside the cloister wall. Apple and cherry trees, unburdened of their fruit but dusty and weary with bearing, waited for autumn to further rob them of their leaves. Oh, bittersweet life, to be an apple tree! thought Thomasine. She could not have said for a thousand marks how an apple tree’s life could be bittersweet, but it seemed a fine, even spiritual, notion. Soon she, like the apple tree, would be rooted in St. Frideswide’s forever.
While the cakes cooled on their plate between her hands, remarked the more practical part of her mind.
A familiar pang of guilt shot through her; while she stood there gaping, she was failing the most basic of all the vows: Obedience. With a penitent frown, she hurried up the last steps to Domina Edith’s door.
There, not meaning to, she paused again. Her hand was raised to knock, but the sound of voices in the room beyond held her. Dame Frevisse’s she knew – strong and very distinct from Domina Edith’s age-dimmed, murmuring tones, which faintly followed it. Both of their voices were familiar, as everything in St. Frideswide’s was blessedly familiar. It was the man’s voice answering theirs, deep and amused, that froze her hand. In her year and barely more at St. Frideswide’s, she had grown unused to men’s voices; they had no place in a nunnery, where even the voices of women were supposed to sound only rarely, according to the Rule. She had been warned about their guest, but that had not been enough to ready her.
Her raised hand drew back from the door, going instead to make sure her hair was all pushed safely out of sight under her dingy white veil. Then she tugged at her faded gown, to be sure it hung loose enough around her and gave no hint of her shape under its shabbiness. Although she had come to St. Frideswide’s well provisioned by her sister and brother-in-law, she had chosen to trade her goodly clothes for the most worn garments in the nunnery’s chests. Intent on proving how worthy she was, and despite her sister’s disappointment and a suspicion that the prioress did not completely approve, she had
clung to the habit of poverty. Now she was truly uncomfortable wearing anything remotely fine.
Sure that nothing was amiss with her appearance, that she was sufficiently uncomely, she tapped with mouse quiet at the door.
Too quietly. Dame Frevisse continued speaking, her words unclear but her voice strong and certain, doing nothing to ease Thomasine’s reluctance. Before she had come to St. Frideswide’s, she had expected there would be no differences among the nuns, that vows and a life lived together would make them somehow all alike, and she had been unsettled to discover, despite being blended all together in a sea of black gowns and veils, their faces framed in white wimples, that they were still individual. Especially Dame Frevisse.
From the very first she had caused Thomasine unease. The plainness of her habit made her age uncertain, but her face was too strongly shaped for mildness, her eyes too clever under their dark brows, seeing much and remarking on everything with subtle mockery. The only nun whose scrutiny Thomasine felt more sharply was the prioress herself, who, despite all her years and age-weakness, seemed to see more of Thomasine than Thomasine presently wanted seen.
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