A HISTORY OF BEDFORDSHIRE lars male or female above the age of twelve were to be admitted ; the nuns were not to go into Bedford or Elstow ; only suitable persons were to be professed. 1 Bishop Grey 2 admonished the nuns to in- crease their numbers, that the divine office might not be neglected ; but none was to be admitted unless she could read and sing, and then only with the consent of the ' greater and wiser ' part of the convent. No seculars except young children were to be allowed in the monastery ; an apostate nun was to be brought back. This was the last visita- tion before the well known injunctions of Bishop Longland in 1530. 3 The tone of these makes it impossible to avoid the conclusion that the house had become thoroughly secu- larised. The ladies had for the most part given up the most distinctive features of their common life ; they had forsaken the use of the refectory, and lived more like pensioners in a boarding-house, having their little private ' households,' where they received and ate with their friends. They were accustomed to wear scarlet stomachers, ' voyded shoes ' and low-necked dresses like those of secular women, and ' cornered crests ' instead of veils. The lady abbess when she walked in proces- sion was followed by a train of servants, and leant upon the arm of one of them. The ' chapelayne,' Dame Katherine Wingate, had been wont to absent herself from matins, and to take her meals in the abbess's buttery with the steward. Nevertheless the bishop evi- dently thought the case was not past remedy, and it is noteworthy that after all nothing worse than secularity is implied in these in- junctions. He reminds them that ' the more secret religious persons be kept from the sight and visage of the world and strangers, the more close and entire their mind and devo- tion shall be to God ' ; and so orders a door at least 5 feet high to be erected at the lower end of the choir, so that the nuns might neither see nor be seen by strangers at office time ; and the cloister door between the monastery and the church, as well as the 1 Line. Epis. Reg., Memo. Repingdon,23l. Rules of diet were also given at this visitation. No money was to be exacted from those seeking admission to the community. Two older nuns were to be responsible for all the money of the convent ; the collector of rents was to give an account upon oath twice a year. A sacristan and a precentor were to be chosen from the nuns of good reputation : none convicted of immorality was to be admitted to any office. The sick nuns in the infirmary were to be duly visited, and the rest to sleep in the dormitory. s Ibid. Memo. Grey, 203d. 3 Arch, xlvii. 51-3. outer door towards the court, were to be kept shut as far as possible. There were to be no more ' households ' kept except the abbess's, and a ' misericorde ' where four or five of the sisters with ' one sad lady of the elder sort,' nominated by the abbess, might take their meals in turn and meet their friends. The rest were to go to the ' fratry.' 4 How far these injunctions produced any effect it is impossible to say. The house was not mentioned by Layton in the letter 6 in which he records his visit to Bedfordshire. It did not fall under the Act of 1536, and was not surrendered until 26 August 1 539- 8 The deed of surrender is still extant ; it con- tains the ordinary formula, the same as that of Wardon and Chicksand, and has no signa- tures, but only the seal. The pension lists of 1539-40 7 assign £50 to the abbess, Elizabeth Boyvill, and smaller sums to twenty-three nuns besides. If there were so many at this time, we may conclude that the house held perhaps twice as many in the thirteenth century, but there is no record of the original number. The usual officials are named from time to time : the prioress, the sacristan, afterwards called the ' chapelayne,' the chantress. It appears that in the thir- teenth and fourteenth centuries there were a few lay brothers attached to the house, but it is not clear what was their exact status. 8 The original endowment of the abbey in- cluded the vills of Elstow and Wilshampstead with 5 hides and i^virgates in Maulden, and the church of Hitchin in Hertfordshire. 9 Small portions of land in Buckinghamshire, Leices- tershire, Gloucestershire and Northampton-
- It should be noted that there is no suggestion
of actual immorality at this time, or at any other, except in Bishop Repingdon's injunctions (see above). But on the other hand the recurrence of the same corrections makes it clear that the stan- dard of life in the house had never been high since the thirteenth century, and though there were doubtless always some of the ' sadder sort,' as at the end, yet they were in the minority. 5 Wright, Suppression of Monasteries, Letter 42. « Deed of Surrender (P.R.O.), No. 88. 1 L. and P. Hen. VIII. (P.R.O.), xv.1032, No. 80. s Pat. 6 Edw. I. m. J&. Commission of oyer and terminer touching the persons who assaulted Brother Henry of Elstow at Elstow. Cal. of Pap. Letters, iii. 276 (1349), Walter Woodward, lay brother of Elstow, having left his order, desires to be reconciled to it. Inspeximus, II Edward II., of the charter of Henry I., which grants the abbess in her lands sac and soc, toll and team, and infangetheof, and all the customs, services and liberties that the free churches of the king's demesne have. (Dugdale, Mow. iii. 413) 356
