Charity

The endowments and gifts provided by a nun's family when she joined the community would cover a fairly modest lifestyle.  The sums were also important to the maintenance of the buildings and to providing charity to all-comers.  For although nunneries and monasteries were largely closed communities, for centuries they fed the poor and tended to the sick.  They also provided shelter for travelers, all part of their vocation and implicit in the 'Rules' of St Benedict and (in Harrold's case) St Augustine.

Pilgrims were a frequent sight on the roads
of medieval England, and would expect
hospitality from the religious houses they
passed by.

The nuns would have hoped and expected wealthy visitors to pay towards their keep, but they could not insist on this, and they could turn nobody away.  While many monastic communities were deliberately built in remote areas (like hermits, they would try and shut themselves away from the world), the Bedfordshire houses at Harrold, Elstow and Chicksands were all on busy medieval roads.

In the late 14th and early 15th centuries the nuns of Harrold had to plead poverty, citing their duty to "maintain great and expensive hospitality" through being close by the public road.  At this time one of the Bedford to Northampton roads passed through Pavenham and crossed the Great Ouse at Harrold bridge. According to the Viatores, at least some of this road was Roman in origin, and stretched back to Biggleswade. When it reached the Chellington and Carlton area it would have linked up with another former Roman road linking Wellingborough (a busy medieval market town), Irchester and Fenny Stratford on the old Watling Street in what is now Milton Keynes.  Apart from the wealthy, pilgrims and official travelers Harrold would have had to provide for the poor and homeless of the area for nearly four hundred years.

It is interesting to note that nearby Lavendon Abbey cited the same ruinous costs of providing hospitality to those coming along the high roads as a reason for financial hardship in the community. Although there were monastic communities at various time in Bedford, Northampton and Wellingborough, as well as in Lavendon, Harrold would have been the only provider of charity in a locality including Chellington, Carlton, Stevington, Odell and Sharnbrook.  With rich farmland and rising temperatures in the early medieval period, the population of this part of Bedfordshire boomed, with most of the local churches having to build new chapels and add aisles in the 13th and 14th centuries.  This growth stopped in about 1350 with the arrival of the Black Death.

Who was available to care for the sick at this time?  In the absence of any formal medical care it would have probably fallen to the nuns of Harrold Priory.   Chellington, just across the river from the priory, had been a busy and prosperous village up until this period, and there is speculation that the population was decimated by the Black Death or plague, with survivors moving to surrounding villages.



Sources

• William Page (editor) (1912), A History of the County of Bedford: Volume 3, Victoria County History, pp.63-68
• Power, Eileen (2010), Medieval English Nunneries: C1275 to 1535, Cambridge University Press
• Viatores (1964), Roman roads in the south-east midlands, Victor Gollancz
• 'House of Premonstratensian canons: The abbey of Lavendon', A History of the County of Buckingham: Volume 1 (1905), pp. 384-386. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=40317

Poverty and the Rule of St Augustine

The community at Harrold was originally an Arroaisian house, a French order of priests and nuns who lived by the Rule of St Augustine.  A generation later Harrold was able to gain its independence from Arrouaise, and instead became subject to the Bishop of Lincoln.  However, it still continued to live by the Augustinian Rule, although by this stage there were only women in the community.

In practical terms this meant a life of poverty and charity.  Most of the nuns entering Harrold would have been from the higher levels of medieval society, the landowning elite.  Although some would have joined as young novices, many nuns would have been widows and would previously have enjoyed a privileged life style. Becoming a nun would have meant turning their backs on an active social life and instead embracing a life of contemplation and prayer.  Harrold's nuns would have had to give up their jewellery and fine clothes in favour of the plain habit of Augustinians.

Fish was a major part of the monastic diet
(source http://cookit.e2bn.org)

Meals were to be eaten without conversation, the only voice breaking the silence being one of the sisters reading from devotional books.  Even the meals would have seemed plain to many as the Rule encouraged moderation as well as regular fasting and abstinence.  Meat would have been rare, particularly in the winter months when the nuns would have subsisted mostly on vegetables and fish.  No meat would have been eaten during Lent (the 40 days leading up to Easter) and on Fridays.  Many monastic communities had fishponds which were stocked with carp and other fish, and the archaeological evidence of these is still visible.  In Harrold's case it is known that there were numerous fisheries close by in the Great Ouse.

Despite mostly being well-bred women from the upper levels of medieval society, most of the nuns of Harrold would have been involved in growing food for the community as well as preparing it.  They would have grown fruit and vegetables, kept chickens and bees and possibly other small livestock.  The nuns would also have brewed beer (this was safer to drink than water), being helped in all these tasks by (paid) lay servants (unpaid) lay sisters.  The nuns. when times were hard, may have resorted to spinning thread and even weaving their own cloth.

For the later years at Harrold, at least, poverty was a reality rather than just a virtue.  The nuns were rebuked during a visitation (inspection) by Bishop Alnwick of Lincoln in 1442-1443 as he found that they could only afford a 'common washerwoman' four times a year: he was scandalized that at other times they were forced to wash their own clothes on the bank of the river Great Ouse (Spear 2005).

The Rule of St Augustine allow some leniency in regard to diet and creature comforts.  The elderly and sick were provided with better food and more of it, and were permitted warm clothing.  This flexibility in the application of monastic rules probably allowed widows and other new entrants to places like Harrold Priory a lifestyle that was not as austere as one might imagine.  In the later middle ages it was often felt that this flexibility had turned to licence, and that monks and nuns were often leading lives of debauchery.  There is no evidence for this at Harrold although in 1442-1443 Prioress Dame Alice Decun complained to Bishop Alnwick that the nuns 'all wear their veils spread up to the top of their foreheads', and Hodges (2005) wonders if the Bishop was "being worn down by the collective disobedience of the nuns".  At nearby Elstow the Bishop of Lincoln was forced to remind the community of their duties in terms of meals, clothing and other comforts.

By avoiding the excesses of consumption - both food, clothes and other material goods - it was believed that religious communities could focus better on the contemplative life. But at Harrold poverty at times meant that the nuns had to forgo their spiritual duties, simply to be able to feed and clothe themselves.


Sources

• Hodges, Laura Fulkerson (2005), Chaucer and clothing: Clerical and academic costume in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, DS Brewer
• Power, Eileen (2010), Medieval English Nunneries: C1275 to 1535, Cambridge University Press
• Spear, Valerie (2005), Leadership in Medieval English Nunneries, Boydell Press.

Chastity, celibacy and virginity

A woman joining the religious community at Harrold in the middle ages would have had to have made vows of celibacy and chastity.  While the first meant that she would renounce marriage (a nun was considered to be 'the bride of Christ' and wore a ring to mark this fact), the second meant in practice a life of sexual abstinence.

Virginity was a more complex virtue, as many women joining the community would not have been virgins in the strict sense.   There were many widows, as well as younger women who were unmarried mothers.  Indeed in the history of the medieval church, some of the most successful and well known nuns have been figures such as Petronille de Chemillé and Héloïse d'Argenteuil who were in this category, and yet went on to become abbesses of important communities.  As Martyn Whittock has noted, though, in this period virginity was seen as something which could be 'recovered', in a sense, through a life of repentance, prayer, celibacy and chastity.

Bishop Grosseteste: Harrold Priory was
governed by the bishops of Lincoln

Given the varied motivations of women joining a community like Harrold, it is perhaps unsurprising that here and elsewhere there would be occasional transgressions.  In 1298, for example, one of Harrold's nuns was found to have breached her vows of chastity (Power 1010).  Her lover was sentenced by a church court, to be beaten in the market place, but refused to submit to the punishment and so was excommunicated (excluded from the rites of the church).  In 1311 the bishop of Lincoln, who had oversight over the Harrold community, appointed a commission to investigate and correct wrongdoing here and at other unspecified communities.  It is not know what these alleged misdeeds were as no record of the 'visitation' remains.

However, this was by no means unusual.  In a celebrated case a century before, in about 1166, it was reported that a nun from the Gilbertine house at Watton in East Yorkshire had become pregnant by one of the lay brothers of the house: in this case he was apprehended and was said to have been castrated by the nuns.  This and other alleged scandals led to the whole order coming under the scrutiny of the church under the direction of Pope Alexander III.  While the problem was said to be sexual licence within the order, the investigation focused more on dissatisfaction among the lay brothers about working conditions.

Similarly, in 1177 Henry II of England expelled the Anglo-Saxon nuns of Amesbury and replaced them with 24 nuns from Fontevraud.  He cited instances of moral laxity on the part of the English sisters, whom he claimed were debauched (the abbess was said to have been the mother of three children).    And some time in the 1190s Gerald of Wales wrote of the lust of a Gilbertine for her aged master.  These reported happenings were commonplace in fiction at the time: Giovanni Bocaccio's Decameron (1353) contains tales of sexual licence set in nunneries.

Elstow Abbey, less than a day away from Harrold on foot, was frequently the subject of the Bishops' scrutiny, Lincoln's Bishop Gravesend referring in 1260 to "disgraceful acts" which he said were "'from that house more frequently than from any other".  In 1369 the bishop complained that the nuns of Elstow were "wandering" out of the community far too much.  Moreover, many of Elstow's nuns were from artistocratic families and had regular visitors of family and friends (noble ladies and even queens) from their previous lives.  By 1379 Bishop Buckingham was having to instruct the nuns of Elstow not to talk to men at all, not to leave the house without permission and to be back before sunset.  The fact that he had to remind them that they should not be wearing fur or jewelry suggests that the nuns were interpreting the rules of dress rather too liberally for the church's liking.  

In 14th century Harrold, though, the problems did not seem to want to go away, and in 1369 Bishop Glynwell of Lincoln appointed Dame Katherine of Tutbury to reform the excesses of the Priory during a period when there was no prioress. As the County History notes, from the cartularly records little more is said until the priory was visited in 1535 by Thomas Cromwell's agent Dr Layton.  He reported that there were just four or five nuns and a prioress, two of whom had children.  Once again, though, this kind of allegation was commonly being made at the time, and as with Henry II they may have been motivated by a desire to discredit the community for other purposes.

Sources

• Elkins, Sharon (1988), Holy women of 12th century England, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
• Venarde, Bruce L. (1997), Women's monasticism and medieval society: nunneries in France and England, 890-1215, Ithaca: Cornell University Press
• Brewer, J.S. (ed), (1862), Gerald of Wales Gemma Ecclesiastica
• Whittock, Martyn (2009), A brief history of life in the middle ages, London: Constable & Robinson
• 'Houses of Benedictine nuns: The abbey of Elstow', A History of the County of Bedford: Volume 1 (1904), pp. 353-358. 
• Power, Eileen (2010), Medieval English Nunneries: C1275 to 1535, Cambridge University Press

Foundation

Harrold Priory was founded sometime between 1136 and 1138.  There is no exact date available, and in any case it could often take years between a foundation being pledged and the community being give licence by the church and crown to open.

However, there were two key men involved in the foundation: Samson le Fort and Abbot Gervase.  Both of these men appear to be Norman French, part of the new ruling class in England in the 12th century.

We know little about Samson le Fort, although the likelihood is that he was a descendant of one of William I's retinue of knights who provided troops and support for his conquest of England in 1066.  He and his wife (Harrold's Albreda de Blosseville) were what historians such as Bruce Venarde would call 'minor nobility'. There is evidence of a le Fort family in Turvey at around this time - Turvey is just two villages away from Harrold, and connected by the old Roman road and the river Great Ouse.  Despite his 'minor' status, Samson le Fort appeared to be connected to Malcolm, king of Scotland, possibly via the Earl of Huntingdon, and Samson's grants were confirmed by these more powerful overlords.  There was a complex system of land holding at the time, and Malcolm's name crops up in the history of nearby Elstow Priory later in the middle ages.  Samson granted to the new monastic house the 'living' of St Peter's in Harrold and the living of the church at Brayfield, two villages upstream on the river Great Ouse.

The expectation at the time was that the people of a parish such as Harrold would donate 10% of their income to support the church - which could amount to a tidy sum.  In the case of a prosperous parish like St Peters this would grow and grow.  However, Brayfield never seemed to get past the early middle ages.

St Peter's church, Harrold

The other key figure in the foundation of Harrold was Abbot Gervase of Arouaise.  There is still some debate as to where Arouasise was: the consensus seems to be somewhere in northern France, in an area which was in the front lines during the Great War of 1914-18.  Gervase seems to have been a charismatic man, and traveled widely both in Normandy and England, founding religious houses under the Arouasian rule. Gervase seems to have persuaded Samson le Fort to finance Harrold Priory, as a 'daughter' house of Arouasie.  Gervase seems to have been able to put forward a relative, Guy de Arromanches, as the first prior.

In this way the priory was established in Harrold, linked spiritually and financially to the parish church of St Peter, a beautiful medieval church which remains to this day.

Sources

• Venarde, Bruce L. (1997), Women's monasticism and medieval society: nunneries in France and England, 890-1215, Ithaca: Cornell University Press
• Thompson, Sally (1991), Women religioius: The founding of English Nunneries after the Norman conquest, Oxford: Clarendon Press