Sequere pecuniam: Follow the money

The Tythe Barn, Harrold. Close to the Priory site but
not medieval.    Source: rightmove.co.uk

The foundation of Harrold Priory was based on the grant of the churches of Harrold and Brayfield to the new community.  These had been inherited by Albreda de Blosseville from her father, who held the manor of Harrold. They were then gifted by Albreda's husband Samson le Fort to the priory.  These churches would in turn yield an income sufficient to pay for the upkeep of the churches, the costs of the cannons (priests) serving in them, and provide a surplus besides.  The revenue would mostly have come in the form of tithes (a quantity of the crops grown each year), or occasionally in services rendered or rarely in coin.  The immediate area was some of the richest agricultural land in England and so the priory should have been well provided for.  A 17th century building named 'The Tythe Barn' still stands today on Church Walk in Harrold, right on the corner of what would have been the precincts of the St Peter's church and the priory. This is unlikely to have ever served for receiving tythes as the practice had died out by this period.

This type of transaction was normal in the early medieval period, especially in England, when there was very little coin in circulation in the countryside except at harvest time, when accounts were settled and labourers were paid their wages for the year.  So it was normal practice to gift property to the monasteries and nunneries, and many of these were adept at managing these effectively to maximise their revenues. Bruce Vernarde points to the detailed accounts for Fontevraud abbey in France in the 12th century to show that almost all donations were of land, with building and revenue from customs and tolls coming a distant second and third.  It was also the case that most of Fontevraud's purchases were of land and buildings (especially mills).  It is not known if the water mill which still exists in Harrold was ever part of the priory's patrimony: a mill is listed in the 11th century Domesday book but it does not appear explicitly in Harrold Priory's cartulary.

During the four centuries following the foundation, the priory would have continued to receive grants of land and buildings, as well as occasional sums of money and annual grants of grain or other produce.  These 'gifts' would invariably accompany the entry of a new nun or novice to the community.  Religious communities were not allowed to charge new members or their families for entry - this constituted 'simony' and was frowned on by the church.  Instead they had to rely on 'donations' accompanying the 'gift' of the woman in question to the community.   In the formal documentation which accompanied a new arrival, these gifts may have been expressed in spiritual terms: but as Kathleen Cooke has observed they were understandable in terms of cost-effective solutions to long-term care for elderly widows, provision for unmarried daughters or care homes for the terminally ill. A life in a nunnery, as far as families were concerned, could be seen as a good investment.

From the Harrold cartulary we know that Baldwin des Ardres, Count of Guisnes granted the church of Stevington some time before 1153.  The church of Shakerstone in Leicestershire came to Harrold in the 15th century but the priory, historians seem agreed, was never rich. While at Fontevraud the first prioress Petronille de Chemillé proved to be an excellent steward, actively developing 'the business' through shrewd management and acquisitions, there appears to have been no equivalent prioress at Harrold, which continued to live off its modest landholdings until the end, making the occasional plea for charity.

Bedford's Community Archives describe the priory's financial position as follows:

"A partially complete account roll for 1401-1402 has survived in the ownership of the Boteler family and was transcribed by G.D.Gilmore in Volume 49 of the Bedfordshire Historical Records Society publications called Miscellanea [1970]. It shows that the priory made a small surplus but was certainly not rich.

"The house's lands were never great, in fact in 1291 Pope Nicholas did not bother to include the house in his taxation of the church. In the Hundred Rolls of 1274-1279 the priory is recorded as owning 410 acres of land. By 1340 this figure had actually fallen to about 360 acres. 

"When the foundation was dissolved it was described as having an income of £57/10/- of which £31 came from four rectories (Harrold, Cold Brayfield, Stevington and Shakerstone) £13/18/- from land in Harrold and £12/12/- from small rents in seventeen different villages."


Sources

• Cooke, Kathleen (1990), "Donors and Daughters: Shaftesbury Abbey's benefactors, endowments and nuns, c1086-1130", Anglo Norman Studies. 12 pp. 29-45
• Venarde, Bruce L. (1997), Women's monasticism and medieval society: nunneries in France and England, 890-1215, Ithaca: Cornell University Press
• 'House of Austin nuns: The priory of Harrold', A History of the County of Bedford: Volume 1 (1904), pp. 387-390.  http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=40042

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