Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 Part 28

What, one may ask, is the reason for this unanimity of outlook? Why do the people see a nun only as a love-bird shut within a cage and beating its wings against the bars? Partly, no doubt, because such songs always "dally with the innocence of love"; the folk are capable of a deep melancholy, as of a gaiety which is light as thistledown; but Love is and was their lord and king, and so even the nun must be in love when they sing her. It may be, however, that there is a deeper meaning in the _chansons de nonnes_.

The nunneries were aristocratic; the ideal of the religious life was out of the reach of women who lived among fields and beasts of the field.

These spinsters and these knitters in the sun, who seem so gay and peaceful, we know what their lives were like:

Poure folke in cotes, Charged with children, and chef lordes rente, That thei with spynnynge may spare spenen hit in hous-hyre, Bothe in mylk and in mele to make with papelotes[1551];

carding and combing, clouting and was.h.i.+ng, suffering much hunger and woe in winter time; no time to think, and hardly time to pray; but always time to sing. "The wo of those women that wonyeth in cotes" solaced itself in song; but when the echo of the convent bell came to the singer at her clouting, or to her husband, as he drove his plough over the convent acres, they recognised a peace which was founded upon their labours and which, though it could not exist without them, they could never share[1552]. If the songs which the slaves of Athens sang among themselves in the slave quarter at night had come down to us, they would surely have thrown a new light upon those grave philosophers, artists and statesmen, to whom the world owes almost all that it cherishes of wisdom and of beauty. Nor would the Athenians be less great because we knew the slaves. Even so it is no derogation to the monastic ideal to say that the common people, shut out of it, looked at it differently from the great churchmen, who praised it; and, unlike those of the Athenian slaves, their songs still live. The popular mind (these songs would seem to say) had little sympathy for that career in which the daughters of the people had no share. It is immaterial whether they looked upon it with the eye of the fox in the fable, declaring that the grapes were sour, or whether the l.u.s.ty common sense of those living close to nature gave them a contempt for the bloodless ecstasies they could not understand. At all events the cloister mirrored in their songs is a prison and a grave:

Mariez-vous, les filles, Avec ces bons drilles, Et n'allez ja, les filles, Pourrir derrier' les grilles[1553].

That was how the people and the nightingale envisaged it; and no mystic will be the less wise for pondering that brutal last line, the eternal revolt of common sense against asceticism.

All over western and southern Europe this theme was set to music, now with gaiety and insouciance, now with bitterness. The wandering clerk goes singing on his way:

Plangit nonna fletibus The nun is complaining, Inenarrabilibus, Her tears are down raining, Condolens gemitibus She sobbeth and sigheth, Dicens consocialibus: To her sisters she crieth: Heu misella! Misery me!

Nichil est deterius O what can be worse than this Tali vita, life that I dree, c.u.m enim sim petulans When naughty and lovelorn, Et lasciva. and wanton I be.

And he can tell the nun's desire

Pernoctando vigilo All the night long I unwillingly wake, c.u.m non vellem How gladly a lad in mine arms would I take.

Iuvenem amplecterer Quam libenter![1554]

For those who know no Latin it is the same. "In this year," [1359] says a Limburg chronicle, "Men sang and piped this song":

Gott geb im ein verdorben jar G.o.d send to him a lean twelve months der mich macht zu einer nunnen Who in mine own despite, und mir den schwarzen mantel gab A sooty mantle put on me, der weissen rock darunten! All and a ca.s.sock white!

Soll ich ein nunn gewerden And if I must become a nun, dann wider meinen willen Let me but find a page, so will ich auch einem knaben jung And if he is fain to cure my pain seinen k.u.mmer stillen, His pain I will a.s.suage.

Und stillt he mir den meinen nit His be the loss, then, if he fail daran mag he verliesen[1555]. To still my amorous rage.

In Italy at Carnival time in the fifteenth century the favourite songs tell of nuns who leave their convents for a lover[1556]. But above all the theme is found over and over again in French folk songs: "the note, I trowe, y maked was in Fraunce." Two little thirteenth century poems have survived to show how piquant an expression the French singers gave to it.

In one of these the singer wanders out in the merry month of May, that time in which the "chanson populaire" is always set, in deep and unconscious memory of the old spring festivals, celebrated by women in the dawn of European civilisation. He goes plucking flowers, and out of a garden he hears a nun singing to herself:

ki nonne me fist Jesus lou maldie.

je di trop envie vespres ne complies: j'amaisce trop muels moneir bone vie ke fust deduissans et amerousete.

Je sant les douls mals leis ma senturete.

malois soit de deu ki me fist nonnete.

Elle s'escriait comceux esbaihie!

e deus, ki m'ait mis en cest abaie!

maix ieu en istrai per sainte Marie; ke ne vestirai cotte ne gonnette.

Je sant les douls mals leis ma senturete.

malois soit de deu ki me fist nonnete.

Celui manderai a cui seux amie.

k'il me vaigne querre en ceste abaie; s'irons a Parix moneir bone vie, car it est jolis et je seux jonete.

Je sant les douls mals leis ma senturete.

malois soit de deu ki me fist nonnete.

quant ces amis ot la parolle oie, de joie tressaut, li cuers li fremie, et vint a la porte do celle abaie: si en gatait fors sa douce amiete.

Je sant les douls mals leis ma senturete.

malois soit de deu ki me fist nonnete[1557].

"The curse of Jesus on him who made me a nun! All unwillingly say I vespers and compline; more fain were I to lead a happy life of gaiety and love. _I feel the delicious pangs beneath my bosom. The curse of G.o.d on him who made me be a nun!_ She cried, G.o.d's curse on him who put me in this abbey. But by our Lady I will flee away from it and never will I wear this gown and habit. _I feel, etc._ I will send for him whose love I am and bid him come seek me in this abbey. We will go to Paris and lead a gay life, for he is fair and I am young. _I feel, etc._ When her lover heard her words, he leapt for joy and his heart beat fast. He came to the gate of that abbey, and stole away his darling love. _I feel, etc._"

In the other song the setting is the same;

L'autrier un lundi matin m'an aloie ambaniant; s'antrai an un biau jardin, trovai nonette seant.

ceste chansonette dixoit la nonette "longue demoree faites, frans moinnes loialz Se plus suis nonette, ains ke soit li vespres, je morai des jolis malz"[1558].

"Lately on a Monday morn as I went wandering, I entered into a fair garden and there I found a nun sitting. This was the song that the nun sang: 'Long dost thou tarry, frank, faithful monk. If I have to be a nun longer I shall die of the pains of love before vespers.'"

The end hardly ever varies. The nun is either taken away by a lover (as in the first of these songs), or finds occasion to meet one without leaving her house (as in the second); or else she runs away in the hope of finding one like the novice of Avernay in Deschamps' poem, who had learned nothing during her sojourn "fors un mot d'amourette," and who wanted to have a husband "si comme a Sebilette."

Adieu le moniage: Jamaiz n'y entreray.

Adieu tout le mainage Et adieu Avernay!

Bien voy l'aumosne est faitte: Trop tart me suy retraitte, Certes, ce poise my, Plus ne seray nonnette (Oez de la nonnette Comme a le cuer joly: S'ordre ne ly puet plere)[1559].

"Farewell nunhood, never shall I enter thy state. Farewell all the household and farewell Avernay! The alms are given, too late have I left the world. Of a truth this wearies me; I will be a nun no more.

(Hear this tale of the nun, whose heart was gay and whose order could not please her)."

It is but rarely that the singer's sympathy is against the prisoned nun; and although one or two charming songs may be found which convey a warning, the moral sits all awry. A Gascon air (intended, like so many, to accompany a dance and having the favourite refrain "Va leger, legere, va legerement") threatens an altogether inadequate punishment for a nun who enjoys the sweets of this world.

"Down in the meadow, there is a convent. In it a nun lies ill." "Tell me, little nun, for what do you hunger?" "For white apples and for a young lad." "Do not eat, little nun, they will bury you not in the church, nor even in the convent, but out in the graveyard with the poor people"[1560].

A Provencal song with a haunting air tells how the Devil carried off a nun who rebelled against her imprisonment:

Dedins Aix l'y a'no moungeto, Tant pourideto, Di que s'avie soun bel amic Sera la reino dou pays....

"In Aix there is a little nun, a wicked little nun; she says that with her handsome lover she will be queen of all the land. She weeps and weeps, that wicked little nun, and every day she grows thinner and thinner, because she may not put off her habit. But her father has sent her a message, a solemn message, that she cannot do as she would, that in the convent she must stay. The little nun has cursed her father, who made her leave her handsome lover and take the veil and habit. The little nun has cursed the trowel that made the church and the mason who built it and the men who worked for him. The little nun has cursed the priest who said ma.s.s and the acolytes who served him and the congregation who listened to him. The little nun has cursed the cloth which made the veil and the cord of St Francis and the vow of poverty. One day when she was all alone in her room, the devil appeared to her. 'Welcome, my love!' 'I am not your love whom you desire, my pretty. I am the devil, don't you see? I am come to rescue you from the convent.' 'You must first ask my father and also my mother and my friends and my kinsmen, to see if they will consent.'

'No, I will not ask your father, nor yet your mother, nor your friends nor your kinsmen. Now and at once we will go.' 'Farewell, my sister nuns, so little and young, do not do as I did, but praise G.o.d well in the convent.' The devil has taken the little nun, the wicked little nun; he has carried her high up into the sky and then he has hurled her down into h.e.l.l, down, down into h.e.l.l"[1561].

There is a moral here to be sure, but it is the moral of a fairy tale, not of a sermon. As to the many variants of the "Clericus et Nonna" theme in which sometimes the nun makes love to a clerk and is repulsed and sometimes the clerk makes love to a nun and is repulsed[1562] it is possible that the Church had a hand in them all. Wandering clerks and cloistered monks were capable of the most unabashed love-poetry; but sometimes they chose to set themselves right with heaven.

In England the theme of the nun unwillingly professed is not found in popular songs, such as abound in France, Italy and Germany. It received, however, a literary expression towards the close of the fourteenth century. In the pseudo-Chaucerian _Court of Love_ the lover sees among those who do sacrifice to the King and Queen of Love a wailing group of priests and hermits, friars and nuns:

This is the courte of l.u.s.ty folke and gladde, And wel becometh hire abite and arraye; O why be som so sory and so sadde, Complaynyng thus in blak and white and graye?

Freres they ben, and monkes, in G.o.de faye: Alas for rewth! grete dole it is to sene, To se hem thus bewaile and sory bene.

Se howe thei crye and wryng here handes white, For thei so sone wente to religion!

And eke the nonnes with vaile and wymple plight, Here thought is, thei ben in confusion.

"Alas," thay sayn, "we fayne perfeccion, In clothes wide and lake oure libertie But all the synne mote on oure frendes be.

For, Venus wote, we wold as fayne do ye, That ben attired here and wel besene, Desiren man and love in oure degree Ferme and feithfull right as wolde the quene: Oure frendes wikke in tender youth and grene, Ayenst oure wille made us religious; That is the cause we morne and waylen thus."