habit which did not conduce to wakefulness at 1 a.m.  Consequently they were somewhat sleepy at matins and found an almost Johnsonian difficulty in getting up early.  Wise St Benedict foresaw the difficulty, when he wrote in his rule:  ’When they rise for the Divine Office, let them gently encourage one another, because of the excuses made by those that are drowsy.’[8] At the nunnery of Stainfield in 1519 the bishop discovered that half an hour sometimes elapsed between the last stroke of the bell and the beginning of the service, and that some of the nuns did not sing, but dozed, partly because they had not enough candles, but chiefly because they went late to bed;[9] and whoever is without sin among us, let him cast the first stone!  There was a tendency also among both monks and nuns to slip out before the end of the service on any good or bad excuse:  they had to see after the dinner or the guest-house, their gardens needed weeding, or they did not feel well.  But the most common fault of all was to gabble through the services as quickly as they could in order to get them over.  They left out the syllables at the beginning and end of words, they omitted the dipsalma or pause between two verses, so that one side of the choir was beginning the second half before the other side had finished the first; they skipped sentences, they mumbled and slurred what should have been ‘entuned in their nose ful semely’, and altogether they made a terrible mess of the stately plainsong.  So prevalent was the fault of gabbling that the Father of Evil was obliged to charter a special Devil called Tittivillus, whose sole business it was to collect all these dropped syllables and carry them back to his master in a big bag.  In one way or another, we have a good deal of information about him, for he was always letting himself be seen by holy men, who generally had a sharp eye for devils.  One Latin rhyme distinguishes carefully between the contents of his sack:  ’These are they who wickedly corrupt the holy psalms:  the dangler, the gasper, the leaper, the galloper, the dragger, the mumbler, the fore-skipper, the fore-runner and the over-leaper:  Tittivillus collecteth the fragments of these men’s words.’[10] Indeed, a holy Cistercian abbot once interviewed the poor little devil himself and heard about his alarming industry; this is the story as it is told in The Myroure of Oure Ladye, written for the delectation of the nuns of Syon in the fifteenth century:  ’We read of a holy Abbot of the order of Citeaux that while he stood in the choir at matins he saw a fiend that had a long and great poke hanging about his neck and went about the choir from one to another and waited busily after all letters and syllables and words and failings that any made; and them he gathered diligently and put them in his poke.  And when he came before the Abbot, waiting if aught had escaped him that he might have gotten and put in his bag, the Abbot was astonied and afeard of the foulness and misshape of