him and said unto him:  What art thou?  And he answered and said, I am a poor devil and my name is Tittivillus and I do mine office that is committed unto me.  And what is thine office? said the Abbot.  He answered:  I must each day, he said, bring my master a thousand pokes full of failings and of negligences and syllables and words, that are done in your order in reading and singing and else I must be sore beaten.’[11] But there is no reason to suppose that he often got his beating, though one may be sure that Madame Eglentyne, busily chanting through her nose, never gave him the slightest help.  In his spare moments, when he was not engaged in picking up those unconsidered trifles which the monks let fall from the psalms, Tittivillus used to fill up odd corners of his sack with the idle talk of people who gossiped in church; and he also sat up aloft and collected all the high notes of vain tenors, who sang to their own glory, instead of to the glory of God, and pitched the chants three notes higher than the cracked voices of their elders could rise.

But the monotony of convent life sometimes did more than make the nuns unconscious contributors to Tittivillus’s sack.  It sometimes played havoc with their tempers.  The nuns were not chosen for convent life because they were saints.  They were no more immune from tantrums than was the Wife of Bath, who was out of all charity when other village wives went into church before her; and sometimes they got terribly on each others’ nerves.  Readers of Piers Plowman will remember that when the seven deadly sins come in, Wrath tells how he was cook to the prioress of a convent and, says he,

     Of wycked wordes I, Wrath ... here wordes imade,
     Til ‘thow lixte’ and ‘thow lixte’ ... lopen oute at ones,
     And eyther hitte other ... vnder the cheke;
     Hadde thei had knyves, by Cryst ... her eyther had killed other.

To be sure, it is not often that we hear of anything so bad as that fifteenth-century prioress, who used to drag her nuns round the choir by their veils in the middle of the service, screaming ‘Liar!’ and ‘Harlot!’ at them;[12] or that other sixteenth-century lady who used to kick them and hit them on the head with her fists and put them in the stocks.[13] All prioresses were not ‘ful plesaunt and amiable of port’, or stately in their manner.  The records of monastic visitations show that bad temper and petty bickering sometimes broke the peace of convent life.

But we must be back at Eglentyne.  She went on living for ten or twelve years as a simple nun, and she sang the services very nicely and had a sweet temper and pretty manners and was very popular.  Moreover, she was of good birth; Chaucer tells us a great deal about her beautiful behaviour at table and her courtesy, which shows that she was a lady born and bred; indeed, his description of this might have been taken straight out of one of the feudal books of deportment for girls; even her personal beauty—­straight