nose, grey eyes, and little red mouth—­conforms to the courtly standard.  The convents were apt to be rather snobbish; ladies and rich burgesses’ daughters got into them, but poor and low-born girls never.  So the nuns probably said to each other that what with her pretty ways and her good temper and her aristocratic connexions, wouldn’t it be a good thing to choose her for prioress when the old prioress died?  And so they did, and she had been a prioress for some years when Chaucer met her.  At first it was very exciting, and Eglentyne liked being called ‘Mother’ by nuns who were older than herself, and having a private room to sit in and all the visitors to entertain.  But she soon found that it was not by any means all a bed of roses; for there was a great deal of business to be done by the head of a house—­not only looking after the internal discipline of the convent, but also superintending money matters and giving orders to the bailiffs on her estates, and seeing that the farms were paying well, and the tithes coming in to the churches which belonged to the nunnery, and that the Italian merchants who came to buy the wool off her sheeps’ backs gave a good price for it.  In all this business she was supposed to take the advice of the nuns, meeting in the chapter-house, where all business was transacted.  I am afraid that sometimes Eglentyne used to think that it was much better to do things by herself, and so she would seal documents with the convent seal without telling them.  One should always distrust the head of an office or school or society who says, with a self-satisfied air, that it is much more satisfactory to do the thing herself than to depute it to the proper subordinates; it either means that she is an autocrat, or else that she cannot organize.  Madame Eglentyne was rather an autocrat, in a good-natured sort of way, and besides she hated bother.  So she did not always consult the nuns; and I fear too (after many researches into that past of hers which Chaucer forgot to mention) that she often tried to evade rendering an account of income and expenditure to them every year, as she was supposed to do.

The nuns, of course, objected to this; and the first time the bishop came on his rounds they complained about it to him.  They said, too, that she was a bad business woman and got into debt; and that when she was short of money she used to sell woods belonging to the convent, and promise annual pensions to various people in return for lump sums down, and lease out farms for a long time at low rates, and do various other things by which the convent would lose in the long run.  And besides, she had let the roof of the church get into such ill repair that rain came through the holes on to their heads when they were singing; and would my lord bishop please to look at the holes in their clothes and tell her to provide them with new ones?  Other wicked prioresses used sometimes even to pawn the plate and jewels of the convent, to get money for their own private purposes.