All this was very disturbing to the peace and quiet of the nuns, and especially disturbing were the boarders, for they wore gay clothes, and had pet dogs and callers, and set a very frivolous example to the nuns.  At one nunnery we find a bishop ordering:  ’Let Felmersham’s wife, with her whole household and other women, be utterly removed from your monastery within one year, seeing that they are a cause of disturbance to the nuns and an occasion to bad example, by reason of their attire and of those who come to visit them.’[14] It can be easily imagined why the bishops objected so much to the reception of these worldly married women as boarders.  Just substitute for ‘Felmersham’s wife’ ’the Wife of Bath’ and all is explained.  That lady was not a person whom a prioress would lightly refuse; the list of her pilgrimages alone would give her the entree into any nunnery.  Smiling her gap-toothed smile and riding easily upon her ambler, she would enter the gates, and what a month of excitement would pass before she rode away again.  I am sure that it was she who taught Madame Eglentyne the most fashionable way to pinch a wimple; and she certainly introduced hats ’as broad as is a buckler or a targe’ and scarlet stockings into some nunneries.  The bishops disliked it all very much, but they never succeeded in turning the boarders out for all their efforts, because the nuns always needed the money which they paid for their board and lodging.

It is easy to understand that this constant intercourse with worldly visitors would give rise to the spread of worldly habits in Madame Eglentyne’s nunnery.  Nuns, after all, were but women, and they had the amiable vanities of their sex.  But Authority (with a large A) did not consider their vanities amiable at all.  It was the view of Authority that the Devil had dispatched three lesser D’s to be the damnation of nuns, and those three D’s were Dances, Dresses, and Dogs.  Medieval England was famous for dancing and mumming and minstrelsy; it was Merry England because, however plague and pestilence and famine and the cruelties of man to man might darken life, still it loved these things.  But there were no two views possible about what the Church thought of dancing; it was accurately summed up by one moralist in the aphorism, ’The Devil is the inventor and governor and disposer of dances and dancing.’  Yet when we look into those accounts which Madame Eglentyne rendered (or did not render) to her nuns at the end of every year, we shall find payments for wassail at New Year and Twelfth Night, for May games, for bread and ale on bonfire nights, for harpers and players at Christmas, for a present to the Boy Bishop on his rounds, and perhaps for an extra pittance when the youngest schoolgirl was allowed to dress up and act as abbess of the convent for the whole of Innocents’ Day.  And when we look in the bishops’ registers we shall find Madame Eglentyne forbidden ’all manner of minstrelsy, interludes, dancing or revelling within your holy place’; and she would be fortunate indeed if her bishop would make exception for Christmas, ’and other honest times of recreation among yourselves used in absence of seculars in all wise’.  Somehow one feels an insistent conviction that her cheer of court included dancing.[15]