Then, again, there were the fashionable dresses which the visitors introduced into nunneries.  It is quite certain that Madame Eglentyne was not unmoved by them; and it is a sad fact that she began to think the monastic habit very black and ugly, and the monastic life very strict; and to decide that if some little amenities were imported into it no one would be a penny the worse, and perhaps the bishop would not notice.  That is why, when Chaucer met her,

Ful fetis was hir cloke, as I was war,
Of smal coral aboute hir arm she bar
A peire of bedes, gauded al with grene,
And ther-on heng a broche of gold ful shene.

Unfortunately, however, the bishop did notice; the registers are indeed full of those clothes of Madame Eglentyne’s, and of the even more frivolous ones which she wore in the privacy of the house.  For more than six weary centuries the bishops waged a holy war against fashion in the cloister, and waged it in vain; for as long as nuns mingled freely with secular women, it was impossible to prevent them from adopting secular modes.  Occasionally a wretched bishop would find himself floundering unhandily, in masculine bewilderment, through something like a complete catalogue of contemporary fashions, in order to specify what the nuns were not to wear.  Synods sat solemnly, bishops and archbishops shook their grey heads, over golden hairpins and silver belts, jewelled rings, laced shoes, slashed tunics, low necks and long trains, gay colours, costly cloth, and valuable furs.  The nuns were supposed to wear their veils pinned tightly down to their eyebrows, so that their foreheads were completely hidden; but high foreheads happened to be fashionable among worldly ladies, who even shaved theirs to make them higher, and the result was that the nuns could not resist lifting up and spreading out their veils, for how otherwise did Chaucer know that Madame Eglentyne had such a fair forehead (’almost a spanne broad, I trowe’)?  If she had been wearing her veil properly, it would have been invisible, and the father of English poetry may be observed discreetly but plainly winking the other eye when he puts in that little touch; his contemporaries would see the point very quickly.  And that brooch and that fetis cloak of hers....  Here is what some tale-bearing nuns told the Bishop of Lincoln about their Prioress, fifty years after Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales.  ‘The Prioress,’ they said with their most sanctimonious air, wears golden rings exceeding costly, with divers precious stones and also girdles silvered and gilded over and silken veils and she carries her veil too high above her forehead, so that her forehead, being entirely uncovered, can be seen of all, and she wears furs of vair.  Also she wears shifts of cloth of Rennes, which costs sixteen pence the ell.  Also she wears kirtles laced with silk and tiring pins of silver and silver gilt and has made all the nuns wear the like.  Also she wears above her veil a cap of estate, furred with budge.  Item, she has on her neck a long silken band, in English a lace, which hangs down below her breast and there on a golden ring with one diamond.[16] Is it not Madame Eglentyne to the life?  Nothing escaped our good Dan Chaucer’s eye, for all that he rode always looking on the ground.