of excuse for wandering in the world.  Right through the Middle Ages council after council, bishop after bishop, reformer after reformer, tried in vain to keep them shut up.  The greatest attempt of all began in 1300, when the pope published a Bull ordering that nuns should never, save in very exceptional circumstances, leave their convents and that no secular person should be allowed to go in and visit them, without a special licence and a good reason.  This will make the modern reader pity the poor nuns, but there is no need, for nobody ever succeeded in putting it into force for more than five minutes, though the bishops spent over two centuries in trying to do so and were still trying in vain when King Henry VIII dissolved the nunneries and turned all the nuns out into the world for ever, whether they liked it or not.  At one nunnery in the Lincoln diocese, when the bishop came and deposited a copy of the Bull in the house and ordered the nuns to obey it, they ran after him to the gate when he was riding away and threw the Bull at his head, screaming that they would never observe it.[20] The more practical bishops indeed, soon stopped trying to enforce the Bull as it stood and contented themselves with ordering that nuns were not to go out or pay visits too often, or without a companion, or without licence, or without a good reason.  But even in this they were not very successful, because the nuns were most prolific in excellent reasons why they should go out.  Sometimes they said that their parents were ill; and then they would go away to smooth the pillow of the sick.  Sometimes they said that they had to go to market to buy herrings.  Sometimes they said that they had to go to confession at a monastery.  Sometimes it is really difficult to imagine what they said.  What are we to think, for instance, of that giddy nun ’who on Monday night did pass the night with the Austin friars at Northampton and did dance and play the lute with them in the same place until midnight, and on the night following she passed the night with the Friars’ preachers at Northampton, luting and dancing in like manner’?[21] Chaucer told us how the friar loved harping and how his eyes twinkled like stars in his head when he sang, but failed perhaps to observe that he had lured Madame Eglentyne into a dance.

It is indeed difficult to see what ‘legitimate’ excuses the nuns can have made for all their wandering about in the streets and the fields and in and out of people’s houses, and it is sorely to be feared that either they were too much of a handful for Madame Eglentyne, or else she winked at their doings.  For somehow or other one suspects that she had no great opinion of bishops.  After all Chaucer would never have met her, if she had not managed to circumvent her own, since if there was one excuse for wandering of which the bishops thoroughly disapproved, it was precisely the excuse of pilgrimages.  Madame Eglentyne was not quite as simple and coy as she looked.