Towcester, Northamptonshire
First screened 27 January 2008

Women, nuns, sex and sorcery

Austere sect
The Cistercian Order arrived in Britain in 1128, with the establishment of its first monastery at Waverley, in Surrey. The Cistercians were originally an austere sect, founded in France in 1098 by monks who sought to return to the simple way of life laid out by the 6th-century Rule of St Benedict. They built their monasteries in isolated locations, well away from towns, choosing Citeaux in Burgundy for their first 'New Monastery'. Their best-known foundations in Britain include Fountains, Rievaulx and Tintern abbeys.

The Order flourished throughout western Europe, with more than 100 monasteries founded in Britain alone. Many of them had accumulated great wealth by the later medieval period, leaving behind their simple founding principles and vows of poverty.

Women in the Order
Women played a role in the Order from an early stage, and by the later 12th century there were a number of communities of nuns claiming to be Cistercian. Their affiliation was not always welcomed by the male monks, however. The Virgin Mary may have been a woman, but then so too was the temptress Eve, widely regarded as the source of 'original sin' and the cause of the downfall of mankind.

It was not until 1213 that the Cistercian general chapter, the ruling body of the Order made up of the heads of all Cistercian houses, recognised some of the female communities – and even then their status remained unclear. In 1228, moreover, the general chapter declared a halt to the expansion in the number of Cistercian nunneries, ordering that no more should be founded or approved.

White Ladies
This didn't stop the foundation of further unofficial Cistercian communities, however. Indeed, the number of unofficial houses greatly exceeded those that were formally attached to the Order. And whether the nuns were officially recognised or simply followed Cistercian customs, their daily routine and way of life was broadly comparable with that of their male counterparts.

Like the monks, they adopted the characteristic Cistercian white habit of undyed wool, leading them to become known as the 'White Ladies'. And like the monks their daily life followed a regular pattern built around prayer, both private and formal liturgical worship in the priory church; private devotions, mainly Bible reading ('lectio divina', attentive reading of the word of God), in the cloister; communal meals and other community life; and manual labour.

That labour could take various forms. For example, according to monastic historian Janet Burton, who featured in the Sewardsley programme, 'We have some references to nuns engaged in silk work, embroidery. In other cases, where you have a nunnery that is small and poor, you might get nuns sent out into the fields if they hadn't got servants or men to do that kind of work.' At Sewardsley the nuns were even given a licence to collect alms in 1366 after being badly hit by the Black Death.

Sex, sorcery and scandal
It was not uncommon for female religious houses to become the targets of scurrilous gossip or accusations. This was particularly so when ferment in the wider society involved the patrons of these houses, since by discrediting the recipients of their patronage it was possible to discredit the patrons themselves.

Something of this nature appears to have occurred at Sewardsley during the 15th century. In 1434, the bishop of Lincoln sent a commissioner to investigate reports that the nuns having 'cast aside the restraint of all modesty and chastity, are giving their minds to debauchery committed in damnable wise in public and as it were in the sight of all the people acts of adultery, incest, sacrilege and fornication to the death of their own souls, the shame of religion and the mischievous example of others'.

As with subsequent accusations of witchcraft, it seems likely that there was little truth in the reports, but that they were being used as part of wider power struggles between competing local magnates.

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