|
The Gilbertine order and the nun of Watton
The Gilbertine order
Most medieval monastic orders were originally founded on the continent and then imported to Britain as religious blueprints for people to follow. Gilbertines, as featured in the 2002 series Chicksands programme, were a bit different and actually started in England. Gilbert, the son of a Norman knight and Saxon mother, was born around 1083. Considered unsuitable to be a knight like his father, due to some disability, he travelled to France and later returned to teach religion to local children, many of whom were girls.
Though Gilbert would have had relatively rich parents it appears that he gave most of his wealth to the poor. When his father died he became both squire and priest. He built lodgings next to a parish church for the girls (who wanted to become nuns and follow the rule of St Benedict) and soon established a thriving community with lay-brothers brought in to work the land.
By 1139 Gilbert had been given land on which to build a new monastery and soon inherited another from an abandoned Cistercian order. In 1147 he travelled to Citeaux in France to try to get the Cistercians to take on his order, which was now becoming quite large. Pope Eugenius III was not interested in the extra responsibility and took the unusual step of granting Gilbert control of his own order.
Gilbert employed Augustinian canons, or monks, to act as priests to his nuns and this started the characteristic Gilbertine system of having both sexes based at the same monastery. The basic plan was to have the nuns and canons separated within the complex. The church for worship was to have a high wall so that neither sex could see the other but both could hear the preaching. The men and women were to live in separate houses and there was to be no contact between them.
After a hard life of wearing hair shirts, working long hours and eating little, Gilbert himself died in 1189 at the grand old age of 106. His system still worked well for some time after that but by 1534 one of Henry VIII's commissioners visited the Chicksands site and found evidence for some nuns being 'heavy with child'. It must have caused a great scandal in its day.
The nun of Watton
Watton Priory, in Yorkshire, is one of the very few Gilbertine monasteries that have been excavated (the excavation, by W H St John Hope took place in the 1890s). And it was at Watton that one of the greatest – and most gruesome – of Gilbertine scandals occurred: the case of the nun of Watton.
As a young girl of four years old, she was placed at Watton by the Archbishop of York. She grew up without any real religious conviction or vocation and became 'friendly' with a lay brother or canon. She got pregnant and when the other nuns found out they were horrified.
The canon fled but was captured and brought back. The nuns then forced the girl to cut off the man's genitals, which the nuns then stuffed in the girl's throat. The punishment reflected the nuns' horror at what had happened; it seemed to strike at every reason why they had given up the world, the flesh and the devil.
We hear no more of the unfortunate canon. But the nun is reported to have been shackled and kept imprisoned until one day she supposedly had a vision from the Archbishop of York, who spirited away the result of her pregnancy and miraculously caused the chains and fetters on her legs and arms to drop away.
| 
