8 - Looking for medieval nuns

Summary

It has been rightly pointed out that just because a monastic house was, for whatever reason, small and poor, it does not follow that it is poorly documented. Among the smallest and least well endowed houses in medieval England were priories of regular canons and of nuns. However, as Andrew Abram's paper in this collection demonstrates, the Augustinian priory of Wombridge may have numbered only a handful of canons and been classed as a lesser monastery at the Dissolution, but its cartulary bears witness to the significant role the canons had in the locality. That other type of ‘small and poor’ religious house, the nunnery, has received increasing attention from historians in recent years, and it has been demonstrated that despite the lack of size and resources of many of them much can be known of their history. Yet for the nunneries of the north of England in the Middle Ages it remains the case that only one, that of Nunkeeling, has a surviving cartulary, and only a handful have substantial numbers of surviving original charters or other archives produced at the priory. Casting the net more widely than the archives – in a strict sense – of houses of female religious provides opportunities to recover a little more of their history. This paper is concerned with the issue of how to approach the history of nunneries, and seeks to use a range of materials to explore what can be known not of the institutions themselves but of the women who lived in them.

For the monastic historian a staple source is the charter, containing as it does a record of the transfer of land and assets to or from a religious house. For my purposes, in terms of identifying individual religious, the charter has limited use. Charters issued by a nunnery are usually issued by an (often) unnamed prioress and convent or nuns. Moreover, charters that I have examined in connection with the northern English nunneries suggest that nuns, unlike monks and canons, do not usually attest. Where we do find the names of nuns in charters they are likely to be the women whose entry into a nunnery accompanied a grant of land. I have discussed the evidence for the period up to the early thirteenth century extensively elsewhere. I will give here three examples that had eluded me until recently.