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The Early Abbesses, Nuns and Female Tenants of the Abbey of Holy Trinity, Caen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

John Walmsley
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A major problem for the student of a relatively new discipline or sub-discipline is the construction of a framework within which to operate. In the case of the economic, social and legal position of women in the Middle Ages the only clear thing is that the lines are slowly being redrawn, although more perhaps with respect to the central Middle Ages than to the earlier period. In fact, despite the paucity of evidence there has always been a surprising degree of agreement about the early Middle Ages. A wide range of authors from Lina Eckenstein to Eileen Power, Lady Stenton and Suzanne Wemple have regarded the period, from roughly the sixth to the ninth centuries, as one of ‘rough equality’ (to use Stenton's words) between men and women in general, and as a period of veneration, even elevation, of female religious. As for the later period, there is a much wider range of opinion, much of it conflicting. Speaking of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, Brian Tierney and Sidney Painter, in a popular general work, conclude that: ‘Evidence of the general improvement in the status of women is fairly extensive.’ The elevation of marriage to sacrament status in the twelfth century is undoubtedly seen by some as part of this process: ‘C'est dans la réforme du mariage qu'il faut chercher les germes les plus vigoureux de l'amélioration dont bénéficie la condition féminine à partir du XIIe siècle, même si cette amélioration n'est ni continue ni générate.’ By contrast, other works suggest that an earlier golden age for women came to an end in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as an even more male-dominated feudal society reached its zenith in terms of order and definition.

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The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , July 1997 , pp. 425 - 444
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

1 L. Eckenstein, Women under monasticism, Cambridge 1896 repr. New York 1963; Stenton, D., The English woman in history, London 1957Google Scholar; Power, E., ‘The position of women’, in Crump, C. G. and Jacob, E. F. (eds),The legacy of the Middle Ages, Oxford 1926Google Scholar; Wemple, S. F., Women in Frankish society, Philadelphia 1981Google Scholar. An important modification to Stenton's view can be found in Klinck, A., ‘Anglo-Saxon women and the law’, Journal of Medieval History viii (1982), 107–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who argues that the gradual improvement in the position of English women across the five centuries before the Norman Conquest was greater than the deterioration in the century after it.

2 Tierney, B. and Painter, S., Western Europe in the Middle Ages 300–1475, New York 1970, 233Google Scholar.

3 Lorcin, M.T., La famille, in Favier, J. (ed.), La France médiévale, Paris 1983, 35Google Scholar. See also Brooke, C., The medieval idea of marriage, Oxford 1989, 56–60, 273–80Google Scholar.

4 Bloch, M., Feudal society, trans. Manyon, L. A., Chicago 1961, 59–71, 187-9Google Scholar. Stenton, F., The first century of English feudalism 1066–1166, Oxford 1961Google Scholar, is probably the best illustration of such a systematically organised society. The deleterious effect of feudalism on the position of women in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is discussed in the context of marriage in Duby, G., The knight, the lady and the priest: the making of modern marriage in France, trans. Bray, B., London 1984, 92–120Google Scholar. See also Hermite-Leclercq's, P. L. appropriately titled ‘The feudal order’, in Klapisch-Zuber, C. (ed.), A history of women in the west, II: Silences of the Middle Ages, Cambridge, Mass.-London 1992Google Scholar.

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9 That is not to say that the values of upper-class women did not have repercussions further down the social scale. Indeed, it will be argued that this is an area in which Norman society appears to have differed greatly from other parts of France and England: see below p. 440.

10 The main printed sources for this period of the abbey's history are Les actes de Guillaume; Charters and custumals I; Charters and custumals II.

11 The two abbeys were established about 1.5 km apart, St Stephen's to the south-west and Holy Trinity to the east of the recently constructed (i.e. c. 1060) ducal castle.

12 Compare the dispositive sections of their dedication charters in Les actes de Guillaume, 54, 60. In the charter of Holy Trinity William appears in the opening line, Matilda seventeen lines later in the context of the church building.

13 Les actes de Guillaume, 43, 49, tables of concordance of deeds in favour of Holy Trinity and St Stephen's.

14 Ibid. no. 16. Only in this testamentary context, and then it was largely limited to personal movable property, was a married woman's civil power equal to her husband's: Génestal, R., ‘La femme mariée dans l'ancien droit normand’, Revue hislorique du droit français et étranger 4th ser. ix (1930), 492–3Google Scholar.

15 Birdsall, J., ‘The abbey of La Trinité at Caen in the 11th and 12th centuries’, unpubl. PhD diss. Harvard 1925, ch. vGoogle Scholar.

16 In William's lifetime Holy Trinity received the manors of Felsted and Great Baddow in Essex, Minchinhampton and Pinbury in Gloucestershire, Tarrant Launceston in Dorset and Umberleigh in Devon. St Stephen's received the manors of Panfield in Essex, Wellhall in Norfolk, Frampton and Bincombe in Dorset, Northam in Devon and a miscellaneous collection of churches, tithes and portions of land at Crewkerne in Somerset, Corsham in Wiltshire, Moreton in Essex and unspecified property in London: Les actes de Guillaume, nos 4 (St Stephen's), 9, 15 (Holy Trinity). The mid thirteenth-century register of Eudes Rigaud values the English rents of Holy Trinity at £180 sterling, compared with £220 for St Stephen's: Regestrum visitationum, i. 94.

17 Les actes de Guillaume, 14; Baylé, M., La Trinité de Caen: sa place dans l'histoire de l'architecture el du décor romans, Geneva 1979, 13Google Scholar.

18 Rouleaux des morts. The original roll, now lost, was 20.5 metres long and consisted of many entries, called tituli, some in verse, acknowledging receipt of the roll and expressing appreciation of the deceased's contribution to religious life.

19 Ibid. 276, titulus 217. This has been translated in entertaining fashion by Southern, R. W. in The making of the Middle Ages, London 1953, 24Google Scholar. Following the Rouleaux des morts, pp. ii, 177, Southern mistakenly identifies Abbess Matilda as one of the daughters of William the Conqueror. For the five, or possibly six, daughters of William see Douglas, D. C., William the Conqueror, Berkeley 1964, app. CGoogle Scholar.

20 The ecclesiastical history of Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, M., Oxford 1968–1980, iv. 46Google Scholar.

21 Delisle, L., Études sur la condition de la classe agricole et l'état de l'agriculture en Normandie au moyen âge, Evreux 1851, ch. xvGoogle Scholar.

22 Charters and custumals II, 115–17.

23 Les actes de Guillaume, no. 8, p. 85.

24 Ibid. no. 17, and plates VI, VII, the original charters for Holy Trinity and St Stephen's.

25 William's successor as duke of Normandy, Robert Curthose, relaxed these limits by allowing Holy Trinity the remaining three houses and fishing rights on the Orne, which were formerly reserved for the duke: Charters and custumals II, 123–4.

26 Cf. Gold, S. P., ‘The charters of Le Ronceray d'Angers: male/female interaction in monastic business’, in Rosenthal, J. T. (ed.), Medieval women and the sources of medieval history, Athens, Ga 1990, 122–32Google Scholar.

27 For the widespread existence (and consequences) of monastic ‘farmers’ on ecclesiastical estates see Knowles, D.,The monastic order in England 940–1216, Cambridge 1966, 437–8Google Scholar.

28 Charters and custumals I, p. x, asserts that there were no Holy Trinity cells in England, whereas Power, Eileen, Medieval English nunneries, Cambridge 1992, 636Google Scholar, claims that there were two: one at Horstead in Norfolk, the other at Minchinhampton in Gloucestershire. I have found no evidence for either of them in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and would concur with Chibnall that Felsted in Essex was the most likely location for such a cell. Her view is based on the handsome scale of the Norman church at Felsted. In addition to this an entry in survey B(c. 1170) for Felsted suggests the presence of nuns with a dwelling and garden close to the church: Charters and custumals I, 45, no. 104. The later evidence of Eudes Rigaud suggests that in 1257 a few of the nuns were not claustrated: Regestrum visitationem, ii. 575: ‘invenimus tamen quod erant ibi LXXV moniales commorantes, et quinque extra’.

29 Les actes de Guillaume, no. 12, p. 97.

30 Ibid. 7.

31 Pollock, F. and Maitland, F. W., The history of English law, Cambridge 1895, i. 482–5Google Scholar; Clark, C., ‘Women's names in post-conquest England: observations and speculations’, Speculum liii (1978), 231–2Google Scholar.

32 The earliest surviving charter of an individual woman, other than an abbess, in the Holy Trinity archive is that of a widow, Philippa of Rosel, who granted portions ofland from her own demesne to the abbey in order to be quit of annual wheat rent: Charters and custumals II, 39–40, no. 6. The earliest women's charters in the northern Danelaw are also from the early thirteenth century: Stenton, , The English woman in history, 77Google Scholar. Likewise in Normandy women's seals become common from about this time: Génestal, , ‘La femme mariée’, 486–8Google Scholar. For the period 1230–97 there are more than sixty ‘sales’ of wheat rents to the abbey, many of them by widows: Charters and custumals II, 28 n. 2.

33 Ibid. 121. For a fuller discussion of the abbey's property in the Channel Islands see Walmsley, J., ‘Note sur les possessions de l'abbaye de la Trinité de Caen aux lies normandes’, Annales de Normandie xxxvii (1987), 227–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Les actes de Guillaume, no. 25.

35 Charters and custumals II, 131–2.

36 Ibid. 132.

37 Ibid. 55. There were two mines to one sester.

38 Paris, Bibiothèque nationale, MS lat. 5650, fos 20–3 (Normandy), fos 26–9 (England). The surveys of the English estates have been published in Charters and custumals I, 33–8, those for Normandy in Charters and custumals II, 53–60.

39 Ibid. p. xxx.

40 Ibid. p. xxix.

41 Ibid. p. xxxi

42 Legras, H., Le bourgage de Caen, Paris 1911, 39–42Google Scholar. It is no longer held that the two abbeys were founded to expiate William and Matilda's marriage within the prohibited degrees: De Bouard, M., ‘L'édification des deux abbayes’, in Liberté de Normandie, 7–8, 07 1966Google Scholar, a report on the novocentenary of the founding of Holy Trinity.

43 Cf. Johnson, P. D., Equal in monastic profession: religious women in medieval France, Chicago 1991, 166–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Haskins, C. H., Norman institutions, Cambridge, Mass. 1925, 63–4Google Scholar, repr in Charters and custumals II, 125–8.

45 The broader history of this subject is dealt with in sociological and legal terms in White, S. D., Custom, kinship, and gifts to saints: the laudatio parentumin western France 1050–1150, Chapel Hill, NC 1988Google Scholar.

46 Ibid. 38–9, 52, 77–83, 172–3; and, for an early example in Normandy, see Chibnall, M., The world of Orderic Vitalis, Oxford 1984, 58–9Google Scholar.

47 Les actes de Guillaume, no. 2, p. 55. The successful history of Ranulf's family is traced in Musset, L., ‘A-t-il existé en Normandie au XIe siècle une aristocratie d'argent?’, Annales de Normandie ix (1959), 292–4Google Scholar.

48 Les actes de Guillaume, no. 8, p. 83.

49 Haskins, , Norman institutions, 63–4Google Scholar; Les actes de Guillaume, no. 8, p. 88 (Tassilly, Mountbouin, Colombelles); no. 22, p. 131 (Hénouville).

50 Caen, Bibliothèque de l'Université de Caen, fonds normand, cote 21420. The unfortunate history of the original cartulary and the indifferent copy made by H. de Toustain in 1853 is related in Les actes de Guillaume, 21.

51 Cf. Charters and custumals II, 12, 22.

52 Les actes de Guillaume, no. 22, of c. 1080–5 (?).

53 Ibid. 48. Abbess Matilda's mortuary roll lists 31 deceased nuns, of whom only 6 are identifiable from other sources: Rouleaux des marts, 181–2. My figures differ slightly from Musset's.

54 William de Braiose is described as a baron of at least the second rank in Finn, R. Welldon, An introduction to Domesday Book, London 1963, 221Google Scholar. Thurstan Haldup, vicomte of the Cotentin in western Normandy, was not only the principal donor of property to Holy Trinity, after William and Matilda, but was also the founder of the abbey of Lessay in the Cotentin c. 1080, where he installed his brother as first abbot: de Bouard, M. (ed.), Histoire de la Normandie, Toulouse 1970, 180Google Scholar.

55 Power, , Medieval English nunneries, ch. i and pp. 419–22Google Scholar. Les actes de Guillaume, 47, comments on the high proportion of women who took the veil while their husbands were still alive. See also Verdun, J., ‘Les sources d'histoire de la femme en Occident au Xe–XIIIe siècles’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale xx (1977), 247Google Scholar, who notes that about 10% of the nuns at Ronceray in Anjou were married women. This may well reflect the effectiveness of tenth- and eleventh-century teaching that husbands and wives could attain a more virtuous life through separation and self-denial: Duby, , The knight, the lady and the priest, 46, 89Google Scholar, where the interesting question is posed: ‘Was there some correlation between the proliferation of convents for women in northern France in the eleventh century and the contemporary reinforcement of the scruples preventing nobles from purely and simply repudiating wives?’ Cf. Elliott, , Spiritual marriage, chs iii, ivGoogle Scholar.

56 Principally the accounts of 1427–8, 1436–7: Caen, Archives du Calvados, H Trinité de Caen, uncatalogued, Comptes 1427–8, 1436–7, but also an unpublished reconstituted survey of 1257 compiled by Musset: for example, § 118, ‘Offices intérieures de l'abbaye’, and § 120–3, ‘Agents administratifs’. It is to be hoped that this survey will be published soon. See Charters and Custumals II, 31–2.

57 Johnson, , Equal in monastic profession, 181Google Scholar , makes the point that Holy Trinity ‘made do with a chapter of only [my italics] four canons’. Gold, ‘The charters of Le Ronceray d'Angers’, argues for a ‘closeness of association between the nuns and their canons’ in the administration of the abbey.

58 Notwithstanding the injunctions against the practice. See Lynch, J. H.,Simoniacal entry into religious life from 1000 to 1260: a social, economic and legal study, Columbus 1976Google Scholar; Johnson, , Equal in monastic profession, 25ffGoogle Scholar.

59 See, for example, Legras, Le bourgage de Caen, app., charter 3, a late twelfth-century grant by Thomas d'Anguerny, a Caen burgess, of four houses to Holy Trinity on his daughter becoming a nun there; andCharters and custumals II, 36–7, no. 3, Thomas Bardulf's grant of 30s. rent from a mill in Derbyshire on his daughter becoming a nun. For the changing profile of alienations to monasteries see ,White, , Custom, kinship, and gifts to saints, 191–2Google Scholar.

60 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS lat. 5650, fos 40V–60V (England), fos 60v–87r (Normandy);Charters and custumals I, 39–62; Charters and custumals II, 61–111.

61 Lennard, R., ‘What is a manorial extent?’ English Historical Review xliv (1929), 256–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harvey, P. D. A., Manorial records (British Records Association v, 1984), ch. iiGoogle Scholar.

62 Charters and custumals I, 37; Charters and custumals II, 55.

63 Ibid. 114.

64 M Charters and custumals I, 33, 37.

65 Ibid. 59–61, 65, 72-3.

66 Ibid. 75.

67 It should be noted that English and Norman acres, and indeed virgates, differed. The Norman acre seems to have been about twice the size of the English acre, and the Norman virgate was one-quarter of an acre rather than a number of whole acres as in England: Navel, H., Recherches sur les anciennes mesures agraires normandes: acres, verge'es et perches, ii, Caen 1932Google Scholar.

68 Pollock, and Maitland, , History of English law, ii. 427Google Scholar.

69 Searle, E., ‘Seigneurial control of women's marriage: the antecedents and function of merchet in England’, Past and Present lxxxii (1979), 39Google Scholar. The strong position of English widows is also brought out in Hilton, The English peasantry in the later Middle Ages, 98–101; Franklin, P., ‘Peasant widows; “liberation” and remarriage before the Black Death’, Economic History Review 2nd ser. xxxix (1986)Google Scholar; Hanawalt, B., The ties that bound, Oxford 1986, 71, 220–6Google Scholar; Bennett, , Women in the medieval English countryside, ch. viGoogle Scholar.

70 TAC: Latin text, p t 1, chs iii, v, xi(De viduis etpupillis, De dotaliciis, De custodia orphani); pt 11, ch. lxxxiii (De divisione inter heredes).

71 Ibid. ch. xi, sect. 1. Similar problems and complications arising out of remarriage occurred in England and led to a great deal of litigation, especially actions of dower, in the thirteenth century. Most of the late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century legislation on the subject, including clauses 7 and 8 of Magna Carta, tended to favour widows. It was only in the last quarter of the thirteenth century that ‘the provisions made for the protection of the doweress were in effect turned on end to protect the heir’ by means of the Statutes of Gloucester (1278) and Westminster II (1285): Loengard, J., ‘“Of the gift of the husband ”: English dower and its consequences in the year 1200’, in Kirshner, J. and Wemple, S. F. (eds), Women of the medieval world, Oxford 1985, 248Google Scholar.

72 The classic descriptive work is Génestal, R., Le parage normand, Caen 1911Google Scholar.

73 Yver, J., ‘Les caractères originaux de la coutume de Normandie’, Mémoires de l'académie nationale des sciences, arts et belle-lettres de Caen n.s. xii (1952), 329–31Google Scholar, and Egalité entre héritiers et exclusion des enfants dotés: essai de géographie coutumière, Paris 1966, 279–89Google Scholar.

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75 For example, TAC, ch. viii (De portione fratrum).

76 Ibid. ch. v. sect. 2–4; ch. xi, sect. 5; ch. lxxxiii, sect. 4. See Yver, , ‘Les caractères originaux’, 317–18Google Scholar, for the way in which the TAC and the Summa de legibus Normannie applied laws and customs to the whole population that elsewhere in France were applicable to the nobility alone.

77 Charters and cuslumals I, 75–86: Minchinhampton and Avening Survey D.

78 Ibid. 87–104: Felsted DE.

79 Cf. Faith, R., ‘Peasant families and inheritance in medieval England’, Agricultural History Review xiv (1966), 77–95Google Scholar.

80 Charters and custumals I, 105–40: Minchinhampton E.

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88 Regestrum visitationum, i. 94, 261; ii. 575. It is difficult to say how large Holy Trinity was in the early stages, but, judging from the list of 31 deceased nuns in the rouleau des morts of Abbess Matilda, it was probably a community of a few dozen at most: Rouleaux des morts, 182.

89 Southern, , Western society and the Church in the Middle Ages, 313–15Google Scholar.

90 Herlihy, , Optra muliebria, 62–6Google Scholar; Johnson, , Equal in monastic profession, 173–6Google Scholar. Both point out that Norman nunneries tended to be much larger than convents for men.

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96 Aurell í Cardona, ‘La détérioration’, suggests cycles of hypogamy and hypergamy to account in part for the fluctuating fortunes of aristocratic women.

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