Franciscan order, allocated the portions, which then belonged to Joan and Margaret to manage however they saw fit.
An entry in the court records from 2 Henry V indicates that Joan Colchester already held other property as well—“one Place lying in Lugfen, abutting on the High Barke, & of another in Rushfen, late Jeffrey Burwell’s.” The entry shows that she claimed to hold these properties “freely of her own Purchase,” and that the property was held of the abbey and convent of Denney “by the service of 4s 1d. ob. yearly.”23 That Joan purchased this property and then held it by paying a yearly fee to the house suggests that the portion may well have been property which she bought before becoming a nun and brought with her as an entry gift, and which the house subsequently returned to her for her to administer personally. It is also possible that she bought the property after becoming a nun with entry gift funds remaining in her control after her profession.
Some sisters at Denney seem to have formed lasting business relationships with members of the surrounding community through managing their portions. In 6 Henry V, Edmund Bartlett took to farm of Isabell Winter “one close, called Hetes Holt, with Oysers” for a term of ten years, paying 9s per annum.24 Evidently, Isabell and Edmund had a satisfactory relationship, because in 5 Henry VI he takes “a Close called Letysʒere nigh the Depe” for a term of ten years “by the Assent of Isabell.”25 For this he agrees to render “to the aforesaid Isabell” 12s per annum.26
In developing and cultivating such relationships, nuns worked to ensure their own financial security. Successful, long-term business relationships also made nuns known in the community at large as competent, independent agents in charge of resources. Such status counteracts, at least to some extent, the frequently asserted “myth of women’s financial incompetence,”27 a myth to which ecclesiastical officials frequently had recourse in seizing control of nunneries’ resources and in imposing additional layers of masculine supervision. The experience of success thus opens a locus of resistance to discourses of feminine inferiority and dependence both spiritual and temporal.
The business relationships of Minoresses with others outside the convent were not always satisfactory. Legal documents recording these troubled relationships do have the advantage, however, of highlighting the ways in which the Minoresses made visible “demonstrated or desired identities.”28 Beginning in 1452, Denney had a long-running dispute with Thomas Burgoyne, whose manor of Impington adjoined their manor at Histon, regarding the convent’s property and perquisites there. After Thomas Burgoyne died in 1470, the abbess Joan Ketteryche brought a case in chancery against Alys Burgoyne and John Burgoyne, Thomas’s executors.29 Ketteryche claimed that Thomas “ordeynyd by his wille and testament that his executors shulde paye and restore any Iniuries and wrongges don by hym.”30 The abbess said that the executors should therefore make satisfaction because Thomas had prevented Denney’s tenants from attending Denney’s courts, had stopped the convent’s officers from “takyng of weyff and straye” in some of their fields, had prohibited their tenants from feeding and pasturing cattle in particular fields, and had impounded the cattle, only releasing them upon payment of a fine of 1d for “every fote of the bestes.”31 Furthermore, Thomas Burgoyne was “justice of peasse and keper of the bookes withynne the saide counte of Cambridge,” and he “by feynyd accions” caused Denney’s tenants and servants to be indicted before himself. When writs were served “for the removing of the same,” Thomas would claim “ther were noo suche recordes.”32
It is quite proper that Joan pursued this case, since female superiors had legal responsibility for their houses’ holdings and possessions, and, by virtue of their office, were legal subjects. Female superiors were permitted to leave their monasteries to do homage on behalf of their communities to temporal lords, although only to temporal lords “since all ecclesiastical overlords would be expected to receive proctors in these cases.”33 In spite of the juridical status they had through their offices, though, the fact that female superiors were women religious complicated matters. In his commentary on the papal bull Periculoso, which required strict active and passive claustration for nuns, the fourteenth-century canonist Dominicus de Sancto Gemiano desired to limit the involvement of female superiors in legal cases, since such involvement would take them out of the cloister. He affirms the “unique right of the abbess to leave her cloister to render homage or fealty” but also “cites Roman law authority to support the case that women in general should not be compelled to appear in courts of law.”34 The abbesses of such nunneries as Shaftesbury, St. Mary’s Winchester, Wilton, and Barking had baronial status as landholders; as Eileen Power drily observes, though, “the privilege of being summoned to parliament was omitted on account of their sex” even though “the duty of sending a quota of knights and soldiers to serve the King in his wars was regularly exacted.”35
The way in which Joan Ketteryche’s case plays out shows that she took her responsibilities for her house’s property quite seriously and that she did not see her rights to pursue the case as being in any respect curtailed by her status as a bride of Christ. Although the result was not a total victory for Joan, it does reinforce her authority over resources. The abbess did not recover all of the money—some £883—she sought in damages,36 but she and John Burgoyne did agree that she would have her “leets and lawdays at Impyton and they and their tenants … of Histon shall intercommon at Impyton with the said John and his tenants of his manor of Impyton.”37 The abbess of Denney would therefore continue to have the opportunity to act in her own name, and in the houses’ name, publicly appearing as legitimate possessor and controller in temporal matters.
Another aspect of this court case demonstrates that Joan Ketteryche was in fact remarkably shrewd in taking advantage of both her distinctive gendered status as bride of Christ and her maternal authority over resources suggested in foundational Franciscan texts and ceremonies. During the dispute with Thomas Burgoyne and his executors, she wrote a letter to her kinsman John Paston asking that he aid Denney with goods left in his hands as executor of John Fastolf’s estate. In this letter Joan, like the famous letter-writing Paston women with whom she is connected, mobilizes textual practices for material gain. Her rhetoric reveals not only a self-awareness of the implications of being scripted as a bride of Christ, enclosed and subject to spousal authority, but also a sophisticated ability to use this identity to achieve material goals.
Joan begins the letter with a reference to “the reverens of oure spouse ihu,”38 and she makes the nuns’ enclosure, necessitated by their status as spouses of Christ, a reason for Paston to find them deserving of help. She also takes up a gendered religious stereotype to the house’s potential advantage by stressing in her request for aid that she was chosen as abbess “ful myche agens my will” and that she is “ful symple and ʒounge of age.”39 Her use of this terminology brings into play the ideal of nuns’ detachment from material affairs and invokes the “myth of women’s financial incompetence,” the very myth so often reiterated by ecclesiastical officials as a reason for taking away nuns’ independent control of resources, in what is in fact a calculated effort to obtain a desired economic gain.
Benedictines: Brides of Christ in the Marketplace
As the preceding examples suggest, the religious identities constructed in profession and visitation for Franciscan and Brigittine nuns and the identities to which they laid claim in practice have much in common. Disjunctions between theory and practice are somewhat more pronounced, however, when one considers what Benedictine nuns were doing in their everyday lives. A chancery case brought in 1500–1501 by Elizabeth, the prioress of Sopwell (a Benedictine nunnery dependent on St. Albans Abbey), provides a compelling illustration with which to begin probing not only gaps between theory and practice but also ways in which Benedictine nuns enlarged windows of opportunity opened for them in their foundational ideological scripts.
