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Updated: June 7, 2025
It will be remembered that when Madame Eglentyne went on her pilgrimage she took her nun chaplain with her, as well as three priests; that was because no nun was ever allowed to go out alone. One of Madame Eglentyne's duties as prioress was to entertain visitors with her celebrated cheer of court, and we may be sure that she had a great many.
And when we look in the bishops' registers we shall find Madame Eglentyne forbidden 'all manner of minstrelsy, interludes, dancing or revelling within your holy place'; and she would be fortunate indeed if her bishop would make exception for Christmas, 'and other honest times of recreation among yourselves used in absence of seculars in all wise'. Somehow one feels an insistent conviction that her cheer of court included dancing.
What are we to think, for instance, of that giddy nun 'who on Monday night did pass the night with the Austin friars at Northampton and did dance and play the lute with them in the same place until midnight, and on the night following she passed the night with the Friars' preachers at Northampton, luting and dancing in like manner'? Chaucer told us how the friar loved harping and how his eyes twinkled like stars in his head when he sang, but failed perhaps to observe that he had lured Madame Eglentyne into a dance.
Eglentyne, it seems, was never really interested in business, and was quite pleased to have her time taken up with looking after internal affairs and entertaining visitors, with an occasional jaunt outside to see how the estates were getting on.
But the feast would not come at once, because Eglentyne would have to remain a novice for some years, until she was old enough to take the vows. So she would stay in the convent and be taught how to sing and to read, and to talk French of the school of Stratford-atte-Bowe with the other novices.
After all Chaucer would never have met her, if she had not managed to circumvent her own, since if there was one excuse for wandering of which the bishops thoroughly disapproved, it was precisely the excuse of pilgrimages. Madame Eglentyne was not quite as simple and coy as she looked.
This was the reason that Madame Eglentyne got into the register. In the Middle Ages all the nunneries of England, and a great many of the monasteries, used to be visited at intervals by the bishop of their diocese or by somebody sent by him in order to see whether they were behaving properly.
One should always distrust the head of an office or school or society who says, with a self-satisfied air, that it is much more satisfactory to do the thing herself than to depute it to the proper subordinates; it either means that she is an autocrat, or else that she cannot organize. Madame Eglentyne was rather an autocrat, in a good-natured sort of way, and besides she hated bother.
From 12 to 5 p.m. in winter and from 1 to 6 p.m. in summer Eglentyne and her sisters were supposed to devote themselves to manual or brain work, interspersed with a certain amount of sober and godly recreation.
But when Chaucer met her the house was ruling itself somewhere at the 'shire's ende'. The world was full of fish out of water in the fourteenth century, and, by sëynt Loy, said Madame Eglentyne, swearing her greatest oath, like Chaucer's monk, she held that famous text not worth an oyster. So we take our leave of her, characteristically on the road to Canterbury. The Ménagier's Wife
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