§ 20.
Houses of Benedictine nuns were numerous
in England. The most important of these lay within
the dioceses of Salisbury and Winchester. In the
midlands, the east and north, where they were
numerous, they were with a few exceptions small
foundations of which scanty traces are left. A few
priories of nuns, chiefly in the dioceses of York and
Lincoln, followed the Cistercian rule. In the sixteenth
century the wealthiest of the Cistercian nunneries,
which as a rule were small and poor, was at Tarrant
in Dorset; and it was for the three nuns who originally
settled here in the thirteenth century that the
famous
Ancren Riwle or
Regulae inclusarum were
composed. Cistercian nunneries were not subject to
Cîteaux, but were visited by their diocesan bishop.
Houses of nuns or canonesses following the rule of
St Augustine were few; but of their two abbeys,
Burnham and Lacock, there are substantial remains.
The richest nunnery at the suppression was Sion
abbey in Middlesex, founded by Henry
V in 1414 for
Bridgetine nuns, whose rule was modelled on that of
St Augustine. The Bridgetine order, as well as that
of Fontevrault, to which Nuneaton priory in Warwickshire
originally belonged, attempted to provide regular
chaplains for its members by uniting a convent of
men to one of women. In connexion with some of
the older Benedictine nunneries there were from an
early date secular chaplains who had their own
prebends in the monastic estates and their stalls in
quire. In process of time such prebendal stalls in
the churches of Romsey, Shaftesbury, Wilton, Wherwell
and St Mary's, Winchester, became perquisites of
clerks in the royal service, whose duties in the
nunneries were performed by vicars.
