badly behaved the nuns were.

All these tales the bishop's clerk solemnly wrote down in a big book,
and when the examination was over the bishop summoned all the nuns
together again. And if they had answered 'All is well', as they
sometimes did, or only mentioned trivial faults, he commended them and
went his way; and if they had shown that things really were in a bad
way, he investigated particular charges and scolded the culprits and
ordered them to amend, and when he got back to his palace, or the manor
where he was staying, he wrote out a set of injunctions, based on the
complaints, and saying exactly how things were to be improved; and of
these injunctions one copy was entered in his register and another was
sent by hand to the nuns, who were supposed to read it aloud at
intervals and to obey everything in it. We have in many bishops'
registers these lists of injunctions, copied into them by the bishops'
clerks, and in some, notably in a splendid fifteenth-century Lincoln
register, belonging to the good bishop Alnwick, we have also the
evidence of the nuns, just as it was taken down from their chattering
mouths, and these are the most human and amusing of all medieval
records. It is easy to see what important historical documents
visitation reports are, especially in a diocese like Lincoln, which
possesses an almost unbroken series of registers, ranging over the three
centuries before the Dissolution, so that one can trace the whole
history of some of the nunneries by the successive visitations.

Let us see what light the registers will throw upon Madame Eglentyne,
before Chaucer observed her mounting her horse outside the Tabard Inn.
Doubtless she first came to the nunnery when she was quite a little
girl, because girls counted as grown up when they were fifteen in the
Middle Ages; they could be married out of hand at twelve, and they could