in medieval monastic houses, however, combined a preternatural ingenuity
with an extremely exiguous sense of humour, and the sort of dumb
pandemonium which went on at Eglentyne's dinner table must often have
been more mirth-provoking than speech. The sister who desired fish would
'wag her hands displayed sidelings in manner of a fish tail'; she who
wanted milk would 'draw her left little finger in manner of milking';
for mustard one would 'hold her nose in the upper part of her right fist
and rub it'; another for salt would 'fillip with her right thumb and
forefinger over the left thumb'; another desirous of wine would 'move
her forefinger up and down the end of her thumb afore her eye'; and the
guilty sacristan, struck by the thought that she had not provided
incense for the Mass, would 'put her two fingers into her nostrils'. In
one such table drawn up for nuns there are no less than 106 signs, and
on the whole it is not surprising that the rule of the same nuns enjoins
that 'it is never lawful to use them without some reason and profitable
need, for oft-times more hurt hath an evil word, and more offence it may
be to God'.[6]

The nuns, of course, would not have been human if they had not sometimes
grown a little weary of all these services and this silence; for the
religious life was not, nor was it intended to be, an easy one. It was
not a mere means of escape from work and responsibility. In the early
golden age of monasticism only men and women with a vocation, that is to
say a real genius for monastic life, entered convents. Moreover, when
there they worked very hard with hand and brain, as well as with soul,
and so they got variety of occupation, which is as good as a holiday.
The basis of wise St Benedict's Rule was a nicely adjusted combination
of variety with regularity; for he knew human nature. Thus monks and
nuns did not find the services monotonous, and indeed regarded them as
by far the best part of the day. But in the later Middle Ages, when