Chaucer lived, young people had begun to enter monastic houses rather as
a profession than as a vocation. Many truly spiritual men and women
still took the vows, but with them came others who were little suited to
monastic life, and who lowered its standard, because it was hard and
uncongenial to them. Eglentyne became a nun because her father did not
want the trouble and expense of finding her a husband, and because being
a nun was about the only career for a well-born lady who did not marry.
Moreover, by this time, monks and nuns had grown more lazy, and did
little work with their hands and still less with their heads,
particularly in nunneries, where the early tradition of learning had
died out and where many nuns could hardly understand the Latin in which
their services were written. The result was that monastic life began to
lose that essential variety which St Benedict had designed for it, and
as a result the regularity sometimes became irksome, and the series of
services degenerated into a mere routine of peculiar monotony, which
many of the singers could no longer keep alive with spiritual fervour.
Thus sometimes (it must not be imagined that this happened in all or
even in the majority of houses) the services became empty forms, to be
hurried through with scant devotion and occasionally with scandalous
irreverence. It was the almost inevitable reaction from too
much routine.

Carelessness in the performance of the monastic hours was an exceedingly
common fault during the later Middle Ages, though the monks were always
worse about it than the nuns. Sometimes they 'cut' the services.
Sometimes they behaved with the utmost levity, as at Exeter in 1330,
where the canons giggled and joked and quarrelled during the services
and dropped hot candle wax from the upper stalls on to the shaven heads
of the singers in the stalls below![7] Sometimes they came late to
matins, in the small hours after midnight. This fault was common in