nunneries, for the nuns always would insist on having private drinkings
and gossipings in the evening after compline, instead of going straight
to bed, as the rule demanded--a habit which did not conduce to
wakefulness at 1 a.m. Consequently they were somewhat sleepy at matins
and found an almost Johnsonian difficulty in getting up early. Wise St
Benedict foresaw the difficulty, when he wrote in his rule: 'When they
rise for the Divine Office, let them gently encourage one another,
because of the excuses made by those that are drowsy.'[8] At the nunnery
of Stainfield in 1519 the bishop discovered that half an hour sometimes
elapsed between the last stroke of the bell and the beginning of the
service, and that some of the nuns did not sing, but dozed, partly
because they had not enough candles, but chiefly because they went late
to bed;[9] and whoever is without sin among us, let him cast the first
stone! There was a tendency also among both monks and nuns to slip out
before the end of the service on any good or bad excuse: they had to see
after the dinner or the guest-house, their gardens needed weeding, or
they did not feel well. But the most common fault of all was to gabble
through the services as quickly as they could in order to get them over.
They left out the syllables at the beginning and end of words, they
omitted the dipsalma or pause between two verses, so that one side of
the choir was beginning the second half before the other side had
finished the first; they skipped sentences, they mumbled and slurred
what should have been 'entuned in their nose ful semely', and altogether
they made a terrible mess of the stately plainsong. So prevalent was
the fault of gabbling that the Father of Evil was obliged to charter a
special Devil called Tittivillus, whose sole business it was to collect
all these dropped syllables and carry them back to his master in a big
bag. In one way or another, we have a good deal of information about
him, for he was always letting himself be seen by holy men, who
generally had a sharp eye for devils. One Latin rhyme distinguishes