of good birth; Chaucer tells us a great deal about her beautiful
behaviour at table and her courtesy, which shows that she was a lady
born and bred; indeed, his description of this might have been taken
straight out of one of the feudal books of deportment for girls; even
her personal beauty--straight nose, grey eyes, and little red
mouth--conforms to the courtly standard. The convents were apt to be
rather snobbish; ladies and rich burgesses' daughters got into them, but
poor and low-born girls never. So the nuns probably said to each other
that what with her pretty ways and her good temper and her aristocratic
connexions, wouldn't it be a good thing to choose her for prioress when
the old prioress died? And so they did, and she had been a prioress for
some years when Chaucer met her. At first it was very exciting, and
Eglentyne liked being called 'Mother' by nuns who were older than
herself, and having a private room to sit in and all the visitors to
entertain. But she soon found that it was not by any means all a bed of
roses; for there was a great deal of business to be done by the head of
a house--not only looking after the internal discipline of the convent,
but also superintending money matters and giving orders to the bailiffs
on her estates, and seeing that the farms were paying well, and the
tithes coming in to the churches which belonged to the nunnery, and that
the Italian merchants who came to buy the wool off her sheeps' backs
gave a good price for it. In all this business she was supposed to take
the advice of the nuns, meeting in the chapter-house, where all business
was transacted. I am afraid that sometimes Eglentyne used to think that
it was much better to do things by herself, and so she would seal
documents with the convent seal without telling them. One should always
distrust the head of an office or school or society who says, with a
self-satisfied air, that it is much more satisfactory to do the thing
herself than to depute it to the proper subordinates; it either means
that she is an autocrat, or else that she cannot organize. Madame