father, and all the great people of the county came to congratulate her;
and after that they used often to drop in for a dinner of chickens and
wine and wastel bread if they passed the house on a journey, and
sometimes they spent the night there. One or two ladies, whose husbands
were away at the wars or on a pilgrimage to Rome, even came as paying
guests to the convent and lived there for a whole year, for nothing
pleased the country gentlemen or wealthy burgesses better than to use
nunneries as boarding-houses for their women-kind.

All this was very disturbing to the peace and quiet of the nuns, and
especially disturbing were the boarders, for they wore gay clothes, and
had pet dogs and callers, and set a very frivolous example to the nuns.
At one nunnery we find a bishop ordering: 'Let Felmersham's wife, with
her whole household and other women, be utterly removed from your
monastery within one year, seeing that they are a cause of disturbance
to the nuns and an occasion to bad example, by reason of their attire
and of those who come to visit them.'[14] It can be easily imagined
_why_ the bishops objected so much to the reception of these worldly
married women as boarders. Just substitute for 'Felmersham's wife' 'the
Wife of Bath' and all is explained. That lady was not a person whom a
prioress would lightly refuse; the list of her pilgrimages alone would
give her the _entrée_ into any nunnery. Smiling her gap-toothed smile
and riding easily upon her ambler, she would enter the gates, and what a
month of excitement would pass before she rode away again. I am sure
that it was she who taught Madame Eglentyne the most fashionable way to
pinch a wimple; and she certainly introduced hats 'as broad as is a
buckler or a targe' and scarlet stockings into some nunneries. The
bishops disliked it all very much, but they never succeeded in turning
the boarders out for all their efforts, because the nuns always needed
the money which they paid for their board and lodging.