CHAPTER IV. A SPORTING PRIORESS



Yet nothing stern was she in cell,
And the nuns loved their abbess well.--SCOTT.


The days of the Wars of the Roses were evil times for the discipline
of convents, which, together with the entire Western Church, suffered
from the feuds of the Popes with the Italian princes.

Small remote houses, used as daughters or auxiliaries to the large
convents, were especially apt to fall into a lax state, and in truth
the little priory of Greystone, with its half-dozen of Sisters, had
been placed under the care of the Lady Agnes Selby because she was
too highly connected to be dealt with sharply, and too turbulent and
unmanageable for the soberminded house at York. So there she was
sent, with the deeply devout and strict Sister Scholastica, to keep
the establishment in order, and deal with the younger nuns and lay
Sisters. Being not entirely out of reach of a raid from the Scottish
border, it was hardly a place for the timid, although the better sort
of moss troopers generally spared monastic houses. Anne St. John had
been sent thither at the time when Queen Margaret was making her
attempt in the north, where the city of York was Lancastrian, as the
Mother Abbess feared that her presence might bring vengeance upon the
Sisterhood.

There was no great harm in the Mother Agnes, only she was a maiden
whom nothing but family difficulties could have forced into a