Life Inside a Medieval Nunnery

Medieval nunneries ran on broadly the same daily rhythm of communal prayer, reading and work as male monasteries — but they were, in several important and genuinely revealing respects, a fundamentally different institution, shaped as much by their exclusion from the priesthood as by any difference in spiritual ambition.

There were far fewer nunneries than male houses — roughly one-sixth as many — and English nuns numbered only around 2,500 at monasticism’s medieval peak, falling to about 1,500 by the Dissolution, spread across roughly seventy Benedictine houses, thirty loosely Cistercian-affiliated ones, and a single Cluniac convent (the Carthusians never admitted women at all). Because nuns couldn’t be ordained to say Mass or perform other sacraments for the souls of the dead, they held less appeal for wealthy donors seeking exactly that kind of spiritual return on their patronage, leaving most nunneries noticeably smaller and poorer than their male equivalents — though wealthier exceptions did exist: sixteenth-century nuns at Redlingfield Priory had individual bedrooms with feather pillows and a church fitted with alabaster carvings and silver vessels.

Entry itself required a £5 dowry and a year-long novitiate studying the psalms and offices, typically starting between fifteen and seventeen years old, though some older women joined too — often widows, or wives whose husbands had simply abandoned them. Where a monk’s head was tonsured, a nun’s hair was fully shorn, replaced with a habit, wimple and veil rather than a simple cowl — Benedictine nuns wore black, “Cistercian” nuns white — and their governing abbess held authority not just over her own nuns but over any male chaplains and servants attached to the house as well.

Visit westerbone.com for more insights into medieval historical fiction.