Читать книгу English Monasteries - A. Hamilton Thompson - Страница 23

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Houses of Benedictine nuns were numerous in England. The most important of these lay within the dioceses of Salisbury and Winchester. In the midlands, the east and north, where they were numerous, they were with a few exceptions small foundations of which scanty traces are left. A few priories of nuns, chiefly in the dioceses of York and Lincoln, followed the Cistercian rule. In the sixteenth century the wealthiest of the Cistercian nunneries, which as a rule were small and poor, was at Tarrant in Dorset; and it was for the three nuns who originally settled here in the thirteenth century that the famous Ancren Riwle or Regulae inclusarum were composed. Cistercian nunneries were not subject to Cîteaux, but were visited by their diocesan bishop. Houses of nuns or canonesses following the rule of St. Augustine were few; but of their two abbeys, Burnham and Lacock, there are substantial remains. The richest nunnery at the suppression was Sion abbey in Middlesex, founded by Henry V in 1414 for Bridgetine nuns, whose rule was modelled on that of St. Augustine. The Bridgetine order, as well as that of Fontevrault, to which Nuneaton priory in Warwickshire originally belonged, attempted to provide regular chaplains for its members by uniting a convent of men to one of women. In connexion with some of the older Benedictine nunneries there were from an early date secular chaplains who had their own prebends in the monastic estates and their stalls in quire. In process of time such prebendal stalls in the churches of Romsey, Shaftesbury, Wilton, Wherwell and St. Mary's, Winchester, became perquisites of clerks in the royal service, whose duties in the nunneries were performed by vicars.