d her, she had to buy such provisions
as were needed: grain, flesh, fish,--usually a very large item,
especially in the Lenten season,--condiments, such as preserved fruits,
spices, salt, etc., and, where the rule did not utterly forbid it, wine
or ale. Of these details we shall speak more fully in connection with
the rules for a model nunnery which Abelard wrote for Heloise and upon
which she based her government of the famous monastery of the Paraclete.

[Illustration 2:
DROIT DU SEIGNEUR.
After the painting by Lucien Melingue.
As feudalism meant oppression verging on slavery for Jacques Bonhomme,
the peasant, his wife Jeanne could hardly have been in better case. With
peasant marriages the seigneur could interfere even more tyrannically
than with those of his feudal wards. In some places the bride and groom
owed to the seigneur certain gifts called _mets de mariage...._ and that
most infamous right known as the _droit du seigneur_ was claimed, and we
find a writer even as late as the seventeenth century recording the fact
that the husband was sometimes required to purchase his bride's
exemption from this right.]

Aside from the protection they afforded to women who might otherwise
have been utterly lost in the rough world, the monasteries were of great
importance in other ways. Whatever it may have become during the period
of the decline of monastic purity, the life in the nunneries, even in
the comparatively dark period about the year 1000, was not an idle one.
The day was carefully portioned off into periods of work, of religious
devotion, and of leisure, which long custom fixed into a routine. The
occupations included what we should now class chiefly as artistic work,
though much of it was at the time really useful in a more homely
way,--weaving of hangings and tapestries for the church, embroidery,
painting and illuminating, and copying of manuscripts. This last was, of
course, work of the highest utility, though the artistic skill displayed
in the writing itself and in the beautiful illuminations made it also an
art. We have few names of actual scribes of either sex, since they
rarely signed the manuscripts they copied; but among these few there are
some of women. The magnificent tapestries, sometimes large enough to
cover in one piece the side of a church, are perhaps the most noteworthy
of the products of the monasteries. So famous was the work of the nuns
in this particular that tradition assigned to them,