were nurseries of culture. Princesses and royal
daughters sought the veil as an honor or as a refuge from the trials of
their high station. It is true, however, that the monasteries of the
nuns did not always maintain their original purity. Not seldom a nun
broke her vow and preferred excommunication to a loveless existence.
Sometimes the nuns tried to console themselves in the cloister itself
for the dreariness of their existence. The Capitularies of Charlemagne
inform us of the manner in which vagrant nuns, amorous dwellers in
cloisters, offended against religious laws. Sometimes, indeed, the nuns
even carried on amours for money, and the natural consequences of the
breach of the vows of chastity were removed by crime, while, on the
other hand, the chastisements meted out for such crimes were truly
barbarous. There are Capitularies that prescribe that nuns' cloisters be
not too conveniently near to the monasteries of monks, and others that
accurately define the intercourse between clerics and laymen, that set
forth the rule that "no abbess should presume to go outside of the
monastery without episcopal permission nor permit her subordinate nuns
to do so, that they shall not dare to write or send love-songs
(_winileodes_);" but it is not less true that _winileodes_ continued to
be realistically played in the nunneries and played in earnest. That
luxury and high living must have developed in cloisters appears from a
capitulary which forbids abbesses to have packs of hounds, and falcons,
and hawks, and jugglers; that they shall live "regularly," and that
their cloisters should be "rationally" established.

We prefer, however, to write of the many holy women, the nuns,
especially the Anglo-Saxon nuns, who obtained martyrdom by cooperating
with Winfrid, the apostle of the Germans and other holy missionaries of
the time. The monk Rudolf of Fulda wrote a biography of Saint Lioba
after the report of her female disciples. Lioba was educated in an
English nunnery which had been founded at Winbrunne (to-day Wimborne
Minster, Dorsetshire), together with a monastery. Very naively Rudolf
asserts that in spite of the proximity of the institutions no undue
intercourse between their inhabitants ever occurred; nay, the abbess was
so strict that she forbade entrance to the assemblies of the nuns, not
only to clerics and laymen, but also to the bishops. At this holy place
did the virgin grow up, soon becoming the star of piety and wisdom