Revealed: The times when naughty nuns entertained their menfolk

Call it Carry On Sister.

Nothing to do with hospital wards, rather the goings-on in, of all places, a nunnery in the Worcester Diocese in the Middle Ages.

The cast is Heaven sent. There’s Joan Sims as prioress Agnes de Aylesbury, who is having “immoral relations” with John de Warton (Sid James), a visiting priest with an eye for the ladies. Hattie Jacques plays the formidable widow Lady Isabella de Clinton, who enters the nunnery on the death of her husband and immediately sets out to ferment trouble. While Kenneth Williams could be the hapless Bishop Cobham, who had to try to make sense of a situation in which “brawling and bad words were the least of the sins”.

It was apparently, all true too: selling off the nunnery’s goods and chattels, including even the goblets and salt cellars, to make ends meet, entertaining menfolk and even a bit of flogging naughty nuns for good measure. Enter Barbara Windsor and Liz Fraser stage left.

All this is contained within the pages of Worcester Nunneries – the nuns of the Medieval Diocese, an outwardly theological new book by Margaret Goodrich, widow of the former Bishop of Worcester, the Rt Rev Philip. If I were her, I would copyright this account now, before Pinewood wakes up.

I must stress these illuminating facts are not presented in any sensationalist way. Mrs Goodrich plays it straight down the middle as the historian she is.

Her interest in Worcester’s nunneries began when she joined the staff of Alice Ottley School, Worcester, back in the early 1980s as a history teacher. The school stands next door to what was the Royal Grammar School – now part of RGS Worcester & Alice Ottley School – and was built on the site of a former nunnery and where tales of ancient tunnels and ghosts of tormented nuns survive to this day.

Sadly, for the romantics among us Mrs Goodrich debunks the lot. The famed “secret passage” leading from the old nunnery buildings in the direction of Worcester Cathedral is, she says, nothing more than a rather large drain.

Two blocked up doorways in the nunnery are still evident and one, she believes, “was probably an entrance towards The Tything for townsfolk to enter the church.

“The other, according to the 1848 Archaeological Association Report, led to the famed secret passage to the cathedral. However, it is much more likely that a barrel-roofed deep drain or water conduit, leading to or from the nunnery site, gave this impression. Such a passage five or six feet deep and arched over with stone was broken into under the High Street in the early 19th century when water pipes were laid.”

So no wailing nuns entombed and scratching against sturdy oak doors then.

However, what went on at Wroxall Priory, 10 miles east of Redditch and then in the Worcester Diocese, was altogether more entertaining. Here in the Benedictine convent resided a community of Black Nuns and they were, by all accounts, quite some ladies.

“To St Benedict it was of prime importance that his monks and nuns must live in seclusion, for if they were to dedicate themselves wholly to the worship and service of God, the world with all its temptations and demands must not desecrate them,” writes Mrs Goodrich.

Then she adds: “What really haunted the authorities was the fear of sexual impropriety, which would bring the monastic life into scandalous disrepute and take years to live down.” And so she visits Wroxall, where the prioress Agnes de Aylesbury, “a weak woman with many faults”, had lost control of the house, which “slid into serious disarray during her rule”.

In the 1320s and 1330s it became “an ungodly place”, where the nuns quarrelled, men were invited in for “lengthy conversations” both by day and night and the nuns had no respect for their prioress.

“One of the reasons Agnes had come to grief,” explained Mrs Goodrich, “was her infatuation with a priest, John de Warton, on whom she showered ill-afforded victuals and gifts and worse, was her partner in immoral relations.” For his sins, the priest was banned from the convent by Bishop Cobham.

But that was only the half of it.

The community had split into warring factions, one led by the prioress and the other by the lately arrived Lady Isabella de Clinton, widowed, well connected and related to the priory’s founder.

“Isabella played on her status to build up a coterie of critical, discontented nuns,” Mrs Goodrich explained. “She made her chamber a centre for entertaining her friends and for a burdensome and unruly retinue who disrupted the order of the house.”

For her part, the prioress was a hopeless manager and had resorted to “selling off the carpets, linen, goblets and salt cellars intended for hospitable uses” in order to balance the books. Despite these dodgy dealings, the building’s fabric descended to “a ruinous condition”.

Faced by mounting chaos, Agnes quit, so be succeeded by Lady Isabella, so the newcomer triumphed after all. But that didn’t last long because quarrelling continued and “brawling and bad words” were rife.

A succession of bishops failed to keep a lid on Wroxall Priory and Bishop Bransford wrote of “recalcitrant nuns needing ecclesiastical censure”.

The problem was eventually sorted by Worcester Cathedral precentor Robert de Clynton, who imposed a curfew, forbidding the nuns from visiting Warwick or Coventry, both of which were a long walk away anyway, ordering them to eat together instead of in factions and banning men from visiting the convent at night.

Worcester Nunneries, available from Worcester Cathedral bookshop at £9.99, is an intriguing peep into our religious and social past. All it’s missing is poor Bishop Cobham, faced with the ructions at Wroxall, wailing: “Infamy. Infamy. They’ve all got it in for me!”