nuns, the contemplation of religion is withdrawn and scandal is engendered."[540] Very few other references to the education of girls in monasteries have been traced so far. Dr. Abram tells us that "In the Chancery Proceedings it is recorded that 'Lawrens Knyght, gentleman,' arranged that the Prioress of Cornworthy, Devon, should have his two daughters, aged respectively seven and ten, 'to scole' and he agreed to pay her twenty pence weekly for their meat and drink."[541] In English literature, the only instance we have been able to discover is the well-known reference of Chaucer to the Miller's wife. IV. THE EDUCATION OF THE NOVICES. Abbot Gasquet has written a careful and interesting account of the life of a novice in a claustral school of the fifteenth century.[542] Dealing with St. Peter's Abbey, Westminster, he says, "The western walk was sacred to the novices, whose master took the first place, with the youngest nearest to him. Their method of sitting was peculiar: they were placed one behind the other, so that the face of one looked on the back of his neighbour. And this was always the case, except when there was general conversation in the cloister. The only fixed seats were those of the abbot, prior, and master of novices; the rest were placed according to the disposition of the prior, sub-prior, or novice-master, to whom the care and due order of the cloister were specially committed. There, in the morning after the chapter, and at other intervals during the day, the novices attended to their tasks, and one by one took their books to their master, who either heard their reading himself, or sent them to some other senior for help or instruction."[543] The "Rites of Durham"[544] also gives us a description of a novices' school. It is there stated that the school was held both in the morning and in the afternoon in the "weast ally" of the cloisters. Boys began to attend these schools when they were seven years of age, and the eldest learned monk acted as their tutor. The novices were fed, clothed, and educated gratuitously. If they were "apt to lernynge ... and had a pregnant wyt withall" they were afterwards sent to Oxford to study divinity; otherwise, they were kept at their books till they could understand their service and the scriptures, and then became candidates for ordination to the priesthood. Incidental references to the school of the novices occur in various monastic records. Thus, we learn that when Richard II. held his first parliament in 1378, at Gloucester, he and his court were lodged in the abbey, with the result that the monks were obliged to have their meals "in the schoolhouse."[545] The same chronicler also laments the destruction of turf in the cloisters, which "was so worn by the exercises of the wrestlers and ball players there that no traces of green were left on it."[546]