In reading the disposition and management of their property by the nuns, one cannot avoid the suspicion that they were sometimes under the influence of certain persons not wholly disinterested. Thus, there was one Richard Berde, citizen and girdler. He first takes over a tenement in the parish of St. Ethelburga belonging to the House for a term of forty years at the rent of 20s. He then takes another tenement in the same parish for sixty years at 45s. a year. Then he becomes tenant to the Sisters for the great messuage, or inn, called the “Black Bull,” with cellars, etc., and two adjoining tenements for one-and-twenty years at a rent of £9: 14s. a year. So that he became the holder on long leases of one great house and four tenements. It is perfectly certain, of course, that he intended to sublet them all at a profit to himself, and that the Sisters in this transaction got the worst of it. But Richard Berde got more than this out of the nuns: they made him their seneschal, receiver and collector, with a salary of £12, the annual sum of 20s. for his livery, board and lodging, with allowances of beer and wine, an allowance of fuel, and the free use of a chamber and a parlour. The Dissolution must have been a heavy blow to good Richard Berde: he lost his salary and his allowances; one supposes that he was still allowed to retain his tenancy of the houses. He received a pension of 40s., but what was that compared with the extremely comfortable little job that was taken away? The name of the last Prioress was Mary Rollesley. What relative was this lady to John Rollesley, gentleman? One asks because John Rollesley seems to have done pretty well with the Sisters, too. He got the manor of Burston from them on a lease for eighty years at a rent of £9. And the year after this concession, he obtained a messuage in the Close of St. Helen’s, which must have been a great house, because it had been occupied by the Bishop of Llandaff, on a lease of fourscore years at a rent of 46s. 8d. More than that, he obtained the lease, for the same time, of ten tenements, also in St. Helen’s Close, at a yearly rent of £15. And on the same day he got two more tenements outside the Close and a marsh at Stebenhithe (Stepney) for a term of sixty years at a rent of £8: 15: 4. Two years later the grateful nuns gave John Rollesley a small pension of four marks a year for good counsel, and Edward Rollesley, gentleman—clearly one of the same family,—received an annuity of 40s. also for good counsel. One of the last acts of the last Prioress was to leave to John Rollesley the manor of Marke, in the parish of Leyton and Walthamstow, for fourscore years at a rent of £8. Probably all the estates of the House were let in this way to men who farmed them, making their profit by subletting them. These facts show how lucky it might be, in the blessed and religious days before the Reformation, for a family to have a Prioress among them. [Illustration: SEALS OF ST. HELEN’S NUNNERY