Sometimes also a servant would act as a go-between between the nuns and the outside world, smuggling in and out tokens and messages and sundry _billets doux_[429]. On the other hand there were sometimes difficulties of a different nature. The servants got out of hand; they brought discredit on the nuns by the indiscretions of their lives; they gossiped about their mistresses in the neighbourhood, or were quarrelsome and pert to their faces. At Gracedieu in 1440-41 a nun complained "that a Frenchwoman of very unseemly conversation is their maltstress, also that the secular serving folk hold the nuns in despite; she prays that they may be restrained; and chiefly are they rebellious in their words against the kitchener"[430]; evidently the author of the _Ancren Riwle_ spake not utterly from his imagination when he bade his ladies "be glad in your heart if ye suffer insolence from Slurry, the cook's boy, who washeth dishes in the kitchen"[431]. At Markyate also the servants had to be warned "that honestly and not sturdyly ne rebukyngly thai hafe thaym in thaire langage to the sustres"[432] and at Studley a maidservant had boxed the ears of a novice of tender age[433]. At Sheppey in 1511 it was said that "the men servants of the prioress do not behave properly to the prioress, but speak of the convent contemptuously and dishonestly, thus ruining the convent"[434]. The peculiar difficulties suffered in this respect by an important house, which maintained a large body of servants, are best illustrated, however, in the case of Romsey Abbey. At this house in 1302 Bishop John of Pontoise ordained that a useless, superfluous, quarrelsome and incontinent servant and one using insolent language to the ladies shall be removed within a month, ... and especially John Chark, who has often spoken ill and contumaciously in speaking to and answering the ladies, unless he correct himself so that no more complaints be made to the bishop[435]. John Chark possibly learned to bridle his tongue, but the tone among the Romsey servants was not good, for in 1311 Bishop Henry Woodlock ordered that "no women servants shall remain unless of good conversation and honest; pregnant, incontinent, quarrelsome women and those answering the nuns contumaciously, all superfluous and useless servants, [are] to be removed within a month"[436]. In 1387 the difficulties were of another order; writes William of Wykeham: