"The Bishop," says William de Dene, "although unwilling, knowing her to be insufficient and ignorant, set Lora de Retlyng in command as abbess, a woman who lacked all the capacity and wisdom of a leader and ruler, the nuns enthusiastically applauding; and the next day he blessed her, which benediction was rather a malediction for the convent. Then the Bishop forbade the Abbess to give a corrody to her maid-servant, as it had been the ill custom to do, and he sequestrated the common seal, forbidding it to be used, save when his licence had been asked and obtained"[651]. Twenty-five years passed and in 1349 the chronicler writes: The Bishop of Rochester visited the abbeys of Lesnes and Malling, and he found them so ruined by longstanding mismanagement, that it is thought they never can recover so long as this world lasts, even to the day of judgment[652]. Malling had suffered severely from the Black Death in the previous year, but our knowledge of the character of Lora de Retlyng and the plain statement of William de Dene ("destructa per malam diutinam custodiam"), make it clear that bad management and not the pestilence was to blame for its poverty[653]. Financial mismanagement was, indeed, the most frequent of all charges brought against superiors at the episcopal visitations. When Alnwick visited his diocese of Lincoln several cases of such incompetence came to light. At St Michael's, Stamford (1440), it was found that the Prioress had never rendered an account during the whole of her term of office, and one of the nuns declared that she did not rule and supervise temporal affairs to the benefit of the house; two years later the Bishop visited the convent again and the Prioress herself pleaded bodily weakness, adding that since she was impotent to rule the temporalities, nor had they any industrious man to supervise these and to raise and receive the produce of the house, and since the rents of the house remained unpaid in the hands of the tenants, she begged that two nuns might be deputed to rule the temporalities, and to be responsible for receipts and payments.