Trusting in your industry, we by tenour of the present (letters) give you power during our pleasure to look after, guard and administer the temporal possessions of our beloved religious ladies, the Prioress and convent of Kirklees in our diocese, throughout their manors and buildings (_loca_) wherever these be, and to receive and hear the account of all servants and ministers serving in the same, and to make those payments (_allocandum_) which by reason ought to be made, as well as to remove all useless ministers and servants and to appoint in their place others of greater utility, and to do all other things which shall seem to you to be to the advantage of the place, firmly enjoining the said prioress and convent, as well as the sisters and lay brothers of the house, in virtue of holy obedience, that they permit you freely to administer in all and each of the aforesaid matters[792]. It must have been of great assistance to the worried and incompetent nuns to have a reliable guardian thus to look after their temporal affairs, and it is difficult to understand why the practice of having a resident prior died out at the Cistercian houses and at Benedictine houses (e.g. St Michael's, Stamford) which had such an official in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Even the appointment of neighbouring rectors as _custodes_ of nunneries in the York and Lincoln dioceses ceased, apparently, to be common by the middle of the fourteenth century[793]. It is a curious anomaly that this remedy should have been applied less and less often during the very centuries when the nunneries were becoming increasingly poor, and stood daily in greater need of external assistance in the management of their temporal affairs. CHAPTER VI EDUCATION Abstinence the abbesse myn a. b. c. me taughte. _Piers Plowman._ The Benedictine ideal set study together with prayer and labour as the three bases of monastic life and in the short golden age of English monasticism women as well as men loved books and learning. The tale of the Anglo-Saxon nuns who corresponded with St Boniface has often been told. Eadburg, Abbess of Thanet, wrote the Epistles of St Peter for him in letters of gold and sent books to him in the wilds of Germany. Bugga, Abbess of a Kentish house, exchanged books with him. The charming Lioba, educated by the nuns of Wimborne, sent him verses which she had composed in Latin, which "divine art" the nun Eadburg had taught her, and begged him to correct the rusticity of her style. Afterwards she came into Germany to help him and became Abbess of Bischofsheim and her biographer tells how