These eulogies are all necessarily tinged by the knowledge that the nunneries either were about to disappear, or had disappeared, from England. They had filled a useful function and men were willing to be to their faults a little blind. It cannot be doubted that the gentry and the substantial middle class appreciated them; up to the very eve of the Dissolution legacies to monastic houses are a common feature in wills. Only an inadequate conclusion, however, is to be reached from a study of tributes such as those of the commissioners at St Mary's Winchester and Polesworth and of Robert Aske. If we turn to pre-Reformation visitation reports, which are free from the desire to state a case, the evidence is more mixed. It is only reasonable to conclude that many nunneries did indeed bring children up, with the example of virtue before their eyes, and the _omnia bene_ of many reports reinforces such a conclusion. But it is impossible also to avoid the conviction that other houses were not always desirable homes for the young, nor nuns their best example. When Alnwick visited his diocese in the first half of the fifteenth century there were children at Godstow, where at least one nun was frankly immoral and where all received visits freely from the scholars of Oxford; nor was the general reputation of the house good at other periods. There were children also at Catesby and at St Michael's Stamford, which were in a thoroughly bad state, under bad prioresses. At Catesby the poor innocents lay in the dorter, where lay also sister Isabel Benet, far gone with child; and they must have heard the Prioress screaming "Beggars!" and "Whores!" at the nuns and dragging them round the cloister by their hair[905]. At St Michael's Stamford, all was in disorder and no less than three of the nuns were unchaste, one having twice run away, each time with a different partner. The visitation of Gracedieu on the same occasion shows too much quarrelling and misrule to make possible a very high opinion of its piety or of its breeding. If we turn to another set of injunctions, the great series for the diocese of York, it must be conceded that though the gentry of the county doubtless found the convents useful as schools and lodging houses, it is difficult to see how Aske's plea that "their daughters (were) brought up in virtue" could possibly have been true of the fourteenth century, when the morals and manners of the nuns were extremely bad. There is not much evidence for the period of which Aske could speak from his own knowledge; but at Esholt, where two children were at school in 1537, one of the nuns was found to have "lyved incontinentlie and vnchast and ... broght forth a child of her bodie begotten" and an alehouse had been set up within the convent gates, in 1535[906]. The only safe generalisation to make about this, as about so many other problems of medieval social history, is that there can be no generalisation.