Carelessness in the performance of the monastic hours was an exceedingly common fault during the later middle ages and often finds a place in episcopal injunctions. Sometimes monks and nuns "cut" the services, as at Peterborough in 1437, when only ten or twelve of the 44 monks came on ordinary days to church[915], or at Nuncoton in 1440, where many of the nuns failed to come to compline, but busied themselves instead in various domestic offices, or wandered idly in the garden[916]. Often they came late to matins, a fault which was common in nunneries, for the nuns were prone to sit up drinking and gossiping after compline, instead of going straight to bed[917]; and these nocturnal carousals, however harmless in themselves, did not conduce to wakefulness at one a.m. Consequently they were somewhat sleepy, _quodammodo sompnolentes_, at matins and found an almost Johnsonian difficulty in getting up early. At Stainfield in 1519 Atwater found that half an hour sometimes elapsed between the last stroke of the bell and the beginning of the office and that some of the nuns did not sing but dozed, partly because they had not enough candles, partly because they went to bed late; they also performed the offices very negligently[918]. But most often of all the fault of monks and nuns lay in gabbling through the services as quickly as possible in order to get them over. They left out syllables at the beginning and end of words, they omitted the _dipsalma_ or _pausacio_ between two verses, so that one side of the choir was beginning the second half, before the other side had finished the first; they skipped sentences; they mumbled and slurred over what should have been "entuned in their nose ful semely." Episcopal injunctions not infrequently animadvert against this irreverent treatment of the offices. At Catesby in 1442 Isabel Benet asserted that "divine service is chanted at so great speed that no pauses are made," and at Carrow in 1526 several of the older nuns complained that the sisters sang and said the service more quickly than they ought, without due pauses. A strong injunction sent to Nuncoton in 1531 declares that the hours have been "doon with grete festinacon, haste and without deuocon, contrarye to the good manner and ordre of religion"[919]. Indeed so common was the fault that the Father of Evil was obliged to employ a special devil called Tittivillus, whose sole business it was to collect the dropped syllables and gabbled verses and carry them back to his master in a sack. One rhyme distinguishes carefully between the contents of his sack: Hii sunt qui psalmos corrumpunt nequiter almos, Dangler, cum jasper, lepar, galper quoque draggar, Momeler, forskypper, forereynner, sic et overleper, Fragmina verborum Tutivillus colligit horum[920]. A holy Cistercian abbot once interviewed Tittivillus; this is the tale as the nuns of Syon read it in their _Myroure of Oure Ladye_: