It is a common injunction that nuns are to wear no other ring than that which, at their consecration, made them brides of Christ[1030]; but the rule was often disobeyed and Dame Clemence Medforde's "golden rings exceeding costly with divers precious stones"[1031] are explained when we remember the "three gold rings, one having a sapphire, another an emerald and the third a diamond" which the rich pepperer's widow left to Dame Margaret Heyroun[1032]. Madame Eglentyne herself may have owed to one of the many friends, who held her digne of reverence, her "peire of bedes, gauded al with grene," of small coral. When Sir Thomas Cumberworth died in 1451 he ordered that "the prioris of Coton, of Irford, of Legburn and of Grenefeld have Ilkon of yam a pare bedys of corall, as far as that I have may laste, and after yiff yam gette [give them jet] bedes"[1033], and so also Matilda Latymer left her daughter at Buckland a set of "Bedys de corall"[1034] and Margerie de Crioll left a nun of Shaftesbury "my paternoster of coral and white pearls, which the Countess of Pembroke gave me"[1035]. (5) The fifth and last source from which nuns could derive a private income was by the work of their own hands and brains. It has been stated above that very little is known about the sale of fine needlework by nuns, but a very interesting case at Easebourne seems to show that they sometimes considered themselves entitled to retain for their own private use the sums which they earned. In 1441 one of the complaints against the gay prioress was that she "compels her sisters to work continually like hired workwomen, and they receive nothing whatever for their own use from their work, but the prioress takes the whole profit." The bishop's injunction is extremely significant: the prioress shall by no means compel her sisters to continual work of their hands and if they should wish of their own accord to work, they shall be free to do so, but yet so that they may reserve for themselves the half part of what they gain by their hands; the other part shall be converted to the advantage of the house and unburdening it from debt[1036]. In fine, the Bishop is obliged to acquiesce in a serious breach of the Benedictine rule: the plea of the nuns to commit the sin of _proprietas_ is considered as a reasonable demand; and the compromise that half their earnings should go to the common fund is intended rather to check the prioress than the nuns. From the injunctions of other bishops it would appear that the private boarders and private pupils taken by individual nuns sometimes paid their fees to those individuals and not to the house[1037]; the "household" system made the reception of such boarders easy.