The nunnery as a career and as a vocation does not need separate treatment. It has already been shown that in large families it was a very usual custom to make one or more of the daughters nuns. Indeed the youth of many of the girls who took the veil is in itself proof that anything like a vocation, or even a free choice, was seldom possible and was hardly anticipated, even in theory. The age of profession was sixteen, but much younger children were received as novices and prepared for the veil; they could withdraw if they found the life distasteful, but as a rule, being brought up from early childhood for this career, they entered upon it as a matter of course; moreover the Church was rather apt to regard the withdrawal of novices as apostasy. Sir Guy de Beauchamp in his will (dated 1359) describes his daughter Katherine as a nun of Shouldham and Dugdale notes that Katherine, aged seven years, and Elizabeth, aged about one year, were found to be daughters and heirs of the said Guy, who died in the following year[102]. It might be supposed that this child of seven was being brought up as a lay boarder in the convent, but legacies left to Katherine "a nun at Shouldham" by her grandfather and by her uncle, in 1369 and in 1400 respectively, show that she had been thus vowed in infancy to a religious life[103]. One of the daughters of Thomas of Woodstock Duke of Gloucester, was "in infancy placed in the monastery (of the Minoresses without Aldgate) and clad in the monastic habit" and in 1401 the Pope gave her permission to leave it if she wished, but she remained and became its abbess[104]. Bishops' registers constantly give evidence of the presence of mere children in nunneries. When Alnwick visited Ankerwyke in 1441, three of the younger nuns complained that they lacked a teacher (_informatrix_) to teach them "reading, song, or religious observance"; and at the end of the visitation the Bishop noted that he had examined all the nuns save three, whom he had omitted "on account of the heedlessness of their age and the simplicity of their discretion, since the eldest of them is not older than thirteen years"[105]. At Studley in 1445 he found a girl who had been in religion for two years and was then thirteen; she complained that one of the maid-servants had slapped a fellow nun (doubtless also a child) in church![106] At Littlemore there was a certain Agnes Marcham, who had entered at the age of thirteen, and had remained there unprofessed for thirteen years; she now refused to take the full vows[107]. Some of the nuns at Romsey in 1534 were very young, two being fourteen and one fifteen[108]. Indeed the reception of girls at a tender age was rather encouraged than otherwise by the Church. Archbishop Greenfield gave a licence to the Prioress of Hampole to receive Elena, daughter of the late Reyner Sperri, citizen of York, who was eight years old, and (he added solemnly) "of good conversation and life"[109], and Archbishop John le