Besides all other religious people living under vows, in community in monasteries, or as solitaries in their anchorages, there were also a number of Widows vowed to that life and devoted to the service of God, who lived at home in their own houses or with their families. This was manifestly a continuation, or imitation, of the primitive Order of Widows, of whom St. Paul speaks in his first Epistle to Timothy (ch. v.). For although religious women, from an early period (fourth century), were usually nuns, the primitive Orders of Deaconesses and Widows did not altogether cease to exist in the Church. The Service Books[162] contain offices for their benediction; and though it is probable that in fact a deaconess was very rarely consecrated in the Western Church, yet the number of allusions to widows throughout the Middle Ages leads us to suspect that there may have been no inconsiderable number of them. A common form of commission[163] to a suffragan bishop includes the consecrating of widows. From the Pontifical of Edmund Lacey, Bishop of Exeter, of the fourteenth century, we give a sketch of the service.[164] It is the same in substance as those in the earlier books. First, a rubric states that though a widow may be blessed on any day, it is more fitting that she be blessed on a holy day, and especially on the Lord's day. Between the Epistle and the Gospel, the bishop sitting on a faldstool facing the people, the widow kneeling before the bishop is to be interrogated if she desires, putting away all carnal affections, to be joined as a spouse to Christ. Then she shall publicly in the vulgar tongue profess herself, in the bishop's hands, resolved to observe perpetual continence. Then the bishop blesses her habit (clamidem), saying a collect. Then the bishop, genuflecting, begins the hymn _Veni Creator Spiritus_; the widow puts on the habit and veil, and the bishop blesses and gives her the ring; and with a final prayer for appropriate virtues and blessings, the ordinary service of Holy Communion is resumed, special mention of the widow being made therein.