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_:
We rede of an holy Abbot of the order of Cystreus that whyle he stode in the quyer at mattyns, he sawe a fende that had a longe and a greate poke hangynge about hys necke, and wente aboute the quyer from one to an other, and wayted bysely after all letters, and syllables, and wordes, and faylynges, that eny made; and them he gathered dylygently and putte them in hys poke. And when he came before the Abbot, waytynge yf oughte had escaped hym, that he myghte have gotten and put in hys bagge; the Abbot was astoned and aferde of the foulenes and mysshape of hym, and sayde vnto hym. What art thow; And he answered and sayd. I am a poure dyuel, and my name ys Tytyuyllus, and I do myne offyce that is commytted vnto me. And what is thyne offyce sayd the Abbot, he answeryd I muste eche day he sayde brynge my master a thousande pokes full of faylynges, and of neglygences in syllables and wordes, that ar done in youre order in redynge and in syngynge. And else I must be sore beten[921].
Carelessness in the singing of the services was not, however, the most serious result of reaction against routine. If the men and women of sensibility failed to keep intelligence active in the pursuit of spiritual or temporal duties, if they cared no longer to use brain and spirit as they performed the daily round, _accidia_[922], that dread disease, half ennui and half melancholia, which, though common to all men, was recognised as the peculiar menace of the cloister, lay ever in wait for them. Against this sin of intellectual and spiritual sloth all the great churchmen of the middle ages inveigh, recognising in it the greatest menace of religious life, from which all other sins may follow[923]. If _accidia_ once laid hold upon a monk he was lost; ceasing to perform with active mind his religious duties, he would find them a meaningless, endless routine, filling him with irritation, with boredom and with a melancholy against which he might struggle in vain. The fourth century cenobite Cassian has left a detailed description of the effects of _accidia_ in the cloister, declaring that it was specially disturbing to a monk about the sixth hour "like some fever which seizes him at stated times," so that many declared that this was "the sickness that destroyeth in the noon day," spoken of in the ninetieth psalm[924]. Many centuries later Dante crystallised it in four unsurpassable lines. As he passed through the fifth circle of hell he saw a black and filthy marsh, in which struggled the souls of those who had been overcome by anger; but deeper than the angry were submerged other souls, whose sobs rose in bubbles through the muddy water and who could only gurgle their confession in their throats. These were the souls of men who had fallen victims to the sin of _accidia_ in their lives