At Elstow Bokyngham gave a more detailed injunction about the appointment of bailiffs and other officers.
Let the Abbess for the government of the aforesaid monastery have faithful servants, in especial for the government and supervision without waste of the husbandry and the manors and stock and woods of the aforesaid house; the which the Abbess herself is bound, if she can, to supervise each year in person, or else let her cause them to be industriously supervised by others; and to look after the external and internal business of the house and to prosecute it outside let her appoint also some man of proven experience and of mature age[755].
The purpose of those regulations and restrictions which have hitherto been described, was to assist the nuns in managing their own finances. But the nuns were never very good business women, and they were moreover in theory confined to the precincts of the cloister, so that it was difficult for them to manage their own business, unless they imperilled their souls by excursions into the world. During the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, therefore, a common method of extricating them from their difficulties was by appointing a male guardian, known in different places as Custos, Prior, Warden or Master, to supervise the temporal affairs of a house and to look after its finances. In the early history of Cistercian nunneries each house was governed jointly by a Prior and Prioress and in some cases a few canons are found holding the temporalities jointly with the nuns. Of these Cistercian houses Mr Hamilton Thompson says:
As in the case of the Gilbertine priories, such nunneries are rarely found outside Lincolnshire and Yorkshire: they were under the bishop's supervision and their connexion with the order of Cîteaux was nominal. Their geographical distribution, as well as the fact that St Gilbert attempted to affiliate his nunneries to the Cistercian order and modelled them upon its rule, provokes the suspicion that such houses were a result of the growth of the Gilbertine order, and, if not intended to become double houses, were at any rate imitations of the corporations of nuns at Sempringham and elsewhere[756].
References to canons occur in connection with the houses of Stixwould, Heynings and Legbourne in Lincolnshire[757], Catesby in Northamptonshire[758] and Swine in Yorkshire[759]. The _comperta_ of Archbishop Giffard's visitation of Swine in 1267-8 show that the house at that time closely resembled the double houses belonging to the Gilbertine order.