that the house of Swine cannot sustain more nuns or sisters than now are there, inasmuch as those at present there are ill provided with food, as is said above, and that the house nevertheless remains at least a hundred and forty marks in debt; wherefore the lord Archbishop decreed that no nun or sister should thenceforward be received there, save with his consent[700].
A very severe punishment was decreed at Marrick, where the Archbishop announced that any man or woman admitted without his licence would be expelled without hope of mercy, the Prioress would be deposed and any other nuns who agreed condemned to fast on bread and water for two months (except on Sundays and festivals)[701]. In other dioceses the bishops pursued a similar policy. But it was not easy to enforce these prohibitions. Four years after Archbishop Greenfield's injunction to Hampole (1308) he was obliged to address another letter to the convent, having heard that the prioress had received
a little girl (_puellulam_), by name Maud de Dreffield, niece of the Abbot of Roche, and another named Jonetta, her own niece, at the instance of Sir Hugh de Cressy, her brother, that after a time they might be admitted to the habit and profession of nuns[702].
The predicament of the Prioress is easily understood; how was she to refuse her noble brother and the Abbot of Roche? They could bring to bear far more pressure than a distant archbishop, who came upon his visitations at long intervals. Moreover the ever present need of ready money made the resistance of nuns less determined than it might otherwise have been; for a dowry in hand they were, as usual, willing to encumber themselves with a new mouth to feed throughout long years to come.
Prohibitions from increasing the number of nuns become more rare in the second half of the fourteenth and during the fifteenth century. Even when the population recovered from the havoc wrought by the Black Death, the numbers in the nunneries continued steadily to decline. Perhaps fashion had veered, conscious that the golden days of monasticism were over; more likely the growing poverty of the houses rendered them a less tempting retreat. A need for restricting the number of nuns still continued, because the decline in the revenues of the nunneries was swifter than the decline in the number of the nuns. Thus in 1440-1 Alnwick included in his injunctions to seven houses a prohibition to receive more nuns than could competently be sustained by their revenues[703], and the evidence given at his visitations shows the necessity for such a restriction. The injunction to Heynings is particularly interesting: