It was a time for hard work and for good fellowship. Says Tusser:
In haruest time, haruest folke, seruants and all, should make all togither good cheere in the hall: And fill out the black boule of bleith to their song, and let them be merie all haruest time long.
Once ended thy haruest let none be begilde, please such as did helpe thee, man, woman and childe. Thus dooing, with alway such helpe as they can, those winnest the praise of the labouring man[354].
The final feast was associated with the custom of giving a goose to all who had not overturned a load in carrying during harvest, and the nuns of St Michael's always enter it in their accounts as "the expenses of the sickle goose" or harvest goose.
For all this good feasting, yet art thou not loose till ploughman thou giuest his haruest home goose. Though goose go in stubble, I passe not for that, let goose haue a goose, be she leane, be she fat[355].
An echo of old English gaiety sounds very pleasantly through these harvest expenses.
(5) _The wages sheet._ The last set of expenses which the monastic housewife entered upon her roll was the wages sheet of the household, the payments for the year, or for a shorter period, of all her male and female dependents, together with the cost of their livery and of their allowance of "mixture," when the convent gave them these. We saw in the last chapter that the nuns were the centre of a small community of farm and household servants, ranging from the reverend chaplains and dignified bailiff through all grades of standing and usefulness, down to the smallest kitchen-maid and the gardener's boy.
Such is the tale of the account rolls. It may be objected by some that this talk of tenement-building, and livestock, ploughshares and harvest-home has little to do with monastic life, since it is but the common routine of every manor. But this is the very reason for describing it. The nunneries of England were firmly founded on the soil and the nuns were housewives and ladies of the manor, as were their sisters in the world. This homely business was half their lives; they knew the kine in the byre and the corn in the granary, as well as the service-books upon their stalls. The sound of their singing went up to heaven mingled with the shout of the ploughmen in the field and the clatter of churns in the dairy. When a prioress' negligence lets the sheepfold fall into disrepair, so that the young lambs die of the damp, it is made a charge against her to the bishop, together with more spiritual crimes. The routine of the farm goes on side by side with the routine of the chapel. These account rolls give us the material basis for the complicated structure of monastic life. This is how nuns won their livelihood; this is how they spent it.