A closer analysis of the chief sources of income of a medieval nunnery, as they may be distinguished in the _Valor_ and in various account rolls, is now possible. They may be classified as follows: _Temporalities_, comprising: (1) rents from lands and houses, (2) perquisites of courts, fairs, mills, woods and other manorial perquisites, (3) issues of the manor, i.e. sale of farm produce, (4) miscellaneous payments from boarders, gifts, etc.; and _Spiritualities_, comprising (5) tithes from appropriated benefices, alms, mortuaries, etc. The distinction between temporalities and spiritualities is a technical one and there was sometimes little difference between the sources of the two kinds of income, but the temporal revenues were usually larger[279].
(1) _Rents from lands and houses._ A house which possessed several manors besides its home farm would either lease them to tenants ("farm out the manor" as it was called), or put in bailiffs, who were responsible for working the estates and handing over to the convent the profits of their agriculture, and who may also have collected rents where no separate rent collector was employed. For besides the profits arising from the demesne land (of which some account will be given below), the convent derived a much more considerable income from the rents of all tenants (whatever the legal tenure by which they held) who held their land at a money rent. The number of such tenants was likely to increase by the commutation of customary services for money payments; since, except in the particular manor or manors wherein the produce of the demesne was reserved for the actual consumption of the community, it was to the interest of a convent to lease a great part of the demesne land to tenants at a money rent and so save itself the trouble of farming the land under a bailiff[280]. In addition to these rents from agricultural land an income was sometimes derived, as has already been pointed out, from the rent of tenements in towns.
In most account rolls a careful distinction was drawn between "rents of assize" and "farms." The former were the payments due from the tenants (whether freehold or customary) who held their holdings at a money rent; these rents were collected by the different collectors of the nunnery or brought to the treasurers by the tenants themselves. "Farms" were leases, i.e. payments for land or houses which were held directly in demesne by the nunnery, but instead of being worked by a bailiff, or occupied by the household, were "farmed out" at an annual rent. A "farmer" might thus hold in farm an entire manor, and, for the payment of an annual sum to the nuns, he would have the right to the produce of the demesne and to the rents of rent-paying tenants. He might be quite a small person and hold in farm only a few acres of the demesne (in addition perhaps to an ordinary tenant's holding on the manor). He might hold the farm of a mill, or a stable, or a single house[281]. In any case he paid a rent to the nuns and made what he could out of his "farm"; while they much preferred these regular payments to the trouble of superintending the cultivation of distant lands, in an age when communication was difficult and slow.