The Customs of Old England | Page 6

there on the day
mentioned.

ECCLESIASTICAL
CHAPTER II
VOWESSES
Not wholly aloof from the subject treated in the previous chapter is the
custom that prevailed in the Middle Ages for widows to assume vows
of chastity. The present topic might possibly have been reserved for the
pages devoted to domestic customs, but the recognition accorded by the
Church to a state which was neither conventual nor lay, but partook of
both conditions in equal measure, decides its position in the economy
of the work. We must deal with it here.
Before discussing the custom in its historical and social relations, it will
be well to advert to the soil of thought out of which it sprang, and from
which it drew strength and sustenance. Already we have spoken of the
heritage of human sentiment. Now there is ample evidence that the
indifference to the marriage of widows which marks our time did not
obtain always and everywhere. On the contrary, among widely

separated races such arrangements evoked deep repugnance, as
subversive of the perfect union of man and wife, and clearly also of the
civil inferiority of females. The notion that a woman is the property of
her husband, joined to a belief in the immortality of the soul, appears to
lie at the root of the dislike to second marriages--which, according to
this view, imply a degree of freedom approximating to immorality. The
culmination of duty and fidelity in life and death is seen in the
immolation of Hindu widows. The Manu prescribes no such fiery
ordeal, but it states the principles leading to this display of futile
heroism: "Let her consecrate her body by living entirely on flowers,
roots, and fruits. Let her not, when her lord is deceased, ever pronounce
the name of another man. A widow who slights her deceased lord by
marrying again brings disgrace on herself here below, and shall be
excluded from the seat of her lord."
A similar feeling permeated the early Church. "The argument used
against the unions," says Professor Donaldson, "was that God made
husband and wife one flesh, and one flesh they remained even after the
death of one of them. If they were one flesh, how could a second
woman be added to them?" He alludes, of course, to the re-marriage of
the husband, but the argument, whatever it may be worth, applies
equally to both parties. An ancient example of renunciation is afforded
by Judith, of whom it is recorded: "She was a widow now three years
and six months, and she made herself a private chamber in the upper
part of the house, in which she abode shut up with her maids and she
wore hair-cloth upon her loins, and fasted all the days of her life, except
the Sabbaths and new moons, and the feasts of the house of Israel; and
on festival days she came forth in great glory, and she abode in her
husband's house a hundred and five years."
An order of widows is said to have been founded or confirmed by St.
Paul, who fixed the age of admission at sixty. This assertion, one
suspects, grew out of a passage in the First Epistle to Timothy, in
which the apostle employs language that would, at least, be consonant
with such a proceeding: "Honour widows that are widows indeed....
Now she that is a widow indeed and desolate trusteth in God and
continueth in supplications and prayers night and day." Simple but very

striking is the epitaph inscribed on the wall of the Vatican:
OCTAVIÆ MATRONÆ VIDVÆ DEI.
The order of deaconesses appears to have been mainly composed of
pious widows, and only those were eligible who had had but one
husband. This order came to an end in the eleventh or twelfth century,
but the vowesses, as a class, continued to subsist in England until the
convulsions of the sixteenth century, and in the Roman Church survive
as a class with some modifications in the order of Oblates, who, says
Alban Butler in his life of St. Francis, "make no solemn vows, only a
promise of obedience to the mother-president, enjoy pensions, inherit
estates, and go abroad with leave." Their abbey in Rome is filled with
ladies of the first rank.
The chief distinction between deaconesses and widows was the
obligation imposed on the former to accomplish certain outward works,
whereas widows vowed to remain till death in a single life, in which,
like nuns, they were regarded as mystically espoused to Christ. Unlike
nuns, however, vowesses usually supported the burdens entailed by
their previous marriage--superintending the affairs of the household
and interesting themselves in the welfare of their descendants. St.
Elizabeth of Hungary, though she bound herself to follow the
injunctions of her confessor and received from him a coarse habit