The Monk and the Nun
The monastic orders in the middle ages were amongst the most corrupt institutions in a corrupt age. Many were known even by contemporaries to prefer hunting, drinking, and womanizing to ministering to their Divine Office. As early as 793 AD, Alcuin of York sent a letter rebuking the monks of Lindisfarne for just these offenses, and even blamed the recent Viking attack on the monastery on their sinful ways. In the late fourteenth century, Chaucer mocked the monastic orders in his portrayal of the hunting-obsessed Monk-narrator and the Wife of Bath’s garrulous attack on friars in The Canterbury Tales.
After the Reformation, when Henry VIII changed England from a Catholic to a Protestant nation (notwithstanding the brief Counter-Reformation), anti-Catholic propaganda seized upon the excesses of the Roman faith attested in medieval sources to justify the change of dogma, and the reformers’ fervor (and brutal-enforcement of compliance) was embraced by the wider populace. War with Catholic Spain served to align patriotism with Protestantism. Thus there are many tales of ghostly monks who wander the earth as punishment for their sinful lives and appalling crimes, along with exaggerated legends of Catholic excess and corruption, in the corpus of English folklore.
Some monasteries were twin-establishments, meaning that monks and nuns were housed in separate buildings within the same compound. Inevitably, some were caught committing the sins of the flesh together, and the punishment was usually death. At The Bull public house in Streatley, Berkshire, a Yew tree growing in the beer garden is said to mark the graves of two such offenders. A sign simply reads ‘In 1440 a nun and a monk here slain for misconduct and buried under the yew tree’. Legend has it that both were executed by being walled up alive before being buried there.
Fear of Catholicism, and the assumption of its members’ wrongdoing, inspired legends surrounding skeletons uncovered in old ecclesiastical buildings. Immurement, or starving people to death in a locked room, is a relatively rare phenomenon in English history, but its peculiar horror understandably gripped the popular imagination. At Thornton Abbey, Lincolnshire, a skeleton found seated at a table with a book and candlestick in 1722 was claimed to be that of Thomas de Gretham, a fourteenth-century abbot said to dabble in black magic and degeneracy. There is also a spurious account of a nun suffering the same fate near Hereford.
There are no contemporary records of the Streatley monk and nun ever-existing, although there are many former monastic sites nearby. The Yew has perhaps contributed to the legend, as the trees frequently grow in churchyards (often survivals of pre-Christian pagan sites where churches now stand). Although it is a dubious tale, the story of the monk and the nun demonstrates how feared the Catholic faith was after the Reformation, aided by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the aforementioned war with Spain. The association of Catholicism with brutality and sin certainly led to some titillating ghost stories and legends.