Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- General Introduction: What's in a Name: the ‘French’ of ‘England’
- Section I Language and Socio-Linguistics
- Introduction
- 1 French Language in Contact with English: Social Context and Linguistic Change (mid-13th–14th centuries)
- 2 The Language of Complaint: Multilingualism and Petitioning in Later Medieval England
- 3 The Persistence of Anglo-Norman 1230–1362: A Linguistic Perspective
- 4 Syntaxe anglo-normande: étude de certaines caractéristiques du XIIe au XIVe siècle
- 5 ‘“Fi a debles,” quath the king’: Language Mixing in England's Vernacular Historical Narratives, c.1290–c.1340.
- 6 Uses of French Language in Medieval English Towns
- 7 The French of England in Female Convents: The French Kitcheners' Accounts of Campsey Ash Priory
- 8 The French of England: A Maritime lingua franca?
- 9 John Barton, John Gower and Others: Variation in Late Anglo-French
- 10 John Gower's French and his Readers
- Section II Crossing the Conquest: New Linguistic and Literary Histories
- Section III After Lateran IV: Francophone Devotions and Histories
- Section IV England and French in the late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
- Bibliography
- Index of Primary Texts and Manuscripts
- Index of Primary Authors
- General Index: Persons and Places, Subjects
- YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS: PUBLICATIONS
7 - The French of England in Female Convents: The French Kitcheners' Accounts of Campsey Ash Priory
from Section I - Language and Socio-Linguistics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- General Introduction: What's in a Name: the ‘French’ of ‘England’
- Section I Language and Socio-Linguistics
- Introduction
- 1 French Language in Contact with English: Social Context and Linguistic Change (mid-13th–14th centuries)
- 2 The Language of Complaint: Multilingualism and Petitioning in Later Medieval England
- 3 The Persistence of Anglo-Norman 1230–1362: A Linguistic Perspective
- 4 Syntaxe anglo-normande: étude de certaines caractéristiques du XIIe au XIVe siècle
- 5 ‘“Fi a debles,” quath the king’: Language Mixing in England's Vernacular Historical Narratives, c.1290–c.1340.
- 6 Uses of French Language in Medieval English Towns
- 7 The French of England in Female Convents: The French Kitcheners' Accounts of Campsey Ash Priory
- 8 The French of England: A Maritime lingua franca?
- 9 John Barton, John Gower and Others: Variation in Late Anglo-French
- 10 John Gower's French and his Readers
- Section II Crossing the Conquest: New Linguistic and Literary Histories
- Section III After Lateran IV: Francophone Devotions and Histories
- Section IV England and French in the late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
- Bibliography
- Index of Primary Texts and Manuscripts
- Index of Primary Authors
- General Index: Persons and Places, Subjects
- YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS: PUBLICATIONS
Summary
Administrative documents from English medieval female convents are relatively rare. Household accounts – those kept by household officers, or obedientiaries such as treasurers, cellarers and sacrists, for example – which detail their annual income, expenses and supplies that suggest a monastery's internal operations survive for only twenty-seven convents – about twenty per cent – of the 132 female houses in medieval England. Most of these accounts are either fragments, single documents or survive in pairs, date from the late fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries and are in Latin or English. Only about a third have been published. By contrast, significantly more accounts survive – and have been published and mined for all aspects of male monastic society and economy – for medieval England's roughly 7,000 male houses of monks and canons.
The survival of eight household accounts, which run sequentially from 1298 to 1303, from a relatively modest convent of Augustinian canonesses, Campsey Ash Priory, in the county of Suffolk – part of the diocese of Norwich – is thus a great boon. Though the nuns who kept these accounts do not identify themselves with a specific office, the content of their accounts indicates that these nuns were kitcheners, those who supplied the nuns' kitchens with food. While superiors and other obedientiaries – particularly the cellarers – also contributed to a convent's larder that fed, and clothed nuns, and their guests and employees, kitcheners were the obedientiaries who bought food specifically for the nuns' consumption.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Language and Culture in Medieval BritainThe French of England, c.1100–c.1500, pp. 90 - 102Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009