In 2012, archaeologists excavating a church site in Oxford had found skeletons of nuns who died in disgrace after being accused of 'sexually immoral behaviour.
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Some of the bodies found were buried ‘upside down’, a mark of shame’ to punish the decreased for their lewd behaviour. Such burials called ‘prone’ burials were reserved for ‘witches’, sinners, and outcasts whose behaviour marked them out as odd or threatening within a community.
Most of the buried were females, at 35, with males and children, accounting for the others. One of the women even had an infant interred between her legs while being buried face down. According to Paul Murray, an archaeologist from John Moore Heritage Services, this was significantly symbolic as he said.
“This was perhaps a penitential act to atone for their sins or the sins of their families. Her lower legs had been truncated by the later internment of an infant. It is unusual for someone so young to be buried within the church. And sometimes women found in prone positions are considered to be witches.”
What crimes did these nuns commit to deserve such a punishment? Why was the Littlemore priory deemed as one of the worst nunneries of Medieval England? Was its prioress executed and buried with her baby?
To know the answers we need to go back to Littlemore Priory, a former nunnery founded in 1110 in Oxfordshire, England.
The sex-crazy nuns of Littlemore Priory
The Benedictine priory at Littlemore was founded in the 12th century by Robert de Sandford in the latter years of the reign of King Stephen.
In the early days of Henry III, the priory received several benefits of the royal favour. The priory was paid handsomely by the king for its maintenance and in 1232.
The king also granted it permission to send a sumpter horse twice a day into Shotover Forest to collect dead wood, and in the same year granted to it a piece of land in Hendred, Berkshire. However, strangely from 1291 onwards, it lost its royal patronage as it gradually sunk into poverty.
On 17 June 1517, Littlemore Priory was visited by Dr. Edmund Horde, a commissary of Bishop William Atwater of Lincoln, accompanied by the episcopal chancellor, Richard Roston. While what triggered the impromptu visit is unknown but what they saw, happening at the nunnery under its prioress Katherine Wells scandalized them to the bones.
The prioress herself was a bad egg, to begin with. She herself had an illegitimate daughter and was still visited by the father of the child, Richard Hewes, a priest in Kent with whom she drank and romped occasionally within the nunnery.
She was heavily appropriating the nunnery’s meagre funds and had pawned all the nunnery’s ornaments to support her extravagant lifestyle. She was brutal in punishments and any nun opposing her would be banished to a closed room without food and drink for several days.
As the nuns complained against the prioress, accusations and counteraccusations started to fly with Katherine blaming the other nuns of immoral behaviour themselves.
The prioress complained that one of the nuns 'played and romped' with boys in the cloister and refused to be corrected. When she punished her, the other nuns broke the punishment room and rescued her. Some nuns even ‘remained out’ for two-three weeks at a stretch to have fun with the men in the neighbourhood.