Joan of Leeds: a reluctant nun

Joan of Leeds was a young nun during the early 14th century at the Benedictine convent of St Clement, near York. However, it was her escape from the convent in 1318, and her subsequent un-nunlike behaviour, that caused the Archbishop of York, William Melton, to get extremely annoyed and seek to have her apprehended and returned to her previous life.

Joan was clearly highly spirited and extremely clever. It may be that she was one of the many young women at that time who were sent to a convent as a young girl because she could not be looked after at home. This could happen for a number of reasons, such as loss of parents or a sudden financial crisis. As the girl grew older and reached puberty she might well have regretted having taken vows of chastity and poverty and want to live a different sort of life. That certainly seems to have been what Joan of Leeds thought.

Joan had a cunning plan that could not have been carried out without the knowledge of some of her fellow nuns. She made an effigy of herself and faked her own death. With the effigy buried instead of her, she slipped away from the convent and travelled 30 miles to the town of Beverley where she discovered the joys that being an attractive young woman can bring.

We know her story thanks to the letter written by Archbishop Melton, who was clearly scandalized, to the Dean of Beverley. His account reads:

“Out of a malicious mind simulating a bodily illness, she pretended to be dead, not dreading for the health of her soul, and with the help of numerous of her accomplices, evildoers, with malice aforethought, crafted a dummy in the likeness of her body. She had no shame in procuring its burial in a sacred place.”

The Archbishop clearly had knowledge of what Joan had been doing with her new-found freedom:

“She perverted her path of life arrogantly to the way of carnal lust and away from poverty and obedience. Having broken her vows and discarded the religious habit, she now wanders at large to the notorious peril of her soul and to the scandal of her order.”

The assumption one has to draw is that Joan sought to get over her poverty by indulging in “carnal lust”.

There is no evidence that Joan was ever apprehended, so she may have found herself a rich husband in Beverley and managed to live a comfortable life that was much more to her liking than what had gone before.

For St Clement’s Convent, which was founded in 1130 and dissolved in 1536 along with many other religious houses during the reign of King Henry VIII, this was not the first whiff of scandal. Back in 1192 all the nuns had been excommunicated when they refused to be ruled by a new abbey, but the Pope overturned this ruling.

Joan may well have sought to follow the example of another nun, in 1301, who had also run away from the convent, but in that case the nun already had a lover and went to join him.

Much later in the 14th century Geoffrey Chaucer wrote – in his Canterbury Tales – about a Prioress who lived a life of luxury but within her convent. Joan was certainly not alone in finding the Benedictine rule not to her liking. Chaucer was clearly of the view that such dissatisfaction was prevalent and that Joan’s case might have been repeated many times over.

© John Welford