“Seduced by Indecency”: The “Carnal Lust” and Faked Death of Joan of Leeds
by thethreepennyguignol
When Johana de Ledes, better known as Joan of Leeds, grew tired of her life in a medieval nunnery in 1318, she did what so many of us who hate our jobs can only fantasize about: faked her own death and made a run for it. Let’s talk about the strange story of Joan of Leeds, and the some of the scandals that plagued the medieval Benedictine order.
Life for a Benedictine nun like Joan in the 1300s was a strictly-controlled one, following the rules laid out by Benedict of Nursia nearly 800 years previously; around 530, Benedict established the guidelines which would form the basis for the demands of the medieval Benedictine monasteries and abbeys. Three central vows were expected of those who joined the Benedictine order: a vow of poverty, a vow of obedience, and a vow of chastity. Great emphasis was put on the matter of humility (with Pslam 22:6 often quoted in support of this – “I am a worm and not a man, the reproach of men and the outcast of the people”), silence, and reverent prayer. A nun like Joan could expect to rise at around 2am to begin the half-dozen or so daily prayer rituals that would take place over the course of the following day. Any conversation was expected to be brief and quiet, with the invocation of laughter frowned-upon, meat was only offered for consumption to the sick, and even clothes were owned by the establishments rather than the people wearing them.
With such an intense schedule and demands placed upon those who joined the Benedictine order, it is, perhaps, not much of a surprise that many found themselves slipping up and breaking the rules. Vows of poverty were often broken by higher-ups in the abbey system who had access to greater influence and power, such as abbesses who would circumvent the issue by accessing enormous personal luxury under the guise of maintaining the communal property of the abbey, if not outright ignoring the vow entirely; in Geoffery Chaucer’s The Prioress’ Tale, part of his Canterbury Tales series, a fictional prioress, Madame Eglantine, is mercilessly satirised as a hypocrite who pampers her pet dogs more than caring for her fellow man, wears a gold brooch, and carries an expensive coral rosary. Vows of obedience were often directly challenged by various members of the order, perhaps most notably by the nuns of Abbey Sainte-Croix in Poitiers; one of the earliest Benedictine abbeys established in Europe, it served as the centre of a major upset when, in 589, around forty nuns rebelled against their abbess due to their harsh living conditions. Hiring mercenaries and soldiers, a full-throated military campaign was launched against the abbess, who was kidnapped by the nuns – when several bishops were sent to the abbey to bring an end to the rebellion, they were clubbed by the nuns themselves. While the rebellion was eventually quashed, most involved received little more than cursory slap on the wrist for their involvement, despite its obvious defiance of the vow of obedience.
But the vow that proved perhaps the most problematic for members of the order was the vow of chastity. The trope of the nun tempted into succumbing to sexual desire is not an unfounded one, with an estimated 4% of those in the order eventually committing some kind of so-called sexual immorality. In Yorkshire alone, a number of scandalous stories revolving around the romantic and sexual liaisons of the nuns would soon gain local infamy. In 1300 in Clementhorpe, one nun dramatically cast of her habit as she rode on horseback to the arms of her male lover, while in Nunappleton priory, a nun was found to have fallen pregnant. In East Riding, nuns and monks shared a living space, which led to a late-night tryst between a nun and an older monk – “she went out a Virgin of Christ,” another monk later wrote of the matter,”and she soon returned an adulteress”.
It was these vows of chastity, according to surviving records, that proved a problem for Joan of Leeds. In the early 1300s, Joan had been forced by her parents to join the Benedictine order at St Clements by York at a young age – not an uncommon event, as the abbey offered a cheap and respectable way to ensure a child was provided for outside of a potentially-expensive wedding dowry – and served as a nun at the St Clements By York ever since. She had grown increasingly frustrated by the limitations placed on her by her foisted-upon participation on the order, and frequently expressed as such to her fellow nuns her desire to return to secular life.
These frustrations seemed to come to a head in 1318, when Joan decided to take matters into her own hands. According to a letter from Archbishop William Melton She began feigning intense illness, and, “with the help of numerous of her accomplices, evildoers, with malice aforethought”, she faked her own death. Using a dummy (likely made of straw) as a stand-in for her corpse, Joan made her escape from the nunnery, while the fake “Joan” was buried in sacred ground on the church property in a staged funeral – whether her fellow sisters knew that it was fake or had been fooled by Joan is not remarked upon. The exact motivation for her eventual flight from monastic life was unclear, though Melton put forth some colourful guesses in his letter: “having turned her back on decency and the good of religion, seduced by indecency, she involved herself irreverently and perverted her path of life arrogantly to the way of carnal lust and away from poverty and obedience, and, having broken her vows and discarded the religious habit, she now wanders at large to the notorious peril to her soul and to the scandal of all of her order”.
Joan was eventually discovered living in the nearby Beverly (the Dean of Beverly being the recipient of the letter from Melton) with an unnamed man, causing great consternation in the church. Melton demanded that Joan return to her abbey within eight days and resume her duties after taking penitence for her actions, and for an investigation to be carried out to identify her potential accomplices within the abbey.
However, in another letter uncovered regarding the scandal, it was revealed that Joan may not have broken her vow of chastity at all – because she had never made it in the first place. She had, several weeks after her abscondment from the abbey, approached a priest known as Brother John – “trembling and anxious and coming…in great fear” – to try and explain her actions and seek absolution. She claimed that she had been submitted to the order against her will when she was very young, and had never willingly taken the Benedictine vows; the church demanded that those committing their life to the abbey did so of their own free will when they were of age to do so, and, if Joan’s story was true, she would be functionally granted freedom from the restraints of her previous life. “As a pious father moved by benign piety,” John suggested that he had “judged it more useful… for her safety to allow her to contract marriage rather than wander in the secular world dangerously when she has no wish henceforth to submit to any religious observance…lest there be any further reason for her to slip into dangerous error.”
So what became of Joan after she faked her death and fled the church? Unfortunately, her story as we know it ends there, with the most recent letters regarding the case uncovered in 2020 by The Northern Way research project. A few fictional forays into her tale have turned up in various mediums – the New Diorama Theatre re-imagined the story as a “thoroughly immoral” Christmas play, and Candace Robb used the story as the basis for her book The Nun’s Tale. But, regardless of its ultimately mysterious nature, it’s a story that has certainly captured the imagination of many who’ve encountered it, given the absurd details and outrageous nature of her apostasy – it was described by Professor Sarah Rees-Jones, a lead investigator on the project, as akin to “a Monty Python sketch”, and I think she’s dead-on with that comparison. Bizarre, scandalous, and just a little bit ridiculous, the story of Joan of Leeds lives on – just as she did after her supposed death.
If you’d like to support my blog, please consider supporting me by buying my books or dropping me a tip via my Support page. You can also check out some of my longform historical articles below, if you’d like to read more articles like this one:
The Myth, the Murders, and the Matter of the Bloody Countess Báthory
The Impossible Case of the Pimlico Poisoning
Palatable Poison: Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, and Lesbian Sex and Love on Trial
The Quiz Show Scandals of the 1950s (And How They Changed American Television)
Sources
The History of Clementhorpe Nunnery by RB Dobson and S. Donaghey
(header image via Wikipedia)
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