The Wicked Nuns of St Mary’s

This is an approximate transcript of storytelling gig I performed recently in a Medieval church in Suffolk (England). We’re talking history, folklore, and demonology spiced with a large dose of imagination…

Let me tell you a story about the Wicked Nuns of St Mary’s in the centre of the Suffolk town of Bungay — and also of what really lies beneath the so-called Druid’s Stone in the churchyard.

Today St Mary’s church is no longer used for religious services but back in Middle Ages — so from about 900 years ago until King Henry the Eighth’s Dissolution of the Monasteries about 500 years ago — St Mary’s was a priory housing nuns belonging to the Benedictine Order. If you head out into the churchyard to the rear of the building, so can still see some of the ruins of the old priory buildings.

Ah… nuns, you say, nice little ladies who have dedicated their lives to religion and good works. EXCEPT this was definitely not the case in the Middle Ages. Instead, convents, nunneries, and priories were places where the local gentry and wealthier merchants would dump their teenage daughters who were either unmarriageable — or else their families were unwilling to spend money on their dowries. That said, as their daughters were to become ‘Brides of Christ’ they still had to pay the convent some money.

Not unexpectedly these young nuns did not take too kindly to being locked away in a convent — particularly those who had already enjoyed, let’s just say, the fruits of the flesh. Add in the fact many of…