The convent’s daily inspections and evening assignments

The convent’s daily inspections and evening assignments are the operating routine through which the monks regulate the imprisoned women’s bodies, time, clothing, and access to one another. A morning inspection identifies who will be assigned for the evening; later rounds determine who attends supper, who is summoned privately, and who remains overnight. The routine’s apparent order does not mitigate its coercion: it makes the women visible to their captors and distributes them according to the monks’ demands, while punishment enforces compliance.

Institutional Setting and Personnel

The procedure depends on a purpose-built system of concealment. The church is joined to a pavilion reached from a hidden door behind the altar, concealed in the wainscoting and opened by a spring. A long, dark passage runs beneath a thirty-foot moat and continues underground for a quarter of a league before reaching the pavilion’s cellars. The building is masked by six enclosures, including stone walls and closely planted living palisades at least fifty feet high; from outside, the site can appear to be woodland rather than an inhabited structure. Its arrangement makes escape difficult and helps keep the daily system beyond public view.

The pavilion’s internal plan supports both custody and routine. Its basements contain a central hall, eight smaller rooms, two dungeons, and six storage rooms. The stories above contain kitchens and dining spaces, the monks’ private rooms, and the sleeping cells of the serving friars. Four seraglios, arranged as two large chambers with eight cubicles apiece, house the girls. Four serving friars fill specialized positions as jailer, valet, doctor, and cook; they are deaf and dumb, and the women are forbidden to approach or communicate with them. The architecture and assigned roles leave the prisoners with little access to help or information beyond what the institution permits.

Daily Inspection and Allocation

The daily sequence begins at nine in the morning, whatever the season. The Officer of the Day enters the chamber, sits in an armchair, and calls each woman forward for an individual inspection. He then determines who is to take part in the evening’s proceedings, specifies the condition in which the selected women are expected to appear, hears the superintendent’s report, and orders punishments. The inspection can itself become a collective exercise in submission, with the superintendent directing the group; the procedure therefore combines administration with the direct demonstration of the monks’ authority.

Assignments can also interrupt the women’s time before the evening schedule. A monk may send for one of them before breakfast by means of a card bearing her name, delivered by the jailer friar. The Officer of the Day arranges the summons but cannot refuse it; the selected woman must leave and return when dismissed. This procedure gives the monks access to the prisoners outside the formal supper allocation and makes the designation of a name on a card an instrument of immediate control.

In the evening, the assigned women are collected at seven in summer and six in winter. The jailer escorts them to supper, after which those not retained for the night return to their chamber. Others may be selected to stay out overnight, sometimes after being told several hours ahead what clothing to wear. On the first day of each month, each monk also receives a woman as a Girl of the Watch, except for the chamber superintendents, who are exempt because they govern the groups. The selected woman serves that monk for the month and must go to him at five in the morning, remaining until he leaves for the monastery the next day. She cannot be exchanged during the month or assigned to the same monk for consecutive months, but the rule’s limits do not lessen the burden it places on her.

Classification, Rules, and Punishment

The institution divides the women by age and clothing, with each class assigned a distinct color. The roster is kept constant at sixteen, eight women in each chamber, and the newcomer is given the habit appropriate to her class. They wear light-colored garments during the day and gowns of the same class color in the evening, dressing their hair for the monks’ gatherings. Classification makes each woman’s place in the system legible: her assigned clothing identifies the group to which she belongs, while the fixed number supports the institution’s continuous rotation of personnel.

Within each chamber, the superintendent has authority over the women and is responsible for inspecting them before they are sent to the monks. The Officer of the Day visits the living quarters, receives the superintendent’s complaints, assigns women to supper, and imposes the evening’s penalties. Rules and penalties are displayed in each chamber, converting the schedule into a posted disciplinary code. A woman who fails to rise at the appointed time faces thirty strokes; unsuitable dress or hair brings twenty; failure to report incapacity associated with menstruation brings sixty; and pregnancy confirmed by the surgeon brings one hundred. Negligence, refusal, or incompetence in responding to the monks’ demands can bring two hundred, while misconduct in the chamber or disobedience to the superintendent brings sixty. The escalating punishments make clear that the system penalizes not only breaches of routine but also failure to meet the captors’ expectations.

The rules extend beyond punctuality and dress to the women’s outward responses. Displays of sorrow, remorse, or a renewed inclination toward religion can be punished, as can signs of reluctance. Because the superintendent is also accountable for the women’s condition before assignments, authority is delegated downward without being relinquished by the monks: the women are compelled to obey her, while she is exposed to punishment if the group fails to meet the required standard. The procedure thus makes surveillance collective as well as hierarchical.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The routine is presented not as a sequence of isolated abuses but as a mechanism that makes captivity repeatable. Fixed numbers, class colors, inspections, lists, written rules, summons, and changing assignments turn the women into a managed population. The daily schedule leaves them with little control over when they are examined, where they go, or how long they remain away from their chamber. Even the intervals in which they are not assigned a task are defined by the institution’s timetable and its authority to summon them.

The procedure’s apparent regularity also contrasts with the violence it organizes. When the Officer of the Day arrives, the women line up and are counted before being inspected; the sequence resembles an orderly administrative round, yet its purpose is coercive allocation. The routine’s structure enables the monks to exercise power predictably while keeping responsibility dispersed among the officer, superintendents, and jailer. Against that internal precision stands the convent’s isolation from outside scrutiny: the superior protects its privileges, rare visitors are reassured by appearances of religious austerity, and the public reputation of the monastery helps sustain impunity. The daily system is therefore both a disciplinary apparatus within the pavilion and part of the broader concealment that allows the institution to endure.