The support of resident corrodians and the payment of pensions and liveries were, however, less onerous than the duty of providing hospitality for visitors, which the nunneries performed as one of their religious obligations. _Date_ and _Dabitur_ did not always accompany each other. The great folk who held the Pope's indult to enter the houses of Minoresses were probably generous donors; but the unenclosed orders had to lodge and feed less wealthy guests and often enough they found the obligation a strain upon their finances. When the nuns of King's Mead, Derby, in 1326, petitioned the King to take the house into his special protection, they explained that great numbers of people came there to be entertained, but that owing to the reduction in their revenue they were unable to exercise their wonted hospitality[640]; and the number of guests was mentioned by the nuns of Heynings in 1401 as one reason for their impoverishment[641]. At Nunappleton in 1315 the Archbishop of York had to forbid two sets of guests to be received at the same time, until the house should be relieved of debt; and at Moxby (which was also in debt) he ordained that relatives of the nuns were not to visit the house for a longer period than two days; Nunappleton was evidently a favourite resort, for in 1346 another archbishop speaks of guests flocking--_hospites confluentes_--to the priory and orders them to be admitted to a hostelry constructed for the purpose. At Marrick in 1252 it was ordered that guests were not to stay for more than one night, because the means of the house barely sufficed for the maintenance of the nuns, sisters and brethren[642].
Another charge which fell heavily upon the nunneries, sometimes not entirely by their own fault, was that of litigation. This was only an occasional expense, but when it occurred it was heavy, and a suit once begun might drag on for years. Moreover the incidental expenses in journeys and bribes, which all had to be paid out of the current income of a house already (perhaps) charged with the payment of tithes and taxes and badly in need of repair, were often almost as heavy as the costs of the litigation. For instance an account of Christian Bassett, Prioress of St Mary de Pré (near St Albans), contains the following list of expenses incurred by her in the prosecution of a law suit in 1487, during the rule of her predecessor Alice Wafer: