early ages is a matter of which there can be little doubt, and this
is sufficiently evidenced by one fact alone. Within its precincts was
born, about the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth
century, John, the foremost mathematician of the age, author of
"Tractatus de Sphæri Mundi," "De Computo Ecclesiastes," and "De
Algorismo," who was honoured with a public funeral at the expense of
the University of Paris, who assumed the name of Johannes de Sancto
Bosco, or John of the Holy Wood. And here it may be incidentally
noticed that the Holy Wood has since then produced other men upon
whom the mantle of Johannes seems to have fallen. Here was born, in
1556, Henry Briggs, the eminent mathematician; Gresham, Professor of
Geometry, Savilian Professor at Oxford, and author of "Arithmetica
Logarithmica," an improvement on Napier, containing logarithms of
30,000 natural numbers; Jesse Ramsden, the famous optician, and
improver of the Hadley quadrant, who died A.D. 1800; and at Horton,
seven miles distant, Abraham Sharpe, one of the best mathematicians and
astronomers of his time, who died in 1742.
The shadows of evening were falling upon the valley, and the outlines
of the rugged, verdureless hills were gradually becoming more and more
indistinct, as Father Aelred, having passed out of his little chapel of
St. John the Baptist, where he had been performing the vesper service,
proceeded to his lonely habitation, and after a simple meal of wild
fruits and a draught of water from the little streamlet trickling down
the hillside, sat him down to read for the hundredth time a transcript
of a portion of Cædmon's Scriptural poems, after which he spent some
time in prayer and self-communion, and then cast himself upon his
sackcloth, which was spread over a layer of rough gravel, to slumber
for a short time, in this mortifying and penitential fashion, to rise
again at midnight for other devotional exercises.
Father Aelred was a man of thirty or thirty-five years of age, of pale
countenance and emaciated frame, with sunken eyes and hollow voice,
the result of rigorous fasting, long vigils, mortification of the
flesh, and severe penitential exercises. In his boyhood he had been
regarded, from his gravity of aspect, love of learning, and incipient
piety, as one who was destined to become a light of the church of the
coming generation, and was sent for his education to the famous School
of Streoneshalh, established by the Lady Hilda, and at that time under
the superintendence of her successor, the Princess Elfleda, where he
imbibed Scriptural instruction from the lips of the then venerable
Cædmon, a monk of the house. He became a novice of the house, passed
the requisite examinations satisfactorily, and was in due course
admitted as a fully accredited member of the fraternity. The strictness
of his piety was such that he shortly found the life of a monk not to
answer his longings for a higher life of holiness and a position where
he could be of service to the souls of his fellowmen. He therefore
left the shelter of Whitby, and wandered about for some weeks, until
he came into the wild and barren-looking mountainous district of the
west, and finding there a secluded valley, shut in by towering hills
and frowning rocks--a spot with a very sparse and scattered population,
and removed far away from the noise and turmoil of the world--he
resolved to make it his home, and to settle down in it as a hermit,
shutting out all intercourse with his fellowmen and women, save in the
way of imparting spiritual teaching and consolation to the few simple
unsophisticated rustics who dwelt in the valley. He found a cavern in
the hillside, which he enlarged and fashioned into a habitation wherein
to live; fitting the entrance with a door, to shelter him from the cold
winter winds and prevent the intrusion of wild animals, above which
he made an orifice for the admission of light, which he glazed with a
thinly scraped sheet of horn, such as King Alfred's lanterns were made
of, and furnished the interior with two sections of a tree trunk, the
larger to serve as a table, the smaller as a seat; a shelf on which he
kept his eatables, with a knife, an earthen platter, and a drinking
horn, a piece of rough sackcloth for his bed, and over it, fixed to
the rock, a roughly-shapen cross, the emblem of his faith, beside which
hung a knotted rope for the purpose of penitential flagellation. At
a few rods distance he erected with his own hands, from timber cut
by himself, a small chapel--a temple of God, sufficiently rude and
unpretentious in point of architecture, but answering every purpose for
which it was intended, that of a place of assembly for the simple and
unlettered people of the valley, where they might join in the worship
of God; and here Aelred every evening performed divine service and
catechised the small flock of which he had constituted himself the
pastor, and on Sundays performed three full services, with a sermon and
the administration of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. And thus he
came to be looked upon in the district as a most holy man, as indeed
he was, and but little below a saint, who might be expected any day to
commence the working of miracles, in the cure of the sick and afflicted.
There was one peculiarity about Aelred's character, which amounted
almost to a monomania. He entertained a shrinking horror of
fair-featured, beautiful women--not that there were many such in his
solitary valley, they being, as a rule, embrowned by exposure to the
sun, and their features corrugated by marks of rough toil and the
troubles of life even from girlhood, and as such they experienced his
sympathy and Christian charity; and the little children were always
treated by him with tenderness and love, in imitation of his Divine
Master, who had said "for of such is the kingdom of Heaven." But
for the vain and frivolous of the sex, who seemed to deem nothing
of supreme importance save the adornment of their persons, he felt
profound scorn and contempt, mixed with a modicum of pity, and
marvelled why they were sent into the world at all, unless, it might
be, to test the virtue of man by the temptation of their fascinating
allurements.
It happened, however, that not far distant a benevolent and wealthy
lady had established a religious home for females. It was not exactly a
nunnery, although it possessed many of the features of one, the inmates
not being debarred from matrimony, although absolute chastity was an
essential while resident there; nor were they garbed in unbecoming
costumes, nor compelled to sacrifice that pride and ornament of
woman, her hair; besides which they were allowed a certain amount of
liberty in the way of visiting their friends, which was not accorded
to a regular nun. The ladies of this establishment were wont to go to
Father Aelred to confess their little peccadilloes, to which he saw no
reasonable objection, as they were generally very homely, ill-favoured
specimens of the sex, as is usually the case with the inmates of
nunneries, and thus were in no way perilous to his chaste soul and holy
communings. Had they been otherwise, it is probable that he might have
declined the office of father confessor to them, and closed the door of
St. John's Chapel against their intrusion.
It is a well-known psychological fact that the body and the mind act
and re-act upon each other to their respective well-being or detriment,
and that if the one is neglected or abused the other suffers in
proportion; and this fact was evidenced in the case of Father Aelred.
As we have observed, he was a man of intense and fervid piety, the
whole of his thoughts being concentrated on one sole object--the
salvation of his own soul and that of his fellow-creatures. Hence he
fasted for prolonged periods, denied himself a sufficient measure
of sleep, such as nature demanded, subjected himself to severe
self-flagellations, and in other ways outraged nature, fancying that
by these mortifications of the flesh he was promoting the health of
his soul. But the laws of nature are never broken with impunity, and
he had to pay the penalty; instead of invigorating he impaired the
powers of the spiritual portion of his dual entity, which, although
distinct from, is essentially interwoven with the material half. At
first he merely experienced lassitude, depression of spirits, and a
harassing dread that after all his religious aspirations and rigid
observance of the duties of the Church, he might find himself cast
into the bottomless pit at last. These were followed by distressing
dreams and visions of the Judgment Day, the frown and sentence of the
arbiter of his eternal destiny, and the jeering scoffs of the enemy
of souls, as he passed into the region of everlasting weeping and
wailing. Deeming these to be proofs of the weakness of his faith and
the languor of his religious life, he was led to redouble the rigour
of his asceticism, the natural result being to intensify the malady he
sought to cure. From seeing fearful visions in his dreams at night, he
began to see horrible figures of demons by day, who crowded about him,
with scoffing grimaces and leering looks, sometimes, as it seemed to
his ears, as if uttering threats and sarcastic allusions to his assumed
piety, or anon indulging in demoniac yells of laughter. Of course he
attributed all these to the machinations of the devil, and prayed for
deliverance from them; but he was haunted by them day and night, with
increasing persistency, until at length the sanity of his mind gave
way, and he became in fact a maniac, not, however, so pronounced as to
render it evident to others, or prevent his performance of his priestly
offices, nor did he relax his private devotional exercises.
On the evening above mentioned, when the holy father returned home
from the chapel and sat down to the perusal of the transcript of
Cædmon, which he had brought from Whitby, he was particularly disturbed
in mind, and could not concentrate his thoughts upon what he was
reading, which perpetually recurred at the evening service in the
chapel and the advent of a new member of his congregation; besides
which an imp had squatted himself on the table opposite him, and sat
there grinning at him in a most diabolical fashion. It was the usual
custom of the sisterhood of the religious house of which mention
has been made to attend his evening service; and on this occasion a
new member of the sisterhood was present for the first time. She had
been just admitted as a novice, and was young and beautiful, with the
fair, clear complexion, blue eyes, and long flaxen hair of the Anglian
race, a striking contrast to the elderly, homely featured spinsters
whom she accompanied. The moment he caught sight of her face, Aelred
experienced a species of fascination, similar to that of the bird in
the presence of the serpent, and although he battled with the feeling,
he could not shake it off. To his eyes, she seemed like an angel come
down from heaven, and the more he struggled to avert his thoughts from
contemplating her celestial beauty, the more he felt impelled to turn
his eyes again and again to where she sat. He felt it was wrong, so
he brought the service to an abrupt close and hastened home to purify
his soul, by prayer, from what he deemed the lust of the eye. But the
vision was ever present in his mind's eye, so much so that he scarcely
heeded or was conscious of the grinning imp on the table. He had
retired to his sackcloth couch, after a wholesome application of the
knotted rope and a prolonged prayer before the cross, and eventually
fell asleep, but his dreams were all of the fair vision he had seen in
the chapel, and for that night he was not haunted by his usual demon
visitants.
A few days afterwards the Mother Superior of the little convent came
to the chapel for confession, and brought with her her new daughter,
to whom she introduced Aelred as her future father confessor, and it
was with a strange unusual throbbing of his heart that he looked upon
her fair form, as she bowed herself beneath his paternal greeting;
but when he listened to her soft, silvery accents as she told him in
confession her little sins of thought, his heart softened as it had
never done before to any woman. These feelings, however, involuntary as
they were, caused him much alarm, and he strove to banish them as being
perilous to his soul, but it was impossible to drive the fair, and as
he thought, angelic, image from his mind. A week passed by, to him a
week of sad spiritual tribulation, for when in prayer his mind wandered
away; nor was he able to fix his thoughts in contemplation, the angelic
vision ever rising up to distract and perplex him.
One day when she came to confess she said to him--"Holy father, I
have fallen into grievous sin; I have made the probationary vow of
abstraction from the world and of devotion to the sole service of
God." "That is well, my daughter," said Aelred; "persevere in that
resolution, and God will bless you both now and for ever." "But,
father," she continued, "I have suffered a fearful lapse; I have looked
back upon the world, and have almost regretted having taken the vows."
"Backsliding," said Aelred in reply, "is, as you term it, a grievous
sin; but it is remediable by prayer, penitence, and fasting. But tell
me more in detail the evil thoughts which have assailed your soul."
"I almost fear to tell you," she answered. "Then can I not advise
you in the matter excepting in general terms. Confide in me; it is
but speaking to God through me, and he will inspire me with words of
remedial comfort; otherwise I cannot grant absolution."
Thus urged, she stated that previously to entering the convent she
scarcely knew what the passion of love meant, but since then it had
sprung up in her heart with a vehemence that it seemed to be impossible
to suppress. She had seen one since she came into the valley, a pious
and godly man, who had at the first sight animated her breast with the
passion in so intense a degree that it glowed and raged within her
like a furnace. The holy man at once concluded that he himself was the
person she referred to, and he felt his heart beating wildly with an
hitherto unexperienced emotion, and at the same time his brow became
bedewed with perspiration, caused by an apprehensive terror of the
dangerous position in which he found himself placed. He stood silent
and almost paralysed, looking down upon her with fearful forebodings as
to what she would confess further, when she, wondering at his silence,
cast a furtive glance upward from her hitherto downcast eyes. Everyone
knows that there is wondrous eloquence in the glance of a female
eye, and as her's met his, he felt at once that it meant impassioned
love--lawless love, and it stirred up within his disordered mind
all the narrow bigotry of his sentiments in respect to sexual love.
He still stood silently gazing upon her, when all at once a fearful
idea flashed across his mind, which caused him to pass at once from a
person of slightly distempered intellect into a perfect madman. The
idea was that the girl before him was none other than Satan himself,
who, not having been able to tempt him to sin by means of his imps in
their repulsive demoniac forms, had assumed the semblance of a lovely
virgin to allure him to carnal sin. Rising up to his full height, with
eyeballs glaring and features distorted with indignant rage, he cried,
"Satan, I know thee, and I defy thee; but no more shalt thou tempt man
in that shape at least," and with that he dealt her a violent blow, and
she fell senseless on the floor. "Ah!" cried he, "thou hast found thy
match in me, but my work is not yet completed; thy head shall be placed
aloft as a warning to others," and with that he procured a knife and
severed her head from her body, which he then took out and fixed on the
trunk of a yew tree, just where it begins to ramify, and when that was
completed he rushed up the mountain with wild shouts of triumph and
maniacal gesticulations.
The young novice not returning to the convent, search was made for
her, and her headless body was discovered in the chapel, lying in a
pool of blood, but it was not until the following day that the head
was found fixed in the yew tree. On attempting to remove it, it was
found that the long hair had taken root in the tree trunk, and was
spreading downwards in thin filaments, and as this was looked on as a
miracle, it was left there. Suspicion of the murder attached itself to
the hermit-priest, and as he had been seen going up the mountain in a
distraught state of mind, search was made for him in that direction,
and his body was found at the foot of a precipice down which he had
fallen, but whether through accident or for the purpose of suicide
could never be known.
Camden says--"Her head was hung upon an ew-tree, where it was reputed
holy by the vulgar, till quite rotten, and was visited in pilgrimage by
them, every one picking off a branch of the tree as a holy relique. By
this means the tree became at last a mere trunk, but still retained its
reputation of sanctity among the people, who believed that those little
veins, which are spread out like hair in the rind between the bark and
the body of the tree, were indeed the very hair of the virgin. This
occasioned such resort of pilgrims to it that Horton, from a little
village grew up to a large town, assuming the name of Halig-fax, or
Halifax, which signifies holy hair."
The Dead Arm of St. Oswald the King.
The Anglian kingdom of Northumbria, of which York was the capital,
presented in the seventh century one almost continuous series of
battles and murders, massacres of the people, and desolation of the
land. Ethelfrid, grandson of Ida, founder of the kingdom of Bernicia,
and Eadwine, son of Ælla, founder of that of Deira, succeeded their
fathers in their respective kingdoms about the same time; but
the former, who had married Acca, Eadwine's sister, usurped his
brother-in-law's throne and drove him into exile, who afterwards, by
the assistance of Redwald, King of the East Angles, in the year 617,
defeated and slew Ethelfrid in battle, and became King of Northumbria
and eighth Bretwalda, or paramount monarch of Britain. He was converted
to Christianity, and Penda, the pagan King of Mercia, in order to
extirpate the heretical religion, invaded Northumbria, and defeated
Eadwine at Hethfield, who was slain in the fight. This happened in
633, and Penda then went into East Anglia on the same mission, leaving
Cadwalla, a Welsh Prince, his ally, although a Christian, as Governor
of Northumbria, who made York his headquarters, and ruled the people,
especially those who had embraced Christianity and were the most
devoted adherents of the family of Eadwine, with the most ruthless
barbarity. On the death of Ethelfrid, his sons, Eanfrid and Oswald,
fled into Scotland along with Osric, son of Ælfrid, King Eadwine's
uncle, where they had been converted to Christianity under the teaching
of the monks of Iona, or, as Speed puts it, "had bin secured in
Scotland all his (Eadwine's) reigne, and among the Red-shanks liued as
banished men, where they learned the true Religion of Christ, and had
receiued the lauer of Baptisme." On hearing of the death of Eadwine,
they returned to Northumbria, were welcomed by the people, and assumed
the crowns--Osric of Deira, and Eanfrid of Bernicia. Cadwalla was
still, however, potent in Northumbria, holding York and tyrannising
over the people, and they were scarcely seated on their thrones when he
slew Osric in battle, and caused Eanfrid to be put to death when he
came before him to sue for peace. Seeing that Christianity was almost
extinct in the land, the people having reverted to the old faith,
they both deemed it expedient to renounce Christianity and restore
the worship of Woden, respecting which Bede says, "To this day that
year (the year during which they reigned) is looked upon as unhappy
and hateful to all good men; as well on account of the apostasy of
the English Kings, who had renounced the faith, as of the outrageous
tyranny of the British King. Hence it has been agreed by all who have
written about the reigns of the Kings to abolish the memory of these
perfidious Monarchs, and to assign that year to the reign of the
following King, Oswald, a man beloved of God."
Oswald was an altogether different man from his brother Eanfrid, a man
of genuine faith, who had imbibed the true principles of Christianity,
sincere in his devotions, and prepared to undergo any suffering, even
death itself, rather than apostatise from what he was fully convinced
was the truth. On the death of his brother he collected around him
a small army of devoted followers, and with these advanced to meet
Cadwalla, relying on the justice of his cause, the bravery of his
handful of men, and the assistance of God. He set up his standard,
a cross, emblematic of his faith, at Denisbourne, near Hagulstad
(Hexham), "and this done," says Bede, "raising his voice, he cried
to his army, 'Let us all kneel and jointly beseech the true and
living God Almighty, in his mercy, to defend us, from the haughty and
fierce enemy, for he knows that we have undertaken a just war for the
safety of our nation.' All did as he had commanded, and accordingly,
advancing towards the enemy with the first dawn of day, they obtained
the victory, as their faith deserved." He adds, "In that place of
prayer very many miraculous cures have been performed, as a token and
memorial of the King's faith, for even to this day many are wont to cut
off small chips from the wood of the holy Cross, which being put into
water, men or cattle drinking thereof or sprinkled with that water are
immediately restored to health." He then gives some instances, one of
Bothelme, a brother of the church of Hagulstad, which was afterwards
built on the spot, who broke his arm by falling on the ice, causing "a
most raging pain," when he was given a portion of moss from the then
old cross, which he placed in his bosom, and went to bed forgetting
that he had it, but "awaking in the middle of the night, he felt
something cold lying by his side, and putting his hand to feel what it
was, he found his arm and hand as sound as if he had never felt any
such pain."