THE famous St. Columba cannot perhaps be numbered among the hermits: but
as the spiritual father of many hermits, as well as many monks, and as
one whose influence upon the Christianity of these islands is notorious
and extensive, he must needs have some notice in these pages. Those who
wish to study his life and works at length will of course read Dr.
Reeves’s invaluable edition of Adamnan. The more general reader will
find all that he need know in Mr. Hill Burton’s excellent “History of
Scotland,” chapters vii. and viii.; and also in Mr. Maclear’s “History of
Christian Missions during the Middle Ages”—a book which should be in
every Sunday library.
St. Columba, like St. David and St. Cadoc of Wales, and like many great
Irish saints, is a prince and a statesman as well as a monk. He is mixed
up in quarrels between rival tribes. He is concerned, according to
antiquaries, in three great battles, one of which sprang, according to
some, from Columba’s own misdeeds. He copies by stealth the Psalter of
St. Finnian. St. Finnian demands the copy, saying it was his as much as
the original. The matter is referred to King Dermod, who pronounces, in
high court at Tara, the famous decision which has become a proverb in
Ireland, that “to every cow belongs her own calf.” {283} St. Columba,
who does not seem at this time to have possessed the dove-like temper
which his name, according to his disciples, indicates, threatens to
avenge upon the king his unjust decision. The son of the king’s steward
and the son of the King of Connaught, a hostage at Dermod’s court, are
playing hurley on the green before Dermod’s palace. The young prince
strikes the other boy, kills him, and flies for protection to Columba.
He is nevertheless dragged away, and slain upon the spot. Columba leaves
the palace in a rage, goes to his native mountains of Donegal, and
returns at the head of an army of northern and western Irish to fight the
great battle of Cooldrevny in Sligo. But after a while public opinion
turns against him; and at the Synod of Teltown, in Meath, it is
proclaimed that Columba, the man of blood, shall quit Ireland, and win
for Christ out of heathendom as many souls as have perished in that great
fight. Then Columba, with twelve comrades, sails in a coracle for the
coast of Argyleshire; and on the eve of Pentecost, A.D. 563, lands upon
that island which, it may be, will be famous to all times as Iona, Hy, or
Icolumkill,—Hy of Columb of the Cells.
Thus had Columba, if the tale be true, undertaken a noble penance; and he
performed it like a noble man. If, according to the fashion of those
times, he bewailed his sins with tears, he was no morbid or selfish
recluse, but a man of practical power, and of wide humanity. Like one of
Homer’s old heroes, St. Columba could turn his hand to every kind of
work. He could turn the hand-mill, work on the farm, heal the sick, and
command as a practised sailor the little fleet of coracles which lay
hauled up on the strand of Iona, ready to carry him and his monks on
their missionary voyages to the mainland or the isles. Tall, powerful,
handsome, with a face which, as Adamnan said, made all who saw him glad,
and a voice so stentorian that it could be heard at times a full mile
off, and coming too of royal race, it is no wonder if he was regarded as
a sort of demigod, not only by his own monks, but by the Pictish chiefs
to whom he preached the Cross. We hear of him at Craig Phadrick, near
Inverness; at Skye, at Tiree, and other islands; we hear of him receiving
visits from his old monks of Derry and Durrow; returning to Ireland to
decide between rival chiefs; and at last dying at the age of
seventy-seven, kneeling before the altar in his little chapel of Iona—a
death as beautiful as had been the last thirty-four years of his life;
and leaving behind him disciples destined to spread the light of
Christianity over the whole of Scotland and the northern parts of
England.
St. Columba, at one period or other of his life, is said to have visited
a missionary hermit, whose name still lingers in Scotland as St.
Kentigern, or more commonly St. Mungo, the patron saint of Glasgow. The
two men, it is said (but the story belongs to the twelfth century, and
can hardly be depended on), exchanged their crooked staves or crosiers in
token of Christian brotherhood, and that which St. Columba is said to
have given to St. Kentigern was preserved in Ripon Cathedral to the
beginning of the fifteenth century. But who St. Kentigern was, or what
he really did, is hard to say; for all his legends, like most of these
early ones, are as tangled as a dream. He dies in the year 601: and yet
he is the disciple of the famous St. Servanus or St. Serf, who lived in
the times of St. Palladius and St. Patrick, 180 years before. This St.
Serf is a hermit of the true old type; and even if his story be, as Dr.
Reeves thinks, a fabrication throughout, it is at least a very early one,
and true to the ideal which had originated with St. Antony. He is
brought up in a monastery at Culross: he is tempted by the devil in a
cave in the parish of Dysart (the Desert), in Fifeshire, which still
retains that name. The dæmon, fleeing from him, enters an unfortunate
man, who is forthwith plagued with a wolfish appetite. St. Serf cures
him by putting his thumb into his mouth. A man is accused of stealing
and eating a lamb, and denies the theft. St. Serf, however, makes the
lamb bleat in the robber’s stomach, and so substantiates the charge
beyond all doubt. He works other wonders; among them the slaying of a
great dragon in the place called “Dunyne;” sails for the Orkneys, and
converts the people there; and vanishes thenceforth into the dream-land
from which he sprung.
Two great disciples he has, St. Ternan and St. Kentigern; mystery and
miracle hang round the boyhood of the latter. His father is unknown.
His mother is condemned to be cast from the rock of “Dunpelder,” but is
saved and absolved by a miracle. Before the eyes of the astonished
Picts, she floats gently down through the air, and arrives at the cliff
foot unhurt. St. Kentigern is thenceforth believed to be virgin-born,
and is reverenced as a miraculous being from his infancy. He goes to
school to the mythic St. Serf, who calls him Mungo, or the Beloved; which
name he bears in Glasgow until this day. His fellow-scholars envy his
virtue and learning, and try to ruin him with their master. St. Serf has
a pet robin, which is wont to sit and sing upon his shoulder. The boys
pull off its head, and lay the blame upon Kentigern. The saint comes in
wrathful, tawse in hand, and Kentigern is for the moment in serious
danger; but, equal to the occasion then as afterwards, he puts the
robin’s head on again, sets it singing, and amply vindicates his
innocence. To this day the robin figures in the arms of the good city of
Glasgow, with the tree which St. Kentigern, when his enemies had put out
his fire, brought in from the frozen forest and lighted with his breath,
and the salmon in whose mouth a ring which had been cast into the Clyde
had been found again by St. Kentigern’s prophetic spirit.
The envy of his fellow-scholars, however, is too much for St. Kentigern’s
peace of mind. He wanders away to the spot where Glasgow city now
stands, lives in a rock hollowed out into a tomb, is ordained by an Irish
bishop (according to a Celtic custom, of which antiquaries have written
learnedly and dubiously likewise), and has ecclesiastical authority over
all the Picts from the Frith of Forth to the Roman Wall. But all these
stories, as I said before, are tangled as a dream; for the twelfth
century monks, in their loyal devotion to the see of Rome, are apt to
introduce again and again ecclesiastical customs which belonged to their
own time, and try to represent these primæval saints as regular and
well-disciplined servants of the Pope.
It may be remarked that St. Serf is said to have come into a “dysart” or
desert. So did many monks of the school of St. Columba and his
disciples, who wished for a severer and a more meditative life than could
be found in the busy society of a convent. “There was a ‘disert,’” says
Dr. Reeves, “for such men to retire to, besides the monastery of Derry,
and another at Iona itself, situate near the shore in the low ground,
north of the Cathedral, as may be inferred from Portandisiart, the name
of a little bay in this situation.” A similar “disert” or collection of
hermit cells was endowed at Cashel in 1101; and a “disert columkill,”
with two townland mills and a vegetable garden, was endowed at Kells, at
a somewhat earlier period, for the use of “devout pilgrims,” as those
were called who left the society of men to worship God in solitude.
The Venerable Bede speaks of as many as three personages, Saxons by their
names, who in the Isle of Ireland led the “Pilgrim” or anchoritic life,
to obtain a country in heaven; and tells of a Drycthelm of the monastery
at Melrose, who went into a secret dwelling therein to give himself more
utterly to prayer, and who used to stand for hours in the cold waters of
the Tweed, as St. Godric did centuries afterwards in those of the Wear.
Solitaries, “recluses,” are met with again and again in these old
records, who more than once became Abbots of Iona itself. But there is
no need to linger on over instances which are only quoted to show that
some of the noblest spirits of the Celtic Church kept up wherever they
could the hermit’s ideal, the longing for solitude, for passive
contemplation, for silence and perpetual prayer, which they had inherited
from St. Antony and the Fathers of the Egyptian Desert.
The same ideal was carried by them over the Border into England. Off its
extreme northern coast, for instance, nearly half-way between Berwick and
Bamborough Castle, lies, as travellers northward may have seen for
themselves, the “Holy Island,” called in old times Lindisfarne. A monk’s
chapel on that island was the mother of all the churches between Tyne and
Tweed, as well as of many between Tyne and Humber. The Northumbrians had
been nominally converted, according to Bede, A.D. 627, under their King
Edwin, by Paulinus, one of the Roman monks who had followed in the steps
of St. Augustine, the apostle of Kent. Evil times had fallen on them.
Penda, at the head of the idolatrous Mercians (the people of
Mid-England), and Ceadwalla, at the head of the Western Britons, had
ravaged the country north of Tweed with savage cruelty, slain King Edwin,
at Hatfield, near Doncaster, and exterminated Christianity; while
Paulinus had fled to Kent, and become Bishop of Rochester. The invaders
had been driven out, seemingly by Oswald, who knew enough of Christianity
to set up, ere he engaged the enemy, a cross of wood on the
“Heavenfield,” near Hexham. That cross stood till the time of Bede, some
150 years after; and had become, like Moses’ brazen serpent, an object of
veneration. For if chips cut off from it were put into water, that water
cured men or cattle of their diseases.
Oswald, believing that it was through the mercy of him whom that cross
symbolized he had conquered the Mercians and the Britons, would needs
reconvert his people to the true faith. He had been in exile during
Edwin’s lifetime among the Scots, and had learned from them something of
Christianity. So out of Iona a monk was sent to him, Aidan by name, to
be a bishop over the Northumbrians; and he settled himself upon the isle
of Lindisfarne, and began to convert it into another Iona. “A man he
was,” says Bede, “of singular sweetness, piety, and moderation; zealous
in the cause of God, though not altogether according to knowledge, for he
was wont to keep Easter after the fashion of his country;” _i.e._ of the
Picts and Northern Scots. . . . “From that time forth many Scots came
daily into Britain, and with great devotion preached the word to these
provinces of the English over whom King Oswald reigned. . . . Churches
were built, money and lands were given of the king’s bounty to build
monasteries; the English, great and small, were by their Scottish masters
instructed in the rules and observance of regular discipline; for most of
those who came to preach were monks.” {290}
So says the Venerable Bede, the monk of Jarrow, and the father (as he has
been well called) of English history. He tells us too, how Aidan,
wishing, it may be supposed, for greater solitude, went away and lived on
the rocky isle of Farne, some two miles out at sea, off Bamborough
Castle; and how, when he saw Penda and his Mercians, in a second invasion
of Northumbria, trying to burn down the walls of Bamborough—which were
probably mere stockades of timber—he cried to God, from off his rock, to
“behold the mischief:” whereon the wind changed suddenly, and blew the
flames back on the besiegers, discomfiting them, and saving the town.
Bede tells us, too, how Aidan wandered, preaching from place to place,
haunting King Oswald’s court, but owning nothing of his own save his
church, and a few fields about it; and how, when death came upon him,
they set up a tent for him close by the wall at the west end of the
church, so that it befell that he gave up the ghost leaning against a
post, which stood outside to strengthen the wall.
A few years after, Penda came again and burned the village, with the
church; and yet neither could that fire, nor one which happened soon
after, destroy that post. Wherefore the post was put inside the church,
as a holy thing, and chips of it, like those of the Cross of Heaven
Field, healed many folk of their distempers.
. . . A tale at which we may look in two different humours. We may pass
it by with a sneer, and a hypothesis (which will be probably true) that
the post was of old heart-of-oak, which is burnt with extreme difficulty;
or we may pause a moment in reverence before the noble figure of the good
old man, ending a life of unselfish toil without a roof beneath which to
lay his head; penniless and comfortless in this world: but sure of his
reward in the world to come.
A few years after Aidan’s death another hermit betook him to the rocks of
Farne, who rose to far higher glory; who became, in fact, the tutelar
saint of the fierce Northern men; who was to them, up to the time even of
the Tudor monarchs, what Pallas Athene was to Athens, or Diana to the
Ephesians. St. Cuthbert’s shrine, in Durham Cathedral (where his
biographer Bede also lay in honour), was their rallying point, not merely
for ecclesiastical jurisdiction or for miraculous cures, but for
political movements. Above his shrine rose the noble pile of Durham.
The bishop, who ruled in his name, was a Count Palatine, and an almost
independent prince. His sacred banner went out to battle before the
Northern levies, or drove back again and again the flames which consumed
the wooden houses of Durham. His relics wrought innumerable miracles;
and often he himself appeared with long countenance, ripened by
abstinence, his head sprinkled with grey hairs, his casule of cloth of
gold, his mitre of glittering crystal, his face brighter than the sun,
his eyes mild as the stars of heaven, the gems upon his hand and robes
rattling against his pastoral staff beset with pearls. {292} Thus
glorious the demigod of the Northern men appeared to his votaries, and
steered with his pastoral staff, as with a rudder, the sinking ship in
safety to Lindisfarne; received from the hands of St. Brendan, as from a
saint of inferior powers, the innocent yeoman, laden with fetters, whom
he had delivered out of the dungeon of Brancepeth, and, smiting asunder
the massive Norman walls, led him into the forest, and bade him flee to
sanctuary in Durham, and be safe; or visited the little timber vine-clad
chapel of Lixtune, on the Cheshire shore, to heal the sick who watched
all night before his altar, or to forgive the lad who had robbed the nest
which his sacred raven had built upon the roof, and, falling with the
decayed timber, had broken his bones, and maimed his sacrilegious hand.
Originally, says Bede, a monk at Melrose, and afterward abbot of the same
place, he used to wander weeks together out of his monastery, seemingly
into Ettrick and the Lammermuirs, and preach in such villages as “being
seated high up among craggy, uncouth mountains, were frightful to others
even to look at, and whose poverty and barbarity rendered them
inaccessible to other teachers.” “So skilful an orator was he, so fond
of enforcing his subject, and such a brightness appeared in his angelic
face, that no man presumed to conceal from him the most hidden secrets of
their hearts, but all openly confessed what they had done.”
So he laboured for many years, till his old abbot Eata, who had become
bishop and abbot at Lindisfarne, sent for him thither, and made him prior
of the monks for several years. But at last he longed, like so many
before him, for solitude. He considered (so he said afterwards to the
brethren) that the life of the disciplined and obedient monk was higher
than that of the lonely and independent hermit: but yet he longed to be
alone; longed, it may be, to recall at least upon some sea-girt rock
thoughts which had come to him in those long wanderings on the heather
moors, with no sound to distract him save the hum of the bee and the wail
of the curlew; and so he went away to that same rock of Farne, where
Aidan had taken refuge some ten or fifteen years before, and there, with
the deep sea rolling at his feet and the gulls wailing about his head, he
built himself one of those “Picts’ Houses,” the walls of which remain
still in many parts of Scotland—a circular hut of turf and rough
stone—and dug out the interior to a depth of some feet, and thatched it
with sticks and grass; and made, it seems, two rooms within; one for an
oratory, one for a dwelling-place: and so lived alone, and worshipped
God. He grew his scanty crops of barley on the rock (men said, of
course, by miracle): he had tried wheat, but, as was to be expected, it
failed. He found (men said, of course, by miracle) a spring upon the
rock. Now and then brethren came to visit him. And what did man need
more, save a clear conscience and the presence of his Creator? Certainly
not Cuthbert. When he asked the brethren to bring him a beam that he
might prop up his cabin where the sea had eaten out the floor, and when
they forgot the commission, the sea itself washed one up in the very cove
where it was needed: when the choughs from the cliff stole his barley and
the straw from the roof of his little hospice, he had only to reprove
them, and they never offended again; on one occasion, indeed, they atoned
for their offence by bringing him a lump of suet, wherewith he greased
his shoes for many a day. We are not bound to believe this story; it is
one of many which hang about the memory of St. Cuthbert, and which have
sprung out of that love of the wild birds which may have grown up in the
good man during his long wanderings through woods and over moors. He
bequeathed (so it was believed) as a sacred legacy to the wild-fowl of
the Farne islands, “St. Cuthbert’s peace;” above all to the eider-ducks,
which swarmed there in his days, but are now, alas! growing rarer and
rarer, from the intrusion of vulgar sportsmen who never heard St.
Cuthbert’s name, or learnt from him to spare God’s creatures when they
need them not. On Farne, in Reginald’s time, they bred under your very
bed, got out of your way if you made a sign to them, let you take up them
or their young ones, and nestled silently in your bosom, and croaked
joyfully with fluttering wings when stroked. “Not to nature, but to
grace; not to hereditary tendency, but only to the piety and compassion
of the blessed St. Cuthbert,” says Reginald, “is so great a miracle to be
ascribed. For the Lord who made all things in heaven and earth has
subjected them to the nod of his saints, and prostrated them under the
feet of obedience.” Insufficient induction (the cause of endless
mistakes, and therefore of endless follies and crimes) kept Reginald
unaware of the now notorious fact that the female eider, during the
breeding season, is just as tame, allowing for a little exaggeration, as
St. Cuthbert’s own ducks are, while the male eider is just as wild and
wary as any other sea-bird: a mistake altogether excusable in one who had
probably never seen or heard of eider-ducks in any other spot. It may
be, nevertheless, that St. Cuthbert’s special affection for the eider may
have been called out by another strange and well-known fact about them of
which Reginald oddly enough takes no note—namely, that they line their
nests with down plucked from their own bosom; thus realizing the fable
which has made the pelican for so many centuries the type of the Church.
It is a question, indeed, whether the pelican, which is always
represented in mediæval paintings and sculptures with a short bill,
instead of the enormous bill and pouch which is the especial mark of the
“Onocrotalus” of the ancients, now miscalled pelican, be not actually the
eider-duck itself, confounded with the true _pelecanus_, which was the
mediæval, and is still the scientific, name of the cormorant. Be that as
it may, ill befell any one who dare touch one of St. Cuthbert’s birds, as
was proved in the case of Liveing, servant to Ælric, who was a hermit in
Farne after the time of St. Cuthbert. For he, tired it may be of barley
and dried fish, killed and ate an eider-duck in his master’s absence,
scattering the bones and feathers over the cliffs. But when the hermit
came back, what should he find but those same bones and feathers rolled
into a lump and laid inside the door of the little chapel; the very sea,
says Reginald, not having dared to swallow them up. Whereby the hapless
Liveing being betrayed, was soundly flogged, and put on bread and water
for many a day; the which story Liveing himself told to Reginald.
Not only the eider, but all birds in Farne, were protected by St.
Cuthbert’s peace. Bartholomew, who was a famous hermit there in after
years, had a tame bird, says the chronicler, who ate from his hand, and
hopped about the table among him and his guests, till some thought it a
miracle; and some, finding, no doubt, the rocks of Farne weary enough,
derived continual amusement from the bird. But when he one day went off
to another island, and left his bird to keep the house, a hawk came in
and ate it up. Cuthbert, who could not save the bird, at least could
punish the murderer. The hawk flew round and round the island,
imprisoned, so it was thought, by some mysterious power, till, terrified
and worn out, it flew into the chapel, and lay, cowering and half dead,
in a corner by the altar. Bartholomew came back, found his bird’s
feathers, and the tired hawk. But even the hawk must profit by St.
Cuthbert’s peace. He took it up, carried it to the harbour, and there
bade it depart in St. Cuthbert’s name, whereon it flew off free, and was
no more seen. Such tales as these may be explained, even to their most
minute details, by simply natural causes: and yet, in this age of wanton
destruction of wild birds, one is tempted at moments to wish for the
return of some such graceful and humane superstition which could keep
down, at least in the name of mercy and humanity, the needless cruelty of
man.
But to return. After St. Cuthbert, says Bede, had served God in the
solitude of Farne for many years, the mound which encompassed his
habitation being so high that he could see nothing from thence but
heaven, to which he so ardently aspired, he was compelled by tears and
entreaties—King Egfrid himself coming to the island, with bishops and
religious and great men—to become himself bishop in Holy Island. There,
as elsewhere, he did his duty. But after two years he went again to
Farne, knowing that his end was near. For when, in his episcopal
labours, he had gone across to Lugubalia—old Penrith, in Cumberland—there
came across to him a holy hermit, Herebert by name, who dwelt upon an
island in Derwentwater, and talked with him a long while on heavenly
things; and Cuthbert bade him ask him then all the questions which he
wished to have resolved, for they should see each other no more in this
world. Herebert, who seems to have been one of his old friends, fell at
Cuthbert’s feet, and bade him remember that whenever he had done wrong he
had submitted himself to him utterly, and always tried to live according
to his rules; and all he wished for now was that, as they had served God
together upon earth, they might depart for ever to see his bliss in
heaven: the which befell; for a few months afterwards, that is, on the
20th of March, their souls quitted their mortal bodies on the same day,
and they were re-united in spirit.
St. Cuthbert wished to have been buried on his rock in Farne: but the
brethren had persuaded him to allow his corpse to be removed to Holy
Island. He begged them, said Bede, should they be forced to leave that
place, to carry his bones along with them; and so they were forced to do
at last; for in the year 875; whilst the Danes were struggling with
Alfred in Wessex, an army of them, with Halfdene at their head, went up
into Northumbria, burning towns, destroying churches, tossing children on
their pike-points, and committing all those horrors which made the
Norsemen terrible and infamous for so many years. Then the monks fled
from the monastery, bearing the shrine of St. Cuthbert, and all their
treasures, and followed by their retainers, men, women, and children, and
their sheep and oxen: and behold! the hour of their flight was that of an
exceedingly high spring tide. The Danes were landing from their ships in
their rear; in their front was some two miles of sea. Escape seemed
hopeless; when, says the legend, the water retreated before the holy
relics as they advanced; and became, as to the children of Israel of old,
a wall on their right hand and on their left; and so St. Cuthbert came
safe to shore, and wandered in the woods, borne upon his servants’
shoulders, and dwelling in tents for seven years, and found rest at last
in Durham, till at the Reformation his shrine, and that of the Venerable
Bede, were robbed of their gold and jewels; and no trace of them (as far
as I know) is left, save that huge slab, whereon is written the monkish
rhyme:—
Hic jacet in fossâ
Bedæ Venerabilis ossa. {299}