HERMITS dwelling in the wilderness, as far as I am aware, were to be seen
only in the northern and western parts of the island, where not only did
the forest afford concealment, but the crags and caves shelter. The
southern and eastern English seldom possess the vivid imagination of the
Briton, the Northumbrian, and the Scot; while the rich lowlands of
central, southern, and eastern England, well peopled and well tilled,
offered few spots lonely enough for the hermit’s cell.
One district only was desolate enough to attract those who wished to be
free from the world,—namely, the great fens north of Cambridge; and
there, accordingly, as early as the seventh century, hermits settled in
morasses now so utterly transformed that it is difficult to restore in
one’s imagination the original scenery.
The fens in the seventh century were probably very like the forests at
the mouth of the Mississippi, or the swampy shores of the Carolinas.
Their vast plain is now, in summer, one sea of golden corn; in winter, a
black dreary fallow, cut into squares by stagnant dykes, and broken only
by unsightly pumping mills and doleful lines of poplar-trees. Of old it
was a labyrinth of black wandering streams; broad lagoons; morasses
submerged every spring-tide; vast beds of reed and sedge and fern; vast
copses of willow, alder, and grey poplar, rooted in the floating peat,
which was swallowing up slowly, all-devouring, yet all-preserving, the
forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which had once
grown on that low, rank soil, sinking slowly (so geologists assure us)
beneath the sea from age to age. Trees, torn down by flood and storm,
floated and lodged in rafts, damming the waters back upon the land.
Streams, bewildered in the flats, changed their channels, mingling silt
and sand with the peat moss. Nature, left to herself, ran into wild riot
and chaos more and more, till the whole fen became one “Dismal Swamp,” in
which, at the time of the Norman Conquest, the “Last of the English,”
like Dred in Mrs. Stowe’s tale, took refuge from their tyrants, and
lived, like him, a free and joyous life awhile.
For there are islands in the sea which have escaped the destroying deluge
of peat-moss,—outcrops of firm and fertile land, which in the early
Middle Age were so many natural parks, covered with richest grass and
stateliest trees, swarming with deer and roe, goat and boar, as the
streams around swarmed with otter and beaver, and with fowl of every
feather, and fish of every scale.
Beautiful after their kind were those far isles in the eyes of the monks
who were the first settlers in the wilderness. The author of the
“History of Ramsey” grows enthusiastic, and somewhat bombastic also, as
he describes the lovely isle, which got its name from the solitary ram
who had wandered thither, either in extreme drought or over the winter
ice, and, never able to return, was found feeding among the wild deer,
fat beyond the wont of rams. He tells of the stately ashes, most of them
cut in his time, to furnish mighty beams for the church roof; of the rich
pastures painted with all gay flowers in spring; of the “green crown” of
reed and alder which encircled the isle; of the fair wide mere (now
drained) with its “sandy beach” along the forest side; “a delight,” he
says, “to all who look thereon.”
In like humour William of Malmesbury, writing in the first half of the
twelfth century, speaks of Thorney Abbey and its isle. “It represents,”
says he, “a very paradise; for that in pleasure and delight it resembles
heaven itself. These marshes abound in trees, whose length, without a
knot, doth emulate the stars. The plain there is as level as the sea,
alluring the eye with its green grass, and so smooth that there is nought
to trip the foot of him who runs through it. Neither is there any waste
place; for in some parts are apples, in others vines, which are either
spread on the ground, or raised on poles. A mutual strife there is
between Nature and Art; so that what one produces not the other supplies.
What shall I say of those fair buildings, which ’tis so wonderful to see
the ground among those fens upbear?”
So wrote William of Malmesbury, after the industry and wisdom of the
monks, for more than four centuries, had been at work to civilize and
cultivate the wilderness. Yet even then there was another side to the
picture; and Thorney, Ramsey, or Crowland would have seemed, for nine
months every year, sad places enough to us comfortable folk of the
nineteenth century. But men lived hard in those days, even the most
high-born and luxurious nobles and ladies; under dark skies, in houses
which we should think, from darkness, draught, and want of space, unfit
for felons’ cells. Hardly they lived; and easily were they pleased; and
thanked God for the least gleam of sunshine, the least patch of green,
after the terrible and long winters of the Middle Ages. And ugly enough
those winters must have been, what with snow and darkness, flood and ice,
ague and rheumatism; while through the dreary winter’s night the whistle
of the wind and the wild cries of the waterfowl were translated into the
howls of witches and dæmons; and (as in St. Guthlac’s case), the
delirious fancies of marsh fever made those fiends take hideous shapes
before the inner eye, and act fantastic horrors round the fen-man’s bed
of sedge.
Concerning this St. Guthlac full details remain, both in Latin and
Anglo-Saxon; the author of the original document professing to be one
Felix, a monk of Ramsey near by, who wrote possibly as early as the
eighth century. {303}
There we may read how the young warrior-noble Guthlac (“The Battle-Play,”
the “Sport of War”), tired of slaying and sinning, bethought him to
fulfil the prodigies seen at his birth; how he wandered into the fen,
where one Tatwin (who after became a saint likewise) took him in his
canoe to a spot so lonely as to be almost unknown, buried in reeds and
alders, and how he found among the trees nought but an old “law,” as the
Scots still call a mound, which men of old had broken into seeking for
treasure, and a little pond; and how he built himself a hermit’s cell
thereon, and saw visions and wrought miracles; and how men came to him,
as to a fakir or shaman of the East; notably one Beccel, who acted as his
servant; and how as Beccel was shaving the saint one day there fell on
him a great temptation: Why should he not cut St. Guthlac’s throat, and
instal himself in his cell, that he might have the honour and glory of
sainthood? But St. Guthlac perceived the inward temptation (which is
told with the naïve honesty of those half-savage times), and rebuked the
offender into confession, and all went well to the end.
There we may read, too, a detailed account of the Fauna now happily
extinct in the fens; of the creatures who used to hale St. Guthlac out of
his hut, drag him through the bogs, carry him aloft through frost and
fire—“Develen and luther gostes”—such as tormented in like wise St.
Botolph (from whom Botulfston = Boston, has its name), and who were
supposed to haunt the meres and fens, and to have an especial fondness
for old heathen barrows with their fancied treasure-hoards: how they
“filled the house with their coming, and poured in on every side, from
above, and from beneath, and everywhere. They were in countenance
horrible, and they had great heads, and a long neck, and a lean visage;
they were filthy and squalid in their beards, and they had rough ears,
and crooked ‘nebs,’ and fierce eyes, and foul mouths; and their teeth
were like horses’ tusks; and their throats were filled with flame, and
they were grating in their voice; they had crooked shanks, and knees big
and great behind, and distorted toes, and cried hoarsely with their
voices; and they came with immoderate noise and immense horror, that he
thought that all between, heaven and earth resounded with their voices. . . .
And they tugged and led him out of the cot, and led him to the swart
fen, and threw and sunk him in the muddy waters. After that they brought
him into the wild places of the wilderness, among the thick beds of
brambles, that all his body was torn. . . . After that they took him and
beat him with iron whips, and after that they brought him on their
creaking wings between the cold regions of the air.”
But there are gentler and more human touches in that old legend. You may
read in it how all the wild birds of the fen came to St. Guthlac, and he
fed them after their kind; how the ravens tormented him, stealing
letters, gloves, and what not, from his visitors; and then, seized with
compunction at his reproofs, brought them back, or hanged them on the
reeds; and how, as Wilfrid, a holy visitant, was sitting with him,
discoursing of the contemplative life, two swallows came flying in, and
lifted up their song, sitting now on the saint’s hand, now on his
shoulder, now on his knee; and how, when Wilfrid wondered thereat,
Guthlac made answer, “Know you not that he who hath led his life
according to God’s will, to him the wild beasts and the wild birds draw
the more near?”
After fifteen years of such a life, in fever, ague, and starvation, no
wonder if St. Guthlac died. They buried him in a leaden coffin (a grand
and expensive luxury in the seventh century) which had been sent to him
during his life by a Saxon princess; and then, over his sacred and
wonder-working corpse, as over that of a Buddhist saint, there arose a
chapel, with a community of monks, companies of pilgrims who came to
worship, sick who came to be healed; till at last, founded on great piles
driven into the bog, arose the lofty wooden Abbey of Crowland; in
“sanctuary of the four rivers,” with its dykes, parks, vineyards,
orchards, rich ploughlands, from which, in time of famine, the monks of
Crowland fed all people of the neighbouring fens; with its tower with
seven bells, which had not their like in England; its twelve altars rich
with the gifts of Danish vikings and princes, and even with twelve white
bear-skins, the gift of Canute’s self; while all around were the cottages
of the corrodiers, or folk who, for a corrody, or life pittance from the
abbey, had given away their lands, to the wrong and detriment of their
heirs.
But within those four rivers, at least, were neither tyranny nor slavery.
Those who took refuge in St. Guthlac’s place from cruel lords must keep
his peace toward each other, and earn their living like honest men, safe
while they so did: for between those four rivers St. Guthlac and his
abbot were the only lords; and neither summoner, nor sheriff of the king,
nor armed force of knight or earl, could enter—“the inheritance of the
Lord, the soil of St. Mary and St. Bartholomew, the most holy sanctuary
of St. Guthlac and his monks; the minister free from worldly servitude;
the special almshouse of most illustrious kings; the sole refuge of any
one in worldly tribulation; the perpetual abode of the saints; the
possession of religious men, specially set apart by the common council of
the realm; by reason of the frequent miracles of the holy confessor St.
Guthlac, an ever-fruitful mother of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi;
and, by reason of the privileges granted by the kings, a city of grace
and safety to all who repent.”
Does not all this sound like a voice from another planet? It is all
gone; and it was good and right that it should go when it had done its
work, and that the civilization of the fen should be taken up and carried
out by men like the good knight, Richard of Rulos, who, two generations
after the Conquest, marrying Hereward’s grand-daughter, and becoming Lord
of Deeping (the deep meadow), thought that he could do the same work from
the hall of Bourne as the monks did from their cloisters; got permission
from the Crowland monks, for twenty marks of silver, to drain as much as
he could of the common marshes; and then shut out the Welland by strong
dykes, built cottages, marked out gardens, and tilled fields, till “out
of slough and bogs accursed he made a garden of pleasure.”
Yet one lasting work those monks of Crowland seem to have done, besides
those firm dykes and rich corn-lands of the Porsand, which endure unto
this day. For within two generations of the Norman conquest, while the
old wooden abbey, destroyed by fire, was being replaced by that noble
pile of stone whose ruins are still standing, the French abbot of
Crowland (so runs the legend) sent French monks to open a school under
the new French donjon, in the little Roman town of Grante-brigge;
whereby—so does all earnest work, however mistaken, grow and spread in
this world, infinitely and for ever—St. Guthlac, by his canoe-voyage into
Crowland Island, became the spiritual father of the University of
Cambridge in the old world; and therefore of her noble daughter, the
University of Cambridge, in the new world which fen-men sailing from
Boston deeps colonized and Christianized 800 years after St. Guthlac’s
death.