A PERSONAGE quite as interesting, though not as famous, as Cuthbert or
Guthlac, is St. Godric; the hermit around whose cell rose the Priory of
Finchale. In a loop of the river Wear, near Durham, there settled in the
days of Bishop Flambard, between 1099 and 1128, a man whose parentage and
history was for many years unknown to the good folks of the
neighbourhood. He had come, it seems, from a hermitage in Eskdale, in
the parish of Whitby, whence he had been driven by the Percys, lords of
the soil. He had gone to Durham, become the doorkeeper of St. Giles’s
church, and gradually learnt by heart (he was no scholar) the whole
Psalter. Then he had gone to St. Mary’s church, where (as was the
fashion of the times) there was a children’s school; and, listening to
the little ones at their lessons, picked up such hymns and prayers as he
thought would suffice his spiritual wants. And then, by leave of the
bishop, he had gone away into the woods, and devoted himself to the
solitary life in Finchale. Buried in the woods and crags of the “Royal
Park,” as it was then called, which swarmed with every kind of game,
there was a little flat meadow, rough with sweet-gale and bramble and
willow, beside a teeming salmon-pool. Great wolves haunted the woods;
but Godric cared nought for them; and the shingles swarmed with
snakes,—probably only the harmless collared snakes of wet meadows, but
reputed, as all snakes are by the vulgar, venomous: but he did not object
to become “the companion of serpents and poisonous asps.” He handled
them, caressed them, let them lie by the fire in swarms on winter nights,
in the little cave which he had hollowed in the ground and thatched with
turf. Men told soon how the snakes obeyed him; how two especially huge
ones used to lie twined about his legs; till after many years, annoyed by
their importunity, he turned them all gently out of doors, with solemn
adjurations never to return, and they, of course, obeyed.
His austerities knew no bounds. He lived on roots and berries, flowers
and leaves; and when the good folk found him out, and put gifts of food
near his cell, he carried them up to the crags above, and, offering them
solemnly up to the God who feeds the ravens when they call on him, left
them there for the wild birds. He watched, fasted, and scourged himself,
and wore always a hair shirt and an iron cuirass. He sat, night after
night, even in mid-winter, in the cold Wear, the waters of which had
hollowed out a rock near by into a natural bath, and afterwards in a
barrel sunk in the floor of a little chapel of wattle, which he built and
dedicated to the blessed Virgin Mary. He tilled a scrap of ground, and
ate the grain from it, mingled with ashes. He kept his food till it was
decayed before he tasted it; and led a life the records of which fill the
reader with astonishment, not only at the man’s iron strength of will,
but at the iron strength of the constitution which could support such
hardships, in such a climate, for a single year.
A strong and healthy man must Godric have been, to judge from the
accounts (there are two, both written by eye-witnesses) of his personal
appearance—a man of great breadth of chest and strength of arm;
black-haired, hook-nosed, deep-browed, with flashing grey eyes;
altogether a personable and able man, who might have done much work and
made his way in many lands. But what his former life had been he would
not tell. Mother-wit he had in plenty, and showed insight into men and
things which the monks of Durham were ready enough to call the spirit of
prophecy. After awhile it was whispered that he wrought miraculous
cures: that even a bit of the bread which he was wont to eat had healed a
sick woman; that he fought with dæmons in visible shape; that he had seen
(just as one of the old Egyptian hermits had seen) a little black boy
running about between two monks who had quarrelled and come to hard blows
and bleeding faces because one of them had made mistakes in the evening
service: and, in short, there were attributed to him, during his
lifetime, and by those who knew him well, a host of wonders which would
be startling and important were they not exactly the same as those which
appear in the life of every hermit since St. Antony. It is impossible to
read the pages of Reginald of Durham (for he, the biographer of St.
Cuthbert, is also the biographer of St. Godric) without feeling how
difficult it is to obtain anything like the truth, even from
eye-witnesses, if only men are (as they were in those days) in a state of
religious excitement, at a period of spiritual revivals. The ignorant
populace were ready to believe, and to report, anything of the Fakeer of
Finchale. The monks of Durham were glad enough to have a wonder-working
man belonging to them; for Ralph Flambard, in honour of Godric, had made
over to them the hermitage of Finchale, with its fields and fisheries.
The lad who, in after years, waited on the hermit, would have been ready
enough to testify that his master saw dæmons and other spiritual beings;
for he began to see them on his own account; {312} fell asleep in the
forest coming home from Durham with some bottles; was led in a vision by
St. John the Baptist to the top of a hill, and shown by him wonders
unspeakable; saw, on another occasion, a dæmon in St. Godric’s cell, hung
all over with bottles of different liquors, offering them to the saint,
who bade the lad drive him out of the little chapel, with a holy water
sprinkle, but not go outside it himself. But the lad, in the fury of
successful pursuit, overstepped the threshold; whereon the dæmon, turning
in self-defence, threw a single drop of one of his liquors into the lad’s
mouth, and vanished with a laugh of scorn. The boy’s face and throat
swelled horribly for three days; and he took care thenceforth to obey the
holy man more strictly: a story which I have repeated, like the one
before it, only to show the real worth of the evidence on which Reginald
has composed his book. Ailred, Abbot of Rievaux (for Reginald’s book,
though dedicated to Hugh Pudsey, his bishop, was prompted by Ailred) was
capable (as his horrible story of the nun of Watton proves) of believing
anything and everything which fell in with his fanatical, though pious
and gentle, temper.
And here a few words must be said to persons with whose difficulties I
deeply sympathise, but from whose conclusions I differ utterly: those,
namely, who say that if we reject the miracles of these saints’ lives, we
must reject also the miracles of the New Testament. The answer is, as I
believe, that the Apostles and Evangelists were sane men: men in their
right minds, wise, calm; conducting themselves (save in the matter of
committing sins) like other human beings, as befitted the disciples of
that Son of Man who came eating and drinking, and was therefore called by
the ascetics of his time a gluttonous man, and a wine-bibber: whereas
these monks were not (as I have said elsewhere) in their right minds at
all.
This is, or ought to be, patent to any one who will compare the style of
the Apostles and Evangelists with that of the monkish hagiologists. The
calm, the simplicity, the brevity, the true grandeur of the former is
sufficient evidence of their healthy-mindedness and their
trustworthiness. The affectation, the self-consciousness, the bombast,
the false grandeur of the latter is sufficient evidence that they are
neither healthy-minded or trustworthy. Let students compare any passage
of St. Luke or St. John, however surprising the miracle which it relates,
with St. Jerome’s life of Paul the First Hermit, or with that famous
letter of his to Eustochium, which (although historically important) is
unfit for the eyes of pure-minded readers and does not appear in this
volume; and let them judge for themselves. Let them compare, again, the
opening sentences of the Four Gospels, or of the Acts of the Apostles,
with the words with which Reginald begins this life of St. Godric. “By
the touch of the Holy Spirit’s finger the chord of the harmonic human
heart resounds melodiously. For when the vein of the heart is touched by
the grace of the Holy Spirit, forthwith, by the permirific sweetness of
the harmony, an exceeding operation of sacred virtue is perceived more
manifestly to spring forth. With this sweetness of spirit, Godric, the
man of God, was filled from the very time of his boyhood, and grew famous
for many admirable works of holy work (_sic_), because the harmonic
teaching of the Holy Spirit fired the secrets of his very bosom with a
wondrous contact of spiritual grace:”—and let them say, after the
comparison, if the difference between the two styles is not that which
exists between one of God’s lilies, fresh from the field, and a tawdry
bunch of artificial flowers?
But to return. Godric himself took part in the history of his own
miracles and life. It may be that he so overworked his brain that he
believed that he was visited by St. Peter, and taught a hymn by the
blessed Virgin Mary, and that he had taken part in a hundred other
prodigies; but the Prologue to the Harleian manuscript (which the learned
Editor, Mr. Stevenson, believes to be an early edition of Reginald’s own
composition) confesses that Reginald, compelled by Ailred of Rievaux,
tried in vain for a long while to get the hermit’s story from him.
“You wish to write my life?” he said. “Know then that Godric’s life is
such as this:—Godric, at first a gross rustic, an unclean liver, an
usurer, a cheat, a perjurer, a flatterer, a wanderer, pilfering and
greedy; now a dead flea, a decayed dog, a vile worm, not a hermit, but a
hypocrite; not a solitary, but a gad-about in mind; a devourer of alms,
dainty over good things, greedy and negligent, lazy and snoring,
ambitious and prodigal, one who is not worthy to serve others, and yet
every day beats and scolds those who serve him: this, and worse than
this, you may write of Godric.” “Then he was silent as one indignant,”
says Reginald, “and I went off in some confusion,” and the grand old man
was left to himself and to his God.
The ecclesiastical Boswell dared not mention the subject again to his
hero for several years, though he came after from Durham to visit him,
and celebrate mass for him in his little chapel. After some years,
however, he approached the matter again; and whether a pardonable vanity
had crept over Godric, or whether he had begun at last to believe in his
miracles, or whether the old man had that upon his mind of which he
longed to unburthen himself, he began to answer questions, and Reginald
delighted to listen and note down till he had finished, he says, that
book of his life and miracles; {316} and after a while brought it to the
saint, and falling on his knees, begged him to bless, in the name of God,
and for the benefit of the faithful, the deeds of a certain religious
man, who had suffered much for God in this life which he (Reginald) had
composed accurately. The old man perceived that he himself was the
subject, blessed the book with solemn words (what was written therein he
does not seem to have read), and bade Reginald conceal it till his death,
warning him that a time would come when he should suffer rough and bitter
things on account of that book, from those who envied him. That
prophecy, says Reginald, came to pass; but how, or why, he does not tell.
There may have been, among those shrewd Northumbrian heads, even then,
incredulous men, who used their common sense.
But the story which Godric told was wild and beautiful; and though we
must not depend too much on the accuracy of the old man’s recollections,
or on the honesty of Reginald’s report, who would naturally omit all
incidents which made against his hero’s perfection, it is worth listening
to, as a vivid sketch of the doings of a real human being, in that misty
distance of the Early Middle Age.
He was born, he said, at Walpole, in Norfolk, on the old Roman sea-bank,
between the Wash and the deep Fens. His father’s name was Æilward; his
mother’s, Ædwen—“the Keeper of Blessedness,” and “the Friend of
Blessedness,” as Reginald translates them—poor and pious folk; and, being
a sharp boy, he did not take to field-work, but preferred wandering the
fens as a pedlar, first round the villages, then, as he grew older, to
castles and to towns, buying and selling—what, Reginald does not tell us:
but we should be glad to know.
One day he had a great deliverance, which Reginald thinks a miracle.
Wandering along the great tide-flats near Spalding and the old
Well-stream, in search of waifs, and strays, of wreck or eatables, he saw
three porpoises stranded far out upon the banks. Two were alive, and the
boy took pity on them (so he said) and let them be: but one was dead, and
off it (in those days poor folks ate anything) he cut as much flesh and
blubber as he could carry, and toiled back towards the high-tide mark.
But whether he lost his way among the banks, or whether he delayed too
long, the tide came in on him up to his knees, his waist, his chin, and
at last, at times, over his head. The boy made the sign of the cross (as
all men in danger did then) and struggled on valiantly a full mile
through the sea, like a brave lad never loosening his hold of his
precious porpoise-meat till he reached the shore at the very spot from
which he had set out.
As he grew, his pedlar journeys became longer. Repeating to himself, as
he walked, the Creeds and the Lord’s Prayer—his only lore—he walked for
four years through Lindsey; then went to St. Andrew’s in Scotland; after
that, for the first time, to Rome. Then the love of a wandering sea life
came on him, and he sailed with his wares round the east coasts; not
merely as a pedlar, but as a sailor himself, he went to Denmark and to
Flanders, buying and selling, till he owned (in what port we are not
told, but probably in Lynn or Wisbeach) half one merchant ship and the
quarter of another. A crafty steersman he was, a wise weather-prophet, a
shipman stout in body and in heart, probably such a one as Chaucer tells
us of 350 years after:—
“—A dagger hanging by a las hadde hee
About his nekke under his arm adoun.
The hote summer hadde made his hewe al broun.
And certainly he was a good felaw;
Full many a draught of wine he hadde draw,
From Burdeaux ward, while that the chapmen slepe,
Of nice conscience took he no kepe.
If that he fought, and hadde the higher hand,
By water he sent hem home to every land.
But of his craft to recken wel his tides,
His stremes and his strandes him besides,
His herberwe, his mone, and his lode manage,
There was none swiche, from Hull unto Carthage.
Hardy he was, and wise, I undertake:
With many a tempest hadde his berd be shake.
He knew wel alle the havens, as they were,
From Gotland to the Cape de Finisterre,
And every creke in Bretagne and in Spain.”
But gradually there grew on the stout merchantman the thought that there
was something more to be done in the world than making money. He became
a pious man after the fashion of those days. He worshipped at the famous
shrine of St. Andrew. He worshipped, too, at St. Cuthbert’s hermitage at
Farne, and there, he said afterwards, he longed for the first time for
the rest and solitude of the hermitage. He had been sixteen years a
seaman now, with a seaman’s temptations—it may be (as he told Reginald
plainly) with some of a seaman’s vices. He may have done things which
lay heavy on his conscience. But it was getting time to think about his
soul. He took the cross, and went off to Jerusalem, as many a man did
then, under difficulties incredible, dying, too often, on the way. But
Godric not only got safe thither, but went out of his way home by Spain
to visit the sanctuary of St. James of Compostella, a see which Pope
Calixtus II. had just raised to metropolitan dignity.
Then he appears as steward to a rich man in the Fens, whose sons and
young retainers, after the lawless fashion of those Anglo-Norman times,
rode out into the country round to steal the peasants’ sheep and cattle,
skin them on the spot, and pass them off to the master of the house as
venison taken in hunting. They ate and drank, roystered and rioted, like
most other young Normans; and vexed the staid soul of Godric, whose nose
told him plainly enough, whenever he entered the kitchen, that what was
roasting had never come off a deer. In vain he protested and warned
them, getting only insults for his pains. At last he told his lord. The
lord, as was to be expected, cared nought about the matter. Let the lads
rob the English villains: for what other end had their grandfathers
conquered the land? Godric punished himself, as he could not punish
them, for the unwilling share which he had had in the wrong. It may be
that he, too, had eaten of that stolen food. So away he went into
France, and down the Rhone, on pilgrimage to the hermitage of St. Giles,
the patron saint of the wild deer; and then on to Rome a second time, and
back to his poor parents in the Fens.
And now follows a strange and beautiful story. All love of seafaring and
merchandise had left the deep-hearted sailor. The heavenly and the
eternal, the salvation of his sinful soul, had become all in all to him;
and yet he could not rest in the little dreary village on the Roman bank.
He would go on pilgrimage again. Then his mother would go likewise, and
see St. Peter’s church, and the Pope, and all the wonders of Rome, and
have her share in all the spiritual blessings which were to be obtained
(so men thought then) at Rome alone. So off they set on foot; and when
they came to ford or ditch, Godric carried his mother on his back, until
they came to London town. And there Ædwen took off her shoes, and vowed
out of devotion to the holy apostles Peter and Paul (who, so she thought,
would be well pleased at such an act) to walk barefoot to Rome and
barefoot back again.
Now just as they went out of London, on the Dover Road, there met them in
the way the loveliest maiden they had ever seen, and asked to bear them
company in their pilgrimage. And when they agreed, she walked with them,
sat with them, and talked with them with superhuman courtesy and grace;
and when they turned into an inn, she ministered to them herself, and
washed and kissed their feet, and then lay down with them to sleep, after
the simple fashion of those days. But a holy awe of her, as of some
saint and goddess, fell on the wild seafarer; and he never, so he used to
aver, treated her for a moment save as a sister. Never did either ask
the other who they were, and whence they came; and Godric reported (but
this was long after the event) that no one of the company of pilgrims
could see that fair maid, save he and his mother alone. So they came
safe to Rome, and back to London town; and when they were at the place
outside Southwark, where the fair maid had met them first, she asked
permission to leave them, for she “must go to her own land, where she had
a tabernacle of rest, and dwelt in the house of her God.” And then,
bidding them bless God, who had brought them safe over the Alps, and
across the sea, and all along that weary road, she went on her way, and
they saw her no more.
Then with this fair mysterious face clinging to his memory, and it may be
never leaving it, Godric took his mother safe home, and delivered her to
his father, and bade them both after awhile farewell, and wandered across
England to Penrith, and hung about the churches there, till some kinsmen
of his recognised him, and gave him a psalter (he must have taught
himself to read upon his travels), which he learnt by heart. Then,
wandering ever in search of solitude, he went into the woods and found a
cave, and passed his time therein in prayer, living on green herbs and
wild honey, acorns and crabs; and when he went about to gather food, he
fell down on his knees every few yards and said a prayer, and rose and
went on.
After awhile he wandered on again, until at Wolsingham, in Durham, he met
with another holy hermit, who had been a monk at Durham, living in a cave
in forests in which no man dare dwell, so did they swarm with packs of
wolves; and there the two good men dwelt together till the old hermit
fell sick, and was like to die. Godric nursed him, and sat by him, to
watch for his last breath. For the same longing had come over him which
came over Marguerite d’Angoulême when she sat by the dying bed of her
favourite maid of honour—to see if the spirit, when it left the body,
were visible, and what kind of thing it was: whether, for instance, it
was really like the little naked babe which is seen in mediæval
illuminations flying out of the mouths of dying men. But, worn out with
watching, Godric could not keep from sleep. All but despairing of his
desire, he turned to the dying man, and spoke, says Reginald, some such
words as these:—“O spirit! who art diffused in that body in the likeness
of God, and art still inside that breast, I adjure thee by the Highest,
that thou leave not the prison of this thine habitation while I am
overcome by sleep, and know not of it.” And so he fell asleep: but when
he woke, the old hermit lay motionless and breathless. Poor Godric wept,
called on the dead man, called on God; his simple heart was set on seeing
this one thing. And, behold, he was consoled in a wondrous fashion. For
about the third hour of the day the breath returned. Godric hung over
him, watching his lips. Three heavy sighs he drew, then a shudder,
another sigh: {323} and then (so Godric was believed to have said in
after years) he saw the spirit flit.
What it was like, he did not like to say, for the most obvious
reason—that he saw nothing, and was an honest man. A monk teased him
much to impart to him this great discovery, which seemed to the simple
untaught sailor a great spiritual mystery, and which was, like some other
mediæval mysteries which were miscalled spiritual (transubstantiation
above all), altogether material and gross imaginations. Godric answered
wisely enough, that “no man could perceive the substance of the spiritual
soul.”
But the monk insisting, and giving him no rest, he answered,—whether he
wished to answer a fool according to his folly, or whether he tried to
fancy (as men will who are somewhat vain—and if a saint was not vain, it
was no fault of the monks who beset him) that he had really seen
something. He told how it was like a dry, hot wind rolled into a sphere,
and shining like the clearest glass, but that what it was really like no
one could express. Thus much, at least, may be gathered from the
involved bombast of Reginald.
Another pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre did Godric make before he went
to the hermitage in Eskdale, and settled finally at Finchale. And there
about the hills of Judæa he found, says Reginald, hermits dwelling in
rock-caves, as they had dwelt since the time of St. Jerome. He washed
himself, and his hair shirt and little cross, in the sacred waters of the
Jordan, and returned, after incredible suffering, to become the saint of
Finchale.
His hermitage became, in due time, a stately priory, with its community
of monks, who looked up to the memory of their holy father Godric as to
that of a demigod. The place is all ruinate now; the memory of St.
Godric gone; and not one in ten thousand, perhaps, who visit those
crumbling walls beside the rushing Wear, has heard of the sailor-saint,
and his mother, and that fair maid who tended them on their pilgrimage.
Meanwhile there were hermits for many years in that same hermitage in
Eskdale, from which a Percy expelled St. Godric, possibly because he
interfered with the prior claim of some _protégé_ of their own; for they
had, a few years before Godric’s time, granted that hermitage to the
monks of Whitby, who were not likely to allow a stranger to establish
himself on their ground.
About that hermitage hung one of those stories so common in the Middle
Ages, in which the hermit appears as the protector of the hunted wild
beast; a story, too, which was probably authentic, as the curious custom
which was said to perpetuate its memory lasted at least till the year
1753. I quote it at length from Burton’s “Monasticon Eboracense,” p. 78,
knowing no other authority.
“In the fifth year of the reign of King Henry II. after the conquest of
England by William, duke of Normandy, the Lord of Uglebardby, then called
William de Bruce, and the Lord of Sneton, called Ralph de Perci, with a
gentleman and a freeholder called Allatson, did on the 16th day of
October appoint to meet and hunt the wild boar, in a certain wood or
desert place belonging to the abbot of the monastery of Whitby; the
place’s name is Eskdale-side; the abbot’s name was Sedman. Then these
gentlemen being met, with their hounds and boar-staves, in the place
before-named, and there having found a great wild boar, the hounds ran
him well near about the chapel and hermitage of Eskdale-side, where was a
monk of Whitby, who was a hermit. The boar being very sore, and very
hotly pursued, and dead run, took in at the chapel door, and there died:
whereupon the hermit shut the hounds out of the chapel, and kept himself
within at his meditations and prayers, the hounds standing at bay
without. The gentlemen in the thick of the wood, being put behind their
game, followed the cry of their hounds, and so came to the hermitage,
calling on the hermit, who opened the door and came forth, and within
they found the boar lying dead, for which the gentlemen in very great
fury (because their hounds were put from their game) did most violently
and cruelly run at the hermit with their boar-staves, whereby he died
soon after: thereupon the gentlemen, perceiving and knowing that they
were in peril of death, took sanctuary at Scarborough. But at that time
the abbot, being in very great favour with King Henry, removed them out
of the sanctuary, whereby they came in danger of the law, and not to be
privileged, but likely to have the severity of the law, which was death.
But the hermit, being a holy and devout man, at the point of death sent
for the abbot, and desired him to send for the gentlemen who had wounded
him: the abbot so doing, the gentlemen came, and the hermit, being very
sick and weak, said unto them, ‘I am sure to die of those wounds you have
given me.’ The abbot answered, ‘They shall as surely die for the same;’
but the hermit answered, ‘Not so, for I will freely forgive them my
death, if they will be contented to be enjoined this penance for the
safeguard of their souls.’ The gentlemen being present, and terrified
with the fear of death, bade him enjoin what penance he would, so that he
would but save their lives. Then said the hermit, ‘You and yours shall
hold your lands of the Abbot of Whitby and his successors in this manner:
That upon Ascension Eve, you or some of you shall come to the woods of
the Strag Heads, which is in Eskdale-side, the same day at sun-rising,
and there shall the abbot’s officer blow his horn, to the intent that you
may know how to find him; and he shall deliver unto you, William de
Bruce, ten stakes, eleven strut-towers, and eleven yethers, to be cut by
you or some for you, with a knife of one penny price; and you, Ralph de
Perci, shall take twenty and one of each sort, to be cut in the same
manner; and you, Allatson, shall take nine of each sort, to be cut as
aforesaid, and to be taken on your backs, and carried to the town of
Whitby, and to be there before nine of the clock the same day
before-mentioned; at the same hour of nine of the clock (if it be full
sea) your labour or service shall cease; but if it be not full sea, each
of you shall set your stakes at the brim, each stake one yard from the
other, and so yether them on each side of your yethers, and so stake on
each side with your strut-towers, that they may stand three tides without
removing by the force thereof: each of you shall do, make, and execute
the said service at that very hour every year, except it shall be full
sea at that hour: but when it shall so fall out, this service shall
cease. You shall faithfully do this in remembrance that you did most
cruelly slay me; and that you may the better call to God for mercy,
repent unfeignedly for your sins, and do good works, the officers of
Eskdale-side shall blow, _Out on you_, _out on you_, _out on you_, for
this heinous crime. If you or your successors shall refuse this service,
so long as it shall not be full sea at the aforesaid hour, you or yours
shall forfeit your lands to the Abbot of Whitby, or his successors. This
I intreat, and earnestly beg that you may have lives and goods preserved
for this service; and I request of you to promise by your parts in heaven
that it shall be done by you and your successors, as it is aforesaid
requested, and I will confirm it by the faith of an honest man.’ Then
the hermit said: ‘My soul longeth for the Lord, and I do as freely
forgive these men my death as Christ forgave the thieves upon the cross;’
and in the presence of the abbot and the rest he said, moreover, these
words: ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit, for from the bonds
of death Thou hast redeemed me, O Lord of truth. Amen.’ So he yielded
up the ghost the eighth day of December, A.D. 1160, upon whose soul God
have mercy. Amen.”