THE fertile and peaceable lowlands of England, as I have just said,
offered few spots sufficiently wild and lonely for the habitation of a
hermit; those, therefore, who wished to retire from the world into a more
strict and solitary life than that which the monastery afforded were in
the habit of immuring themselves, as anchorites, or in old English
“Ankers,” in little cells of stone, built usually against the wall of a
church. There is nothing new under the sun; and similar anchorites might
have been seen in Egypt, 500 years before the time of St. Antony, immured
in cells in the temples of Isis or Serapis. It is only recently that
antiquaries have discovered how common this practice was in England, and
how frequently the traces of these cells are to be found about our parish
churches. They were so common in the Diocese of Lincoln in the
thirteenth century, that in 1233 the archdeacon is ordered to inquire
whether any Anchorites’ cells had been built without the Bishop’s leave;
and in many of our parish churches may be seen, either on the north or
the south side of the chancel, a narrow slit in the wall, or one of the
lights of a window prolonged downwards, the prolongation, if not now
walled up, being closed with a shutter. Through these apertures the
“incluse,” or anker, watched the celebration of mass, and partook of the
Holy Communion. Similar cells were to be found in Ireland, at least in
the diocese of Ossory; and doubtless in Scotland also. Ducange, in his
Glossary, on the word “inclusi,” lays down rules for the size of the
anker’s cell, which must be twelve feet square, with three windows, one
opening into the church, one for taking in his food, and one for light;
and the “Salisbury Manual” as well as the “Pontifical” of Lacy, bishop of
Exeter, in the first half of the fifteenth century, contains a regular
“service” for the walling in of an anchorite. {330} There exists too a
most singular and painful book, well known to antiquaries, but to them
alone, “The Ancren Riwle,” addressed to three young ladies who had
immured themselves (seemingly about the beginning of the thirteenth
century) at Kingston Tarrant, in Dorsetshire.
For women as well as men entered these living tombs; and there spent
their days in dirt and starvation, and such prayer and meditation
doubtless as the stupified and worn-out intellect could compass; their
only recreation being the gossip of the neighbouring women, who came to
peep in through the little window—a recreation in which (if we are to
believe the author of “The Ancren Riwle”) they were tempted to indulge
only too freely; till the window of the recluse’s cell, he says, became
what the smith’s forge or the alehouse has become since—the place where
all the gossip and scandal of the village passed from one ear to another.
But we must not believe such scandals of all. Only too much in earnest
must those seven young maidens have been, whom St. Gilbert of Sempringham
persuaded to immure themselves, as a sacrifice acceptable to God, in a
den along the north wall of his church; or that St. Hutta, or Huetta, in
the beginning of the thirteenth century, who after ministering to lepers,
and longing and even trying to become a leper herself, immured herself
for life in a cell against the church of Huy near Liège.
Fearful must have been the fate of these incluses if any evil had
befallen the building of which (one may say) they had become a part.
More than one in the stormy Middle Age may have suffered the fate of the
poor women immured beside St. Mary’s church at Mantes, who, when town and
church were burnt by William the Conqueror, unable to escape (or,
according to William of Malmesbury, thinking it unlawful to quit their
cells even in that extremity), perished in the flames; and so consummated
once and for all their long martyrdom.
How long the practice of the hermit life was common in these islands is
more than my learning enables me to say. Hermits seem, from the old
Chartularies, {331} to have been not unfrequent in Scotland and the North
of England during the whole Middle Age. We have seen that they were
frequent in the times of Malcolm Canmore and the old Celtic Church; and
the Latin Church, which was introduced by St. Margaret, seems to have
kept up the fashion. In the middle of the thirteenth century, David de
Haigh conveyed to the monks of Cupar the hermitage which Gilmichael the
Hermit once held, with three acres of land. In 1329 the Convent of
Durham made a grant of a hermitage to Roger Eller at Norham on the Tweed,
in order that he might have a “fit place to fight with the old enemy and
bewail his sins, apart from the turmoil of men.” In 1445 James the
Second, king of Scots, granted to John Smith the hermitage in the forest
of Kilgur, “which formerly belonged in heritage to Hugh Cominch the
Hermit, and was resigned by him, with the croft and the green belonging
to it, and three acres of arable land.”
I have quoted these few instances, to show how long the custom lingered;
and doubtless hermits were to be found in the remoter parts of these
realms when the sudden tempest of the Reformation swept away alike the
palace of the rich abbot and the cell of the poor recluse, and
exterminated throughout England the ascetic life. The two last hermits
whom I have come across in history are both figures which exemplify very
well those times of corruption and of change. At Loretto (not in Italy,
but in Musselburgh, near Edinburgh) there lived a hermit who pretended to
work miracles, and who it seems had charge of some image of “Our Lady of
Loretto.” The scandals which ensued from the visits of young folks to
this hermit roused the wrath of that terrible scourge of monks, Sir David
Lindsay of the Mount: yet as late as 1536, James the Fifth of Scotland
made a pilgrimage from Stirling to the shrine, in order to procure a
propitious passage to France in search of a wife. But in 1543, Lord
Hertford, during his destructive voyage to the Forth, destroyed, with
other objects of greater consequence, the chapel of the “Lady of Lorett,”
which was not likely in those days to be rebuilt; and so the hermit of
Musselburgh vanishes from history.
A few years before, in 1537, says Mr. Froude, {333} while the harbours,
piers, and fortresses were rising in Dover, “an ancient hermit tottered
night after night from his cell to a chapel on the cliff, and the tapers
on the altar before which he knelt in his lonely orisons made a familiar
beacon far over the rolling waters. The men of the rising world cared
little for the sentiment of the past. The anchorite was told sternly by
the workmen that his light was a signal to the King’s enemies” (a Spanish
invasion from Flanders was expected), “and must burn no more; and, when
it was next seen, three of them waylaid the old man on his way home,
threw him down and beat him cruelly.”
So ended, in an undignified way, as worn-out institutions are wont to
end, the hermit life in the British Isles. Will it ever reappear? Who
can tell? To an age of luxury and unbelief has succeeded, more than once
in history, an age of remorse and superstition. Gay gentlemen and gay
ladies may renounce the world, as they did in the time of St. Jerome,
when the world is ready to renounce them. We have already our nunneries,
our monasteries, of more creeds than one; and the mountains of Kerry, or
the pine forests of the Highlands, may some day once more hold hermits,
persuading themselves to believe, and at last succeeding in believing,
the teaching of St. Antony, instead of that of our Lord Jesus Christ, and
of that Father of the spirits of all flesh, who made love, and marriage,
and little children, sunshine and flowers, the wings of butterflies and
the song of birds; who rejoices in his own works, and bids all who truly
reverence him rejoice in them with him. The fancy may seem impossible.
It is not more impossible than many religious phenomena seemed forty
years ago, which are now no fancies, but powerful facts.
The following books should be consulted by those who wish to follow out
this curious subject in detail:—
The “Vitæ Patrum Eremiticorum.”
The “Acta Sanctorum.” The Bollandists are, of course, almost exhaustive
of any subject on which they treat. But as they are difficult to find,
save in a few public libraries, the “Acta Sanctorum” of Surius, or of
Aloysius Lipommasius, may be profitably consulted. Butler’s “Lives of
the Saints” is a book common enough, but of no great value.
M. de Montalembert’s “Moines d’Occident,” and Ozanam’s “Etudes
Germaniques,” may be read with much profit.
Dr. Reeves’ edition of Adamnan’s “Life of St. Columba,” published by the
Irish Archæological and Celtic Society, is a treasury of learning, which
needs no praise of mine.
The lives of St. Cuthbert and St. Godric may be found among the
publications of the Surtees Society.