Books: The Hermits

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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 fossa
Bedae Venerabilis ossa. {299}

ST. GUTHLAC

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 daemons; 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 naive 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.

ST. GODRIC OF FINCHALE

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 daemons 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 daemons 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 daemon 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
daemon, 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.

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