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 AEilward; his mother's, AEdwen—"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 AEdwen 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'Angouleme 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 Judaea 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 protege 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."



ANCHORITES, STRICTLY SO CALLED



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 Liege.

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 "Vitae 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 Archaeological 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.



Footnotes:

{12} About A.D. 368. See the details in Ammianus Marcellinus, lib. xxviii.

{15} In the Celtic Irish Church, there seems to have been no other pattern. The hermits who became abbots, with their monks, were the only teachers of the people—one had almost said, the only Christians. Whence, as early as the sixth century, if not the fifth, they, and their disciples of Iona and Scotland, derived their peculiar tonsure, their use of bells, their Eastern mode of keeping the Paschal feast, and other peculiarities, seemingly without the intervention of Rome, is a mystery still unsolved.

{17a} A book which, from its bearing on present problems, well deserves translation.

{17b} "Vitae Patrum." Published at Antwerp, 1628.

{23} He is addressing our Lord.

{24} "Agentes in rebus." On the Emperor's staff?

{27} St. Augustine says, that Potitianus's adventure at Treves happened "I know not when." His own conversation with Potitianus must have happened about A.D. 385, for he was baptized April 25, A.D. 387. He does not mention the name of Potitianus's emperor: but as Gratian was Augustus from A.D. 367 to A.D. 375, and actual Emperor of the West till A.D. 383, and as Treves was his usual residence, he is most probably the person meant: but if not, then his father Valentinian.

{29} See the excellent article on Gratian in Smith's Dictionary, by Mr. Means.

{30} I cannot explain this fact: but I have seen it with my own eyes.

{32} I use throughout the text published by Heschelius, in 1611.

{33} He is said to have been born at Coma, near Heracleia, in Middle Egypt, A.D. 251.

{34} Seemingly the Greek language and literature.

{35} I have thought it more honest to translate [Greek text] by "training," which is now, as then, its true equivalent; being a metaphor drawn from the Greek games by St. Paul, 1 Tim. iv. 8.

{41} I give this passage as it stands in the Greek version. In the Latin, attributed to Evagrius, it is even more extravagant and rhetorical.

{42} Surely the imagery painted on the inner walls of Egyptian tombs, and probably believed by Antony and his compeers to be connected with devil-worship, explain these visions. In the "Words of the Elders" a monk complains of being troubled with "pictures, old and new." Probably, again, the pain which Antony felt was the agony of a fever; and the visions which he saw, its delirium.

{44} Here is an instance of the original use of the word "monastery," viz. a cell in which a single person dwelt.

{45} An allusion to the heathen mysteries.

{49} A.D. 311. Galerius Valerius Maximinus (his real name was Daza) had been a shepherd-lad in Illyria, like his uncle Galerius Valerius Maximianus; and rose, like him, through the various grades of the army to be co-Emperor of Rome, over Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor; a furious persecutor of the Christians, and a brutal and profligate tyrant. Such were the "kings of the world" from whom those old monks fled.

{52a} The lonely alluvial flats at the mouths of the Nile. "Below the cliffs, beside the sea," as one describes them.

{52b} Now the monastery of Deir Antonios, over the Wady el Arabah, between the Nile and the Red Sea, where Antony's monks endure to this day.

{60} This most famous monastery, i.e. collection of monks' cells, in Egypt is situate forty miles from Alexandria, on a hill where nitre was gathered. The hospitality and virtue of its inmates are much praised by Ruffinus and Palladius. They were, nevertheless, the chief agents in the fanatical murder of Hypatia.

{65} It appears from this and many other passages, that extempore prayer was usual among these monks, as it was afterwards among the Puritans (who have copied them in so many other things), whenever a godly man visited them.

{66a} Meletius, bishop of Lycopolis, was the author of an obscure schism calling itself the "Church of the Martyrs," which refused to communicate with the rest of the Eastern Church. See Smith's "Dictionary," on the word "Meletius."

{66b} Arius (whose most famous and successful opponent was Athanasius, the writer of this biography) maintained that the Son of God was not co-equal and co-eternal with the Father, but created by Him out of nothing, and before the world. His opinions were condemned in the famous Council of Nicaea, A.D. 325.

{67} If St. Antony could use so extreme an argument against the Arians, what would he have said to the Mariolatry which sprang up after his death?

{68a} I.e. those who were still heathens.

{68b} [Greek text]. The Christian priest is always called in this work simply [Greek text], or elder.

{72a} Probably that of A.D. 341, when Gregory of Cappadocia, nominated by the Arian Bishops, who had assembled at the Council of Antioch, expelled Athanasius from the see of Alexandria, and great violence was committed by his followers and by Philagrius the Prefect. Athanasius meanwhile fled to Rome.

{72b} I.e. celebrated there their own Communion.

{77} Evidently the primaeval custom of embalming the dead, and keeping mummies in the house, still lingered among the Egyptians.

{108} These sounds, like those which St. Guthlac heard in the English fens, are plainly those of wild-fowl.

{115} The Brucheion, with its palaces and museum, the residence of the kings and philosophers of Egypt, had been destroyed is the days of Claudius and Valerian, during the senseless civil wars which devastated Alexandria for twelve years; and monks had probably taken up their abode in the ruins. It was in this quarter, at the beginning of the next century, that Hypatia was murdered by the monks.

{116} Probably the Northern, or Lesser Oasis, Ouah el Baharieh, about eighty miles west of the Nile.

{117a} Jerome (who sailed that sea several times) uses the word here, as it is used in Acts xxvii. 27, for the sea about Malta, "driven up and down in Adria."

{117b} The southern point of Sicily, now Cape Passaro.

{118} In the Morea, near the modern Navarino.

{119a} At the mouth of the Bay of Cattaro.

{119b} This story—whatever belief we may give to its details—is one of many which make it tolerably certain that a large snake (Python) still lingered in Eastern Europe. Huge tame snakes were kept as sacred by the Macedonian women; and one of them (according to Lucian) Peregrinus Proteus, the Cagliostro of his time, fitted with a linen mask, and made it personate the god AEsculapius. In the "Historia Lausiaca," cap. lii. is an account by an eye-witness of a large snake in the Thebaid, whose track was "as if a beam had been dragged along the sand." It terrifies the Syrian monks: but the Egyptian monk sets to work to kill it, saying that he had seen much larger—even up to fifteen cubits.

{121} Now Capo St. Angelo and the island of Cerigo, at the southern point of Greece.

{123a} See p. 52. [Around footnote 52a in the text—DP.]

{123b} Probably dedicated to the Paphian Venus.

{130} The lives of these two hermits and that of St. Cuthbert will be given in a future number.

{131} Sihor, the black river, was the ancient name of the Nile, derived from the dark hue of its waters.

{159} Ammianus Marcellinus, Book xxv. cap. 9.

{160} By Dr. Burgess.

{163} History of Christianity, vol. iii. p. 109.

{203} An authentic fact.

{204} If any one doubts this, let him try the game called "Russian scandal," where a story, passed secretly from mouth to mouth, ends utterly transformed, the original point being lost, a new point substituted, original names and facts omitted, and utterly new ones inserted, &c. &c.; an experiment which is ludicrous, or saddening, according to the temper of the experimenter.

{209} Les Moines d'Occident, vol. ii. pp. 332-467.

{210} M. La Borderie, "Discours sur les Saints Bretons;" a work which I have unfortunately not been able to consult.

{212a} Vitae Patrum, p. 753.

{212b} Ibid. p. 893.

{212c} Ibid. p. 539.

{212d} Ibid. p. 540.

{212e} Ibid. p. 532.

{224} It has been handed down, in most crabbed Latin, by his disciple, Eugippius; it may be read at length in Pez, Scriptores Austriacarum Rerum.

{238} Scriptores Austriacarum Rerum.

{245} Haeften, quoted by Montalembert, vol. ii. p. 22, in note.

{256} Dr. Reeves supposes these to have been "crustacea:" but their stinging and clinging prove them surely to have been jelly-fish— medusae.

{257} I have followed the Latin prose version of it, which M. Achille Jubinal attributes to the eleventh century. Here and there I have taken the liberty of using the French prose version, which he attributes to the latter part of the twelfth. I have often condensed the story, where it was prolix or repeated itself: but I have tried to follow faithfully both matter and style, and to give, word for word, as nearly as I could, any notable passages. Those who wish to know more of St. Brendan should consult the learned brochure of M. Jubinal, "La Legende Latine de St. Brandaines," and the two English versions of the Legend, edited by Mr. Thomas Wright for the Percy Society, vol. xiv. One is in verse, and of the earlier part of the fourteenth century, and spirited enough: the other, a prose version, was printed by Wynkyn de Worde, in his edition of the "Golden Legend;" 1527.

{260a} In the Barony of Longford, County Galway.

{260b} 3,000, like 300, seems to be, I am informed, only an Irish expression for any large number.

{269} Some dim legend concerning icebergs, and caves therein.

{270} Probably from reports of the volcanic coast of Iceland.

{272} This part of the legend has been changed and humanized as time ran on. In the Latin and French versions it has little or no point or moral. In the English, Judas accounts for the presence of the cloth thus:—

"Here I may see what it is to give other men's (goods) with harm. As will many rich men with unright all day take, Of poor men here and there, and almisse (alms) sithhe (afterwards) make."

For the tongs and the stone he accounts by saying that, as he used them for "good ends, each thing should surely find him which he did for God's love."

But in "the prose version of Wynkyn de Worde, the tongs have been changed into "ox-tongues," "which I gave some tyme to two preestes to praye for me. I bought them with myne owne money, and therefore they ease me, bycause the fysshes of the sea gnaw on them, and spare me."

This latter story of the ox-tongues has been followed by Mr. Sebastian Evans, in his poem on St. Brendan. Both he and Mr. Matthew Arnold have rendered the moral of the English version very beautifully.

{274} Copied, surely, from the life of Paul the first hermit.

{283} The famous Cathach, now in the museum of the Royal Irish Academy, was long popularly believed to be the very Psalter in question. As a relic of St. Columba it was carried to battle by the O'Donnels, even as late as 1497, to insure victory for the clan.

{290} Bede, book iii. cap. 3.

{292} These details, and countless stories of St. Cuthbert's miracles, are to be found in Reginald of Durham, "De Admirandis Beati Cuthberti," published by the Surtees Society. This curious book is admirably edited by Mr. J. Raine; with an English synopsis at the end, which enables the reader for whom the Latin is too difficult to enjoy those pictures of life under Stephen and Henry II., whether moral, religious, or social, of which the book is a rich museum.

{299} "In this hole lie the bones of the Venerable Bede."

{303} An English translation of the Anglo-Saxon life has been published by Mr. Godwin, of Cambridge, and is well worth perusal.

{312} Vita S. Godrici, pp. 332, 333.

{316} The earlier one; that of the Harleian MSS. which (Mr. Stevenson thinks) was twice afterwards expanded and decorated by him.

{323} Reginald wants to make "a wonder incredible in our own times," of a very common form (thank God) of peaceful death. He makes miracles in the same way of the catching of salmon and of otters, simple enough to one who, like Godric, knew the river, and every wild thing which haunted it.

{330} That of the Salisbury Manual is published in the "Ecclesiologist" for August 1848, by the Rev. Sir W. H. Cope, to whom I am indebted for the greater number of these curious facts.

{331} I owe these facts to the courtesy of Mr. John Stuart, of the General Register Office, Edinburgh.

{333} "History of England," vol. iii. p. 256, note.

THE END