Chapter 23

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.

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} “Vitæ 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 Trêves 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 Trêves 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 ασκήσις 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 Nicæa, 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} ἰερεύς. The Christian priest is always called in this work simply πρεσθύτερος, 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 primæval 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 Æsculapius. 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.

{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} Vitæ 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} Hæften, 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—medusæ.

{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 Légende 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.