Part 11
Before this, Wulfhere had been constantly engaged in extending the power of Mercia. He detached from Northumbria all the district south of the Mersey, and with it got hold of Chester, of which place in later times his daughter was to be regarded as patroness. He gained a hold on the whole of the Severn valley and the Wye, our Herefordshire, over which he set his brother Merewald as under-king. Then he fought the West Saxons under Cenwalch in 661, and defeated them in a signal battle, and extended his ravages into the heart of Wessex as far as Ashdown. Then he turned his arms east along the Thames valley, and brought the East Saxons and London under his sway. Still unsatisfied, he crossed the river into Surrey, subdued it, and invaded Sussex and forced the King Ethelwalch to submit, and to receive baptism. Werburga resolved to retire to Ely where her great-aunt Etheldreda was abbess. Wulfhere and his court conducted her thither, in great state.
We cannot now see Ely in anything like its ancient condition. Then the entire district from Cambridge to the Wash was one broken sheet of water dotted with islets. In places there were shallows where reeds grew dense, the islands were fringed with rushes and willows. The vast mere was a haunt of innumerable wild birds, and the water teemed with fishes. The vast plain of the fens—which is now in summer one sea of golden corn, in winter a black dreary fallow cut up like a chess-board into squares by dykes—was then a tangle of meres, rank growth of waterweeds and copses of alders and grey poplars. The rivers Cam and Nen lost themselves in the waste of waters. Trees torn up, fallen into the water, floated about, formed natural rafts, lodged, and diverted what little current there was in the streams.
Here and there poles had been driven into the stiff clay that formed the bottom of the swamp, cross-pieces had been tied to them, then platforms erected six, ten feet above the surface of the water, and on these platforms huts had been constructed of poles and rushes, in which lived families, their only means of communication with each other and with the firm land being by boat. On the water and by the water they lived, tilling little bits of land left dry in summer but submerged in winter.
The islets were outcrops of fertile land, natural parks, covered by the richest grass and stateliest trees, swarming with deer and roe, goat and boar, as the water around swarmed with otter and beaver, and with fowl of every feather and fish of every scale.
Of all these islets none could compare with Ely, not, as has been supposed, named from the eels that were found about it, but from the elves who were supposed to have chosen it for their own and to dance in the moonlight on its greensward.
Better, purer beings than elves, had taken possession of this enchanted isle—S. Etheldreda and her nuns; and it was through them that the wild fen-dwellers, those who lived on platforms above the water, received the rudiments of the faith, and were ministered to in their agues and rheumatic paralysis.
Etheldreda did not found her monastery here till 673. As Wulfhere died in 675, he can have accompanied his daughter there only very shortly after Etheldreda’s settlement in the place. There is no stone anywhere near, every block that has been employed on the glorious cathedral has been brought from a distance, mostly from Barwell, in Northamptonshire.
Etheldreda constructed her monastery and church entirely of wood. Great trunks had been split and these split logs formed the sides of her church, and it was thatched with reeds from the marshes. The king came by boat; the oars flashed in the sun, and the water rippled as the vessels were driven through it to the landing stage. Werburga, eager, stood looking forward to the lovely island that seemed to float on the water; if, as is probable, she was born some time before Wulfhere became king, she would then be between twenty-eight and thirty. At the landing-stage was her great-aunt with her nuns, in black habits with white veils; and no sooner had Werburga descended from the boat than they struck up the _Te Deum_, and advanced, leading the way, singing, to their wooden church.
Now followed the usual trials: Werburga was first stripped of her costly apparel, her coronet was exchanged for a linen veil, purple and silks were replaced by a coarse woollen habit, and she resigned herself into the hands of her superior, her great-aunt, S. Etheldreda.
We know the form of the ceremonial, and the prayers used on such an occasion, but we do not know who the bishop was who consecrated Werburga.[7] She was led to the foot of the altar, after the reading of the Gospel, and was then asked for two public engagements which were indispensable to the validity of the act: in the first place, the consent of her parents, and in the next her own promise of obedience to himself and his successors. When this had been done he laid his hands upon her to bless her and consecrate her to God. After prayers he placed the veil on her head, saying, “Maiden, receive this veil, and mayest thou bear it stainless to the tribunal of Christ before whom bends every knee in heaven and on earth.”
By the rules of the Anglo-Saxon Church the taking of the irrevocable vows was not suffered till the postulant had reached her twenty-sixth year, but we cannot be sure that this rule prevailed so early. The Celtic Church allowed it at the age of twelve.
When Wulfhere died, then Werburga’s mother came also to Ely, and on the death of S. Etheldreda, in 679, her grandmother Sexburga, widow of Ercombert, king of Kent, became abbess, and ruled till 699, when she died, whereupon Werburga’s mother succeeded. At one time three generations of princesses of the blood of Hengest and Odin were seen together in the peaceful isle of Ely, wearing the same monastic habit, and bowing in prayer in the same wooden church. Werburga lived long and happily as a simple nun under her grandmother’s and mother’s kindly rule and direction, till, on her mother’s death, she was summoned to take the place of abbess.
It is very important for us to understand what was the moving principle at this period which led to the foundation of so many religious settlements. The Saxons and Angles had been a people living in war, loving war, and regarding the cutting of throats and the destruction by fire of every house and city as the highest vocation of a man. But when they had occupied the greatest portion of Britain, and further, when they had embraced Christianity, a change took place in their opinions. They came to see that there was some charm in peace, and dignity in the cultivation of the soil. But it was only after a struggle that they could stoop to take hold of the plough and lay aside the spear. They could be brought to this only by example, and it was this which the monks and nuns issuing from their own princely, royal families showed them.
“In the monastic movement of this time,” says Mr. Green, “two strangely contrasted impulses worked together to change the very aspect of the new England and the new English society. The one was the passion for solitude, the first outcome of the religious impulse given by the conversion; a passion for communing apart with themselves and with God which drove men into waste and woodland and desolate fen. The other was the equally new passion for social life on the part of the nation at large, the outcome of its settlement and well-doing on the conquered soil, and yet more of the influence of the new religion, coming as it did from the social civilisation of the older world, and insensibly drawing men together by the very form of its worship and its belief. The sanctity of the monastic settlements served in these early days of the new religion to ensure for them peace and safety in the midst of whatever war or social trouble might be disturbing the country about them; and the longing for a life of quiet industry, which we see telling from this moment upon the older English longing for war, drew men in crowds to these so-called monasteries.”[8]
Wulfhere was succeeded in 675 by his brother Ethelred, a quiet, unambitious king, who devoted his energies to the foundation of monasteries, dotting them about Mercia with the object of softening and civilising a people that had the instincts of the beasts of prey. He entrusted his niece Werburga with a sort of general supremacy over all the nunneries in his kingdom. She visited them, regulated them, and brought them into order, before her mother’s death and her own appointment to the abbacy of Ely. Thus she resided for a while at the head of the communities of Weedon, Trentham, and Hanbury.
One incident of her story may be quoted.
It happened that a shepherd at Weedon was being brutally maltreated by the steward. The daughter of a king flew to the spot, threw herself between the overseer and the poor wretch he was beating and kicking, and arrested his arm and thrust him back, and held him from his victim, till his passion subsided, and he retired shamefaced.
Werburga died at a ripe age at Trentham, on February 3rd, 699.
Two centuries later, in order to save her remains from the Danes, they were conveyed to Chester, where there was a collegiate church that had been founded by her father at her request. Her body was, however, laid in what is now the Cathedral.
XV
_A PROPHETESS_
Among the most remarkable people of the twelfth century, one who stood forth on the stage of history and exercised there a part of no little importance, Hildegarde, is not to be passed over. Yet, when one comes to study her, she is a person who strikes the student with perplexity. She was, indeed, a woman possible at all times, but only possible as one of significance in the century in which she lived.
She was one of those marvellous women who, indeed, occupied a somewhat analogous place among the ancient pagan Germans—a seeress, a prophetess, even a priestess, like Velleda or Ganna. She took up the same position in the Christian Middle Ages, directed, ruled, foretold, threatened, and was listened to in all seriousness. Popes, prelates, kings consulted her, and all quailed at her threats and denunciations. She saw visions and dreamed dreams; she endeavoured to throw rays of light to illumine the past as well as the future. She thought with her inspired eye to unveil the mysteries of creation. Uneducated, she dictated in Latin; uninstructed, she wrote on natural history; unordained, she preached sermons even to popes.
All kinds of people wrote to her on all kinds of subjects, and she solved their difficulties, advised them in their perplexities, illumined their ignorance.
She has had imitators in all after ages—Antoinette Bourgignon, Joanna Southcott, Krüdner, and Madame Blavatski—but none achieved such success, exercised so wide an influence, was treated with so much submission.
The Emperor, the princes, the nobility, the clergy, the people all believed in her prophetic power, and accepted her commands without a murmur. Her warnings and promises were received as divine revelations, although she spared no one in her denunciations.
The cause for this unbounded respect has been a matter of dispute, but is still inexplicable. That she was a coarse deceiver, who imposed herself on the people as inspired, by a long-continued course of deception, cannot for a moment be allowed by such as without prejudice examine her writings and her conduct. She was made a tool of, and a willing tool, by S. Bernard, to further the crusade he had at heart. But when, in spite of prophecy and promise, that crusade ended in hideous disaster and in dishonour as well, her influence with the people was not in the least shaken.
At the court of Count Meginhard of Spanheim lived the knight Hildebert of Böckelheim, his kinsman. Hildebert’s wife Mathilda bore him in 1098 a daughter, who was named Hildegarde, on their estate a little above Kreuznach on the Rhine. She was the tenth child, and her parents were no little concerned how to provide for such a fry. The simple expedient in those days was to send some of the family into monasteries and convents. From an early date Hildegarde was destined to be a nun. She, together with her kinswoman Chiltrude, the daughter of the count, were sent to be reared by Jutta, the abbess of S. Disibod, a sister of Count Meginhard. Jutta was an uneducated woman; learning was of no account in her convent, and Hildegarde was brought up in ignorance of nearly everything that a young woman of good family ought to have acquired even in the twelfth century.
That Hildegarde was hysterical cannot be doubted, but hysteria is precisely the most mysterious of all ailments. The phenomena connected with it are the perplexity of physicians even at this day. Many and ponderous works have been written upon it in England, France especially, and Germany, but it remains still an unsolved puzzle.
From a very early age she saw visions, and when she spoke of them to her playfellows, and they stared at her and did not appear to comprehend what she said, she shrank into herself and refrained from communicating to others the things that she saw and heard, or fancied she saw and heard. Even at the age of five, this singular gift was noticed by her parents, who could not understand it. Jutta made the girl learn the Psalms in Latin, and she obtained some glimmer of an idea what the words meant, but she did not even acquire a knowledge of the alphabet, nor that of reading music.
Hildegarde was constantly unwell, but her aches and pains were apparently due to hysteria and nothing else, and the suppressed desire to be doing something, making her personality felt, which was impossible as she was situated. When, finally, she was bidden write down her visions, at once all her maladies left her.
“When, on one occasion, I was very much exhausted by my sickness,” says she in her own biography of herself, “I asked the nurse who attended me whether she saw things in any other way than with her eyes; she made me no answer. Then I was frightened, and I dared say no more about it to any one. But sometimes, inadvertently, when I was talking, I let slip prophetic sentences. And when I was, so to say, full of this inner vision, then I spoke much which was quite unintelligible to those about me. And when the force of the ecstasy grew, and I spoke something about it, more after the manner of a child than of a girl of my years, then I blushed and cried, and wished heartily that I had held my tongue. But out of dread of what would be said, I never dared to speak out openly as to what I saw. However (Jutta) the noble lady with whom I was had cognisance of this and consulted a monk of her acquaintance.”
To one in this condition, plenty of exercise, wholesome food, and hard work, and her head under the pump if she gave way to her fancies, would have been proper treatment. But in the twelfth century no one had any conception that hysteria was a physical disorder.
Jutta died in 1136, and by unanimous vote of the sisters Hildegarde was elected to be superior of the convent, when aged eight-and-thirty. She had now full opportunity to give way to her desire to take that prominent place to which she felt she was called. Two years, however, elapsed before she had made up her mind to write her visions and prophecies. There were difficulties in her way: she could not write, she knew nothing of grammar, and she was perhaps dubious how the world would accept revelations which were in shockingly bad grammar and spelling, and displayed profound ignorance of the real meaning of Scripture. However, she consulted one of the monks of the monastery of S. Disibod, and he put the matter before the rest.
Now, as she was evidently sincere, and there could be no suspicion that Hildegarde was deceiving them, they had to decide whether these visions were from heaven or from hell. That there was a third alternative never for an instant occurred to them: it could not, in the nature of things, in the then condition of medical science, or rather ignorance. Manifestly there was nothing bad in these revelations, consequently the poor amiable monks were compelled to decide that they came from God.
The difficulty now arose how they were to be published. It was obviously impossible to issue to the world the farrago of grammatic blunders, and the confused nonsense of much that poured from her lips, and so she was given secretaries to write down in decent Latin what they supposed she meant to say. The Archbishop Henry of Mayence was called in before the decisive step was taken. He was an amiable, peace-loving, but feeble man, who was made archbishop in 1142. He gave his verdict in favour of the revelations.
Hildegarde says of herself: “In 1141, when I was forty-two years old and seven months, there came on me a dazzling light from heaven, and flashed through my brains and heart and bosom. It was like a flame that does not burn, but warms, just like a sunbeam. From thenceforth I had the gift of the interpretation of the Scriptures, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the books of the Old and New Testament. I had, however, no understanding of the several words of the text, as to their syllables and cases and tenses. When I have my visions—and I have had them from childhood—I am not asleep, nor feverish, nor am I necessarily in retirement, nor do I see with my bodily eyes, but with those of my soul.” Later she wrote: “I am always in a fear and tremble, as I have no certainty within me. But I lift up my hands to heaven, and allow myself to be blown about just like a feather in the wind.”
Her first book was called by her _Scivias_; which was her contraction for _Disce vias Domini_, “know the ways of the Lord.” Probably only the first part of it was sent to the Archbishop of Mayence, who gravely called his clergy into consultation over it. Then, when Pope Eugenius III. came to Treves on his way to the Council of Rheims, he was shown it by the archbishop; he gave it to the Bishop of Verdun and other theologians to be examined. Afterwards, on their report, at the Council in 1148, he read it himself to the bishops there assembled, and it was received with applause.
S. Bernard was present, and he at once saw how much assistance he could get in promoting his darling object, a new crusade, if he could enlist Hildegarde in the cause; and he urged the pope to sanction and bless the prophetess. This Eugenius did in a letter, in which he accorded her his full permission to publish whatever was revealed to her. He could hardly do other. These writings were well intended, purported to do good, and that these visions and prophecies were the mere hallucinations of a diseased mind never could have been supposed at the time.
Hildegarde now shifted her quarters. Troops of women had come to place themselves under her direction, drawn by her fame. She settled on S. Ruprechtsberg, near Bingen, where a suitable convent was erected for her.
But the good monks of S. Disibod asked a favour of her which she could not refuse. They knew next to nothing about their founder, except that he was one of the many Irish who had left their native isle in the fifth century and had spread over Germany and Gaul. Would she through her prophetic power, which looked backwards as well as forwards, write them “by revelation” a life of their founder?
This she accordingly did, and the life she wrote was, she insists, given her “by revelation.” It is a long and tedious work, a gush of weak and watery verbiage. When reduced to its elementary constituents, it is found to consist of absolutely nothing more than what was already known—that Disibod came from Ireland, settled on the mount that bore his name afterwards, and died there. But this was distended into a tract of 6,250 words.
Hildegarde’s “Natural History” is a very funny book. She did not pretend to derive her knowledge of the property of things from inspiration, but there can be little doubt that, at the time when it was issued, those who regarded her prophecies as infallible, looked also on her enunciation of the properties of natural objects as inspired.
She begins the book by likening the world to a human body: the earth is the flesh, the rocks are the bones, the moisture of the stones is the marrow, the slate rocks are the toe and finger nails, the plants are the hair, and the dew is the perspiration. All plants are either hot or cold; so also are all animals. This is the radical division between them. The recipes given are profoundly silly. For a boil, house-flies are to be taken, their heads cut off, and they are to be arranged like herrings in a barrel round the swelling. A poultice is to cover all—but it is the flies that bring the gathering to a head. Here is one of the shortest of her botanical accounts—that of the meadow convolvulus. “The herb is cold, it has not great powers nor is it of much use. But if a man’s nails get scaly and crack, then let him grind up the convolvulus, mix with it a little quicksilver and lay it on his nails, tie a bit of rag round, and his nails will be lovely.”
Hildegarde wrote a commentary on the Rule of S. Benedict, another on the Athanasian Creed. She propounded difficult questions in Scripture, and solved them by her inner light, only making the difficulties greater, and always missing the simple meaning of a passage.
S. Hildegarde had her troubles. She did not get on very well with the Archbishops of Mayence. At the instigation of S. Bernard she inflamed the minds of the people with a fever of zeal against the Saracens, and exhorted to a crusade. This resulted in a frightful massacre of Jews at Mayence, instigated by a monk named Badulf. The Archbishop Henry, a mild, amiable man, did what he could to protect the unfortunate Israelites, and opened to them his palace. But a papal legate appeared on the scene, and the Chapter induced him to depose the archbishop. He appealed to Rome, but the cardinals were bribed to declare against him. He had chosen his confidential friend, Arnold of Selnhofen, to take what money he could scrape together to Rome and plead his cause. Arnold made the most solemn assurances of fidelity, and betrayed his trust. He used the money entrusted to him to purchase the deposition of his friend and his own advancement.
The people of Mayence were greatly incensed against Arnold, who was thrust on them by the pope himself, without election by the Chapter, and was invested by the pope the same day on which the friend was degraded whom he had betrayed. On reaching Mayence Arnold did nothing to appease the popular resentment; his court was magnificent, his servants were splendidly liveried, and his table was noted for its luxury. Knowing what a power Hildegarde was in the diocese, he wrote a hypocritical, canting letter to her, beseeching her prayers. She replied with a sharp admonition: “The living Light saith unto thee, Thou hast a form of zeal only, which I hate. Cleanse restlessness from thy soul, and cease from doing injustice to thy people. Rise up and turn to the Lord, for the time cometh speedily.”
Seeing the ferment of men’s minds increase, Arnold resolved on leaving Bingen, where he then was, to go into his cathedral city and put down all resistance with a high hand. He purposed lodging the first night in the monastery of S. James, outside the walls. Hildegarde warned him of his danger, but he would not listen. A friend, the abbot of Erbach, also cautioned him. “Bah!” scoffed the archbishop, “these Mainzers are dogs; they bark, but do not bite.” When Hildegarde heard this, she said, “The dogs have had their chains broken, and they will tear you to pieces.”