The Hermits eBook

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