The subject of English hermits and anchorites has been so exhaustively dealt with by Miss Rotha M. Clay^[95] that a writer may well hesitate before he ventures to enter upon a small portion of the ground which she has covered. Miss Clay has performed her task with great judgment, learning and literary skill and with consummate diligence. So conscientiously and so impartially has she performed her task that the reader will seek in vain to discover whether she is in full sympathy with the hermit’s vocation or the reverse. Her book will be read with pleasure and with profit by all.

The present writer wishes to acknowledge his obligations to Miss Clay, whose researches have both confirmed and supplemented conclusions already formed. The titles of the several chapters of her book are illuminating and suggestive, and the contents abundantly justify the distinction she has made between one type and another. We find ourselves introduced in succession to hermits of island and fen, forest and hillside, cave, lighthouse, highway and bridge, town, church and cloister.

Unless the student keeps in mind the fact that the eremitical impulse fulfilled itself in varied activities he will fail to understand its true nature and purpose. Here was no lawless spirit, disdaining the restraints of an ordered life, but “the fiery glow that whirls the spirit from itself away” to make it the ready instrument in God’s hands for works of mercy, charity, counsel and service while seeking by prayer, meditation, vigil and fasting to attain unto perfection.

Again, while it is allowable to assume that the hermit who dwelt apart and in solitude was the precursor of the conventual body—the word monk implies as much—it nevertheless seems certain that, at the time when he first emerges into the clear light of Celtic history he is not, as popular fancy has imagined, a distraught enthusiast seeking refuge and rest from an evil and adulterous generation, but a tried soldier who has learnt in the convent by precept and by practice the art of war, and who goes forth in all the panoply of celestial might to fight singly and alone the enemies of his soul and to bring deliverance to others. No sooner has he achieved his own salvation than he sets about the salvation of his fellow-men. He has little in common with the self-regarding Christian of the Pilgrim’s Progress. He is eager to be of use. He becomes a minister to the dwellers amid untrodden ways and in remote corners, it may be as a waywarden, a bridge repairer, or a light keeper, but in any case as the guide, the counsellor, the friend of all. Inevitably his sphere of influence widens out. Soon he has become equally necessary to the pilgrim, the traveller and to those who are round about him. As time goes on his cell and the little sanctuary where he and they have met for worship become hallowed by association, and, when he dies, a successor must be sought to carry on the tradition. The hermitage thus remains as a memorial of its founder long after his name has been forgotten.

Or, it may be, the hermit is joined by others like-minded and founds a religious community, a lan whose growth and permanence are promoted by the industry and self-denial of its members. This would seem to have been the normal course of events in Cornwall. In this case the individual founder is often content to leave his work to be carried on by others during his lifetime. He may be a bishop, priest, deacon or layman who determines to undergo the hardships of the wilderness for a season, but who has no intention of devoting his whole life to solitude. Diversities of gifts under the spell of a common impulse give rise to diversities of ministration and of operation.

Of the hermits of the Celtic period in Cornwall we have very little historical evidence. Presumptive evidence we have which, if it told against the traditional interpretation of early Christianity, would doubtless be held to possess great value. For example, we have, in the lives of the saints, references to ecclesiastical types and economic conditions which had been obsolete for centuries when some of those lives are held to have assumed their present literary form.

We have holy wells bearing the names of saints which are not the names of the patron saints of the parishes in which the wells are situated. We have legends which, for the purpose of comparative mythology, are highly esteemed. There are, for example, holy wells at St. Ingunger, Chapel Uny (St. Uny’s) and Jetwells, but these are not the patrons of the parishes, though they are all three well-known Celtic saints. On the other hand, there are wells bearing the names of St. Levan, St. Madron, St. Clether, St. Keyne and St. Just (Venton—east) situated in the parishes which do bear their names. If the ancient Cornish churches derived their names from their founders or founders’ kin it seems probable that the holy wells acquired their names from association with the saints whose names they bear.

There would be the same inducement for a hermit to fix his abode near a spring of water as there is for an Australian squatter to choose a similar spot for the headquarters of his sheep or cattle station. So late as A.D. 1086, when Domesday Book was compiled, the county of Cornwall was very sparsely populated. In the place-names may be recognised traces of a fauna long extinct but nevertheless extant in Celtic times.^[96] It is necessary to bear in mind the transformation of the county, which during the last thirteen centuries has resulted from increased settlement and the more extensive cultivation of land, in order to be in a position to estimate the value of the evidence supplied by the hagiographer.

Early in the sixth century St. Petrock succeeded St. Guron at Bodmin; such is the tradition. Leland (circa 1540) thus records the event,^[97] Bosmana, id est, mansio monachorum in valle, ubi St. Guronus solitarie degens in parvo tugurio, quod reliquen(s) tradidit St. Petroco. Guron was doubtless a hermit. Petrock enlarged the hermitage, which was situated in the valley where the town now stands and near the well which still bears the hermit’s name, so as to make it capable of sheltering himself and three brethren. Guron is probably the same as Goran, the name-saint of the parish in the ancient deanery of Powder. Traces of the name are to be found in Brittany.^[98]

William of Worcester (1478) introduces us to three Cornish hermits, Vylloc or Willow, Mybbard and Mancus. They were companions.

The first is described as a hermit and martyr born in Ireland and beheaded by Melyn’s kinsfolk (Melyn ys kynrede) near the place (in Lanteglos-by-Fowey) where Walter, bishop of Norwich, was born.

From this place to the bridge of St. Willow, a distance of half a mile, he carried his (head) to a spot where the said church was built in his honour.^[99] Mybbard, otherwise Calrogus, is stated to have been a hermit, the son of a King of Ireland, and his body is said to rest within the shrine (scrinio) of Cardynham Church. Mancus, their companion and a hermit, is said, on the authority of Robert Bracey, to lie in the church of Lanreath, within two miles of Fowey, and, on the authority of the canons of Launceston, in the parish of Lanteglos presumably at Bodinnick. All three are said to be commemorated on the same day, viz. the Thursday next before Whitsunday. William of Worcester’s account of the three hermits is prefaced by the sentence “there were three brothers under the name of St. Genesius and each carried his head, one of them archbishop of Lismore.” Is it possible that St. Gennys may be a corruption of a Latinised Greek word s???e?e?? (kinsmen)? It is curious, in any case, that the feast of Cardynham and St. Gennys should be held on Whitsunday, that of Lanteglos having been abandoned and that of Lanreath, whose patron is now given as Marnarch, being kept on the third of August. Anciently there was a chapel at Bodinnick bearing the name of St. John the Baptist. St. Willow is regarded as the patron of Lanteglos and Mybbard as the patron of Cardynham. When all due allowance has been made for accretions and errors in transmission it seems impossible to doubt that three Irish hermits were martyred at or near Lanteglos and commemorated by churches built in their honour.

St. Neot represents a prevalent type of religious which, from the first days of British Christianity until the eleventh century, combined the habits and aspirations of the hermit with the practical usefulness of the missionary. Neot was born in the earlier years of the ninth century of parents who were nearly related in blood to the West-Saxon Kings. Forsaking a military career for which he had been intended, he entered the monastery of Glastonbury, where he received Holy Orders and became eminent for piety, learning, wisdom and counsel. The fear of popular applause drove him forth into the wilderness. He fixed his abode in the Cornish parish which now bears his name, near to a hamlet then known as Hamstoke and therefore apparently already a Saxon settlement. Here he lived seven years. At the end of that time he visited Rome and was advised by the Holy Father to renounce his habit of solitary devotion to return home and scatter the word of God among the people of Cornwall.

He came back to Hamstoke and founded there the college of priests of which mention is made in Domesday Book. At Hamstoke he was visited more than once by his kinsman Alfred the Great, who hunted in the neighbourhood and who is said to have been healed at the shrine of St. Guerir of a malady which had afflicted him from boyhood.

St. Neot’s hermitage was near the spring which is about half a mile west of the church and is known as St. Neot’s well. In his day there appear to have been two pools, one of them with an unique unfailing supply of three fishes, of which one only was to be caught in a day, and the other, a pool in which the saint was wont to stand daily while repeating the Psalter. Many stories are told of the saint’s sojourn by the well. The fox which stole his shoe, the rescue of the doe from the hounds, the theft of his working bullocks and the employment of stags for the ploughing of his land are sufficiently well known.

By the advice of St. Neot King Alfred is said to have restored the English school at Rome. The saint continued to be abbot of his own foundation until his death, which took place on the 31st of July, 877. He was buried in the church which he had built on the site of the chapel of St. Guerir. About a century later his bones were fraudulently removed to the monastery of Eynesbury in Huntingdonshire.

There are several points of interest. There does not appear to have been any marked difference between St. Neot’s eremitical career and that of others of Cornish origin. This may be owing to the late composition of the lives of many of the saints. The substitution of St. Neot for St. Guerir as the name-saint of the church has many precedents and would call for no remark here did it not afford a good example of what was also in Cornwall a fairly general practice, of which the proofs are not abundant—that of calling churches after the names of their founders.^[100]

At this point it is convenient to call attention to the story of Tristan and Iseult, which has been shown to be of Cornish origin and which assumed literary form probably towards the end of the eleventh century. Most of the places mentioned in the story are found in Cornwall and, although the actors in the drama are presumed to have lived some five centuries before their deeds were committed to writing, there are nevertheless inferences to be derived from the record of them which have a direct bearing upon our subject even if we suppose the setting of the story to have been, at the time, comparatively modern. The following episode is an example. During the sojourn of Tristan and Iseult in the forest of Morrois (Moreske), which then extended from the Fal to the Helford river, they meet with a hermit, Ogrin by name, who does not hesitate to give them some much-needed advice. He calls them to repentance and then listens patiently to Tristan’s excuses. It is not suggested that in admonishing them he is exceeding his duty. He is described as a hermit with a hermitage in the forest, a personage quite distinct from the parish priest, whose sphere of influence had already become a recognised geographical unit, as is shown by the following passage:

Ogrin, as a man of sense, advises the Queen to return home, and himself undertakes the delicate task of reconciling the lovers to King Mark.

Throughout the narrative he is represented as a man of God. It does not seem to have occurred to the romancer that there is something slightly incongruous in selecting a hermit for a shopping expedition to the market of St. Michael’s Mount, where, for the fair Iseult:

The hermit, as a man of affairs, may have been familiar to those for whose ears the romance was intended. It is difficult, otherwise, to assign a reason why the writer exaggerated his character beyond the bounds of recognition. The position which the hermit occupied in the popular estimation, august as it undoubtedly was, was not more exalted than that which was voluntarily conceded to him by those who were highly placed. To this fact must doubtless be attributed the more or less successful attempts to perpetuate the office when its occupant was removed by death. It is therefore possible that in the hermit of Colemanshegg, mentioned in a Roll of 1258, we have a reference to one of Ogrin’s successors.^[101] Of this latter personage we know nothing save that Richard hermit of Colemanshegg received 50s. yearly to find a chaplain to celebrate divine service for the soul of Catherine the King’s daughter.

But for this mention of Richard of Colemanshegg the earliest notice of a Cornish hermit after the Norman Conquest would have been that contained in the Assize Roll of the 30th year of Edward I (1301-1302) in which it is recorded that Thomas de Penmargh noctanter intravit domum Andreae Paugan heremitae infra capellam Divi Justi et eum occidit. Johannes filius Andreae heremitae primus invenitor. The entry is under the heading of the hundred of Penwith. Penmargh is doubtless Penmarth in Wendron. Pagan, of which Paugan may be a variant, is not uncommon as a personal name in early records. We are not told why Thomas of Penmargh killed Andrew, or how long it was before John discovered the dead body of his father, but it looks as if Andrew had been seen alive the day before his death and found dead by his son the day after. Where was the hermitage? It is described as below the chapel of St. Just, but St. Just was not a chapel (capella). It was a church (ecclesia), and the terms are never used indiscriminately. If it be allowable to render the passage “below a chapel of St. Just,” that is, below a chapel in the parish of St. Just, the record is very significant.

For one of the most interesting spots in that parish is Chapel Carn Brea, upon the summit of which stood until 1816 a chapel of which a sketch was made by Dr. Borlase, who described it as being approached from the south side by a large flight of steps and as being twenty feet in height, and the roof arched with stone well wrought. Hals tells us it was about ten feet wide and fourteen feet long, with a window in the east end. Both writers speak of an immense heap of stones lying around it, suggesting a large vault or hermitage underneath. The chapel was pulled down in 1816 to build a barn elsewhere. When, in 1879, Mr. W. C. Borlase made an examination of the confused mass of stones which remained, and still remain, he failed to discover any trace of a hermit’s cell, and concluded that the greater portion of the debris had done service as a covering for the prehistoric chambered grave which was found at a lower level. While it is not unlikely that the tumulus suggested, at a very early period, the site for the chapel to the first Christian solitary who found his way to that remote spot, the amount of stone there at the present time is too great to warrant the conclusion, unless the tumulus was of a type and size which has no rival in the county.

Some building doubtless existed besides the chapel, the size of which was obviously too small for public worship.

The most striking feature of Chapel Carn Brea is the commanding view which it affords not only of the Channel but of the whole of Penwith and of a large portion of the Lizard. No better spot could be chosen for a beacon.

Within a couple of hundred yards is the ancient mule track from Marazion to the Land’s End. After reading Miss Clay’s chapter on hermits as light-keepers, it seems impossible to doubt that the hermit of Chapel Carn Brea was one of those who in the day of small things performed that function, and whose simple signal was to the seafarer no less than to the traveller over the lonely moor a bright beacon of God. Andrew Paugan was probably only one of a long line of hermits who dwelt on the hill. A curious extract is found in Dr. Borlase’s collections which, as one of the latest specimens of Cornish literature, has a value all its own and, as the witness of a tradition extant in the latter half of the seventeenth century, is useful for the present purpose. I am indebted to Mr. Henry Jenner for a transcript and translation of it.

“The Accusation of the Hermit (who liv’d in Chapel Karn Bray in Buryan) address’d to ye Duchess.

Why ra cavas dre eu an gwas Harry ma Poddrack broas.

Kensa, wit a hagar-awal iggeva gweel do derevoll war ren ny Keniffer termen dre ra ny moas durt Pedden an woolaes do Sillan. Nessa, wit an skavoll Crack-an-codna iggava setha war en cres a’n awles ewhall (cries tutton Harry an Lader) heb drog veeth. Tregga, wit an gurroll iggeva gwell gen askern skooth Davas, etc.”

To the Countess of the Dominion of Cornwall.

By your sacred leave.

You shall find by him that this fellow Harry is a great witch.

First, from the stormy weather he does work to raise upon us every time that we do go from the end of the Land to Silly. Second, from the break-neck stool which he can (or does) sit upon in the middle of the high cliff (call’d The Chair of Harry the Thief), without any hurt. Thirdly, from a ship he does make with the bone of a shoulder of mutton.

Mr. Jenner is inclined to think that the “seat of Harry the thief” (Tutton Harry an Lader) refers to a piece of cliff at Tol Pedn Penwith called “Chair Ladder.” The whole passage as it stands detached from the context (which has been lost) is little more than so much gibberish. Possibly it may have been so intended, for the romance, of which it is a fragment, was written by Mr. Boson for his children. But this consideration, assuming it to be well founded, would not rob the allusions of their evidential value. Quite the contrary. Every romance requires some element of fact or vraisemblance to recommend it to the popular imagination. Not more than half a mile from Chapel Carn Brea, at the foot of the hill, is Crows-an-Wra, the Witch’s Cross, which may have suggested the character personified by Harry the Wizard of the break-neck stool. Some vague memories of the hermit who served the little chapel, tended the beacon and directed the travellers across the desolate moor doubtless still survived. Andrew Paugan was only one of the occupants of the cell, one who like many others in various parts of England spent his life in solitude, enduring privation and hardship and cultivating piety by prayer, meditation and active philanthropy. He was probably a widower when he gave himself to the career which Thomas of Penmargh, in the stillness of night, for some unknown reason brought to an untimely end.

The next mention of Cornish hermits is found in the Inquisitio post-mortem of Edmund, Earl of Cornwall.^[102] Following the inventory of honours, lands and services held by him at the time of his death there is a list of the charges upon his estates and among them the entry: “alms to St. Philip of Restormel, hermit, and St. Robert of Penlyn, hermit.” The earldom and its possessions reverted to the King on Earl Edmund’s death, and we are therefore not surprised to find an entry in the Close Roll of the following year, 1301, which reads as follows: “To the sheriff of Cornwall. Order to deliver to brother Robert of Penlyn, hermit, the island surrounded (inclusam) by the water of Fawe with a rent of 56s. 2d. from certain tenants of the manor of Penkneth, to be held by him for life as he held them before the death of Edmund, Earl of Cornwall, by reason of whose death the sheriff took them into the King’s hands; on the same terms as the earl granted them, together with the houses built on the island, to Robert by his charter which the King has inspected.”^[103]

All attempts to identify the island have hitherto failed. The manors of Penlyn or Pelyn and Penkneth or Pennight are in the parish of Lanlivery, of which the river Fowey is, roughly speaking, the eastern boundary, but no island is now to be discovered in its course. The site of the hermitage of Restormel is also uncertain. It may have been that of the chapel of the Holy Trinity in the park, sometimes called the King’s free chapel, to which frequent reference is made in the Rolls, and from which, according to an inventory made in 1338, a bell weighing 100 lbs. had been removed to the chapel within the castle walls of Restormel. There is nothing to lead us to suppose that St. Philip and St. Robert had successors. It is not improbable that royal chaplains were substituted for them.

In 1339 the Patent Roll records the King’s protection granted to Roger Godman, hermit of the chapel of St. Mary by Liskeard (Liskerith), collecting about the realm the alms whereon he depends for subsistence.^[104] It is probable that the chapel of St. Mary was the same as the King’s free chapel of St. Mary in the park of Liskeard to which Edward II appointed Roger de Aqua his chaplain in 1316.^[105] It must be distinguished from that of the Hospital of St. Mary Magdalen. The former appears to have become a chantry, for, in 1378, a royal grant was made to Richard Lagge, chaplain, that he might celebrate service in it, and in the same year the bishop issued a licence to him in which it is stated that he is to celebrate for the welfare of the King.^[106] The chantry was suppressed by Edward VI, and the “Chapel of our Laydye” granted to Thomas Pomray in 1549.^[107] It is interesting to compare the fortunes of this chapel with that of the Holy Trinity in the park of Restormel. Both of them appear to have been served originally by hermits, to have been converted into royal chapels and to have shared the same fate.

A little more than half a century later, in 1403, the following entry occurs in Bishop Stafford’s register: “One Cecilia Moys, desiring to lead the contemplative life of an anchorite^[108] in a certain house in the cemetery of Marhamchurch, the bishop on the 4th of May, 1403, commissioned Philip, abbot of Hartland, and Walter Dollebeare, vicar of Southill, to place her there under proper protection, assigning her till Christmas as a time of probation.”

Churchyards were regarded as places specially suitable for the dwellings of anchorites as being dead to the world. It was, moreover, an obvious advantage to the parish priest that they should be near the church for the purpose of Communion. A second entry in the same bishop’s register probably refers to the same anchorite, though the name is given as that of Lucy Moys, anchorite of Marhamchurch.

She receives on the 10th of October, 1405, a licence to choose her confessor. Another entry in the same register records a bequest of 40s. by Richard Tyttesburry, canon of Exeter, to the anchorite of Marhamchurch. His will was made on the 24th of February, 1405, and proved on the 7th of June, 1409.^[109]

At St. Teath there was a hermit, name unknown, who in 1408, under the will of Sir William Bonevylle, received 20s. to pray for the soul of the testator: “al heremyte de Stetth pour prier pour moy.” In the Lambeth manuscript the bequest is recorded “a lermytage de Stath,” suggesting, but by no means proving, a permanent hermitage in the parish.^[110]

Seven years later, in 1415: “Margaret an anchorite dwelling near Bodmin, having asked permission to migrate to the monastery of St. Bridget by Schene and to join the order settled there, is licensed by the bishop accordingly.” To her or to her predecessor Richard Tyttesburry, whose name has been already mentioned, bequeathed in 1405 the sum of 40s.^[111]

It has been generally supposed that Roche Rock, a natural and rugged monolith some 300 feet in height, situated in the parish which bears its name, was formerly the seat of a hermitage, and there is much to favour the supposition. Norden (1584) describes it as “a verie high, steepe and craggie rock, upon the top whereof is placed a cell or hermitage, the walls whereof are partly wroughte, and that with great labour out of the obdurate rock.” In the illustration, which he gives, the building is complete with roof, windows and door. A detailed account is supplied by Davies Gilbert (1838), from which it appears that in his day the roof and upper chamber (as shown in Norden’s plate) had already disappeared, the beam holes of the chamber being the only evidence that such a chamber had existed. The dimensions of what is supposed to have been the chapel are given by him: the length 20 feet, the breadth 12 feet and the height 10 feet.

There are apparently only two purposes for which a building, at such an elevation and in so desolate and remote a spot, could serve—that of a beacon house or of a hermitage. The former is the less probable explanation because of more suitable sites in the neighbourhood. The lack of documentary evidence in support of the latter hypothesis is not surprising and will carry little weight with those who reflect that it is only, as it were, by accident that we have any evidence at all respecting the other hermitages in the county. Comparing the cell on Roche Rock with other similar cells in various parts of England it may be inferred that the building was at one and the same time used by its occupants for both purposes.

The foregoing survey discloses no such secrets as might have been expected. It leaves the story of Cornwall’s conversion where we found it. The key of the position remains undiscovered—the key wherewith to open and unroll the unwritten record of the struggles of those first fateful days when the Christian faith gained a foothold in the land. We are thrown back upon the witness of an age so late as to render the witness of doubtful value. If we refer to it, it is with diffidence, having little or no hope that, as evidence, it will receive the consideration it deserves. Yet in spite of all that may be urged against any particular legend, we must not forget that hagiographer and monk, chronicler and poet, cross and cell, holy well and church, all proclaim the same story and tell the same tale when they represent the heralds of the good tidings as wandering in deserts and in mountains and in dens and caves of the earth. The account of St. Sampson’s visit and the legend of St. Petrock are but types of the rest.

It would doubtless help towards the solution of the problem if something more definite could be known of the quarter whence the earliest of those heralds came. Was it from Gaul, from Lerins, from the East or from Rome? We know that St. Hilary of Poitiers, in the middle of the fourth century, dedicated his treatise De Synodis to the bishops of the British provinces, that St. German of Auxerre accompanied by St. Lupus of Troyes came over to Britain in 429 to assist in extirpating the Pelagian heresy. Does this point to some closer and deeper connection than that of mere propinquity between the Churches of Gaul and of Britain?

The intercourse between Rome and Britain, the Roman soldiers and merchants who during the occupation were brought into daily contact with the Britons could not fail to effect some change in the religious attitude of the latter. It is not, however, this slow, silent, indirect influence which excites our interest. It is rather of that direct attack upon paganism which so far succeeded as to impress a definite character and to make it possible to speak of Celtic Christianity as a distinct type that we wish to hear.

We allow that the same truths when accepted by different races produce different effects and find expression in different ways. An orthodox Russian Churchman and an English Churchman profess the same creeds, accept the same Scriptures, and are in all essentials of one heart and of one soul; yet it will be some time before the latter can be got to feel at home in the public worship of the former. Race, temperament and tradition reveal themselves in external modes of worship. This is true, but it is not sufficient to account for the rÔle of isolation assumed by the British Church and by the daughter Church of Brittany. Some external influence appears to have been at work at a very early period, monastic in character, which was unfavourable to the cultivation of close relations with the rest of Western Christianity. It could hardly have been either of Roman or of Gaulish origin. Had it been Roman it would have constituted a bond of union instead of being, as it was, a barrier against which Augustine could not prevail; had it been Gaulish it would probably have been attempered by intercourse with the source of its inspiration. Possibly it came from the Mediterranean or from the East by way of Marseilles.