[121] One of the little hermitages represented in the Campo Santo series of paintings of the old Egyptian hermit-saints (engraved in Mrs. Jameson’s “Legends of the Monastic Orders”) has a little grated window, through which the hermit within (probably this John) is talking with another outside.
[122] That recluses did, however, sometimes quit their cells on a great emergency, we learn from the Legenda of Richard of Hampole already quoted, where we are told that at his death Dame Margaret Kyrkley, the recluse of Anderby, on hearing of the saint’s death, hastened to Hampole to be present at his funeral.
[123] Wilkins’s “Concilia,” i. 693.
[124] Several MSS. of this rule are known under different names. Fosbroke quotes one as the rule of Simon de Gandavo (or Simon of Ghent), in Cott. MS. Nero A xiv.; another in Bennet College, Cambridge; and another under the name of Alfred Reevesley. See Fosbroke’s “British Monachism,” pp. 374-5. The various copies, indeed, seem to differ considerably, but to be all derived from the work ascribed to Bishop Poore. All these books are addressed to female recluses, which is a confirmation of the opinion which we have before expressed, that the majority of the recluses were women.
[125] Thus the player-queen in Hamlet, iii. 2:—
“Nor earth to me give food, nor heaven light!
Sport and repose lock from me, day, and night!
To desperation turn my trust and hope!
An anchor’s cheer in prison be my scope!
Each opposite, that blanks the face of joy,
Meet what I would have well, and it destroy,” &c.
[126] A cell in the north-west angle of Edington Abbey Church, Wilts, seems to be of this kind.
[127] The wearing a cuirass, or hauberk of chain mail, next the skin became a noted form of self-torture; those who undertook it were called Loricati.
[128] The cell of a Carthusian monk, as we have stated, consisted of a little house of three apartments and a little garden within an inclosure wall.
[129] This very same picture is given also in another MS. of about the same date, marked Add. 10,294, at folio 14.