THE HERMITS AND RECLUSES OF THE MIDDLE AGES.
CHAPTER I.
THE HERMITS.
e have already related, in a former chapter (p. 3), that the ascetics who abandoned the stirring world of the Ægypto-Greek cities, and resorted to the Theban desert to lead a life of self-mortification and contemplation, frequently associated themselves into communities, and thus gave rise to the cœnobitical orders of Christendom. But there were others who still preferred the solitary life; and they had their imitators in every age and country of the Christian world. We have not the same fulness of information respecting these solitaries that we have respecting the great orders of monks and friars; but the scattered notices which remain of them, when brought together, form a very curious chapter in the history of human nature, well worthy of being written out in full. The business of the present paper, however, is not to write the whole chapter, but only to select that page of it which relates to the English solitaries, and to give as distinct a picture as we can of the part which the Hermits and Recluses played on the picturesque stage of the England of the Middle Ages.
We have to remember, at the outset, that it was not all who bore the name of Eremite who lived a solitary life. We have already had occasion to mention that Innocent IV., in the middle of the thirteenth century, found a number of small religious communities and solitaries, who were not in any of the recognised religious orders, and observed no authorised rule; and that he enrolled them all into a new order, with the rule of St. Augustine, under the name of Eremiti Augustini. The new order took root, and flourished, and gave rise to a considerable number of large communities, very similar in every respect to the communities of friars of the three orders previously existing. The members of these new communities did not affect seclusion, but went about among the people, as the Dominicans, and Franciscans, and Carmelites did. The popular tongue seems to have divided the formal title of the new order, and to have applied the name of Augustine, or, popularly, Austin Friars, to these new communities of friars; while it reserved the distinctive name of Eremites, or Hermits, for the religious, who, whether they lived absolutely alone, or in little aggregations of solitaries, still professed the old eremitical principle of seclusion from the world. These hermits may again be subdivided into Hermits proper, and Recluses. The difference between them was this: that the hermit, though he professed a general seclusion from the world, yet, in fact, held communication with his fellow-men as freely as he pleased, and might go in and out of his hermitage as inclination prompted, or need required; the recluse was understood to maintain a more strict abstinence from unnecessary intercourse with others, and had entered into a formal obligation not to go outside the doors of his hermitage. In the imperfect notices which we have of them, it is often impossible to determine whether a particular individual was a hermit or a recluse; but we incline to the opinion that of the male solitaries few had taken the vows of reclusion; while the female solitaries appear to have been all recluses. So that, practically, the distinction almost amounts to this—that the male solitaries were hermits, and the females recluses.
Very much of what we have to say of the mediæval solitaries, of their abodes, and of their domestic economy, applies both to those who had, and to those who had not, made the further vow of reclusion. We shall, therefore, treat first of those points which are common to them, and then devote a further paper to those things which are peculiar to the recluses.
The popular idea of a hermit is that of a man who was either a half-crazed enthusiast, or a misanthrope—a kind of Christian Timon—who abandoned the abodes of men, and scooped out for himself a cave in the rocks, or built himself a rude hut in the forest; and lived there a half-savage life, clad in sackcloth or skins,[91] eating roots and wild fruits, and drinking of the neighbouring spring; visited occasionally by superstitious people, who gazed and listened in fear at the mystic ravings, or wild denunciations, of the gaunt and haggard prophet. This ideal has probably been derived from the traditional histories, once so popular,[92] of the early hermit-saints; and there may have been, perhaps, always an individual or two of whom this traditional picture was a more or less exaggerated representation. But the ordinary English hermit of the Middle Ages was a totally different type of man. He was a sober-minded and civilised person, who dressed in a robe very much like the robes of the other religious orders; lived in a comfortable little house of stone or timber; often had estates, or a pension, for his maintenance, besides what charitable people were pleased to leave him in their wills, or to offer in their lifetime; he lived on bread and meat, and beer and wine, and had a chaplain to say daily prayers for him, and a servant or two to wait upon him; his hermitage was not always up in the lonely hills, or deep-buried in the shady forests—very often it was by the great high roads, and sometimes in the heart of great towns and cities.