Somewhat similar is the legendary history of Coemagen, or Saint Kelvin, an Irish monk of the eighth century, into whose charge was committed the infant son of Colman, a Leinster noble. “Coemagen fed the child on the milk of a doe which came from the forest to the door of his cell. A raven was wont, after the doe had been milked, to perch on the bowl, and sometimes would upset it. ‘Bad luck to thee!’ exclaimed the saint. ‘When I am dead there will be a famous wake, but no scraps for thee and thy clan!’ When very old St. Kelvin moved into a forest hermitage, where the birds came to him as companions. Once, while praying, his supplicating palms outstretched, a blackbird (thrush) dropped her eggs into the hollow of his hands, and he held his arms rigid until the chicks hatched.”
A curious parallel to the last incident is quoted by the Baroness Martinengo-Caesaresco[[20]] “from an industrious translator” of the book Tatchi-Lou-Lun, describing how when a bird laid her eggs on the head of the first Buddha, which she mistook for the branch of a tree, he plunged himself into a trance so as not to move until the eggs had hatched and the young were flown.
St. Bede the younger, a contemporary of Coemagen, had a dove that used to come at his call; and an Irish monk, Comgall, would bid the swans near his residence come and cluster devotionally around his feet. Many saints, the legends declare, had authority over birds, and one, St. Millburg, abbess of Wenlock, in Shropshire, kept them out of the farmers’ crops by telling them it was naughty to despoil the grain. Of old, according to Canon Kingsley, St. Guthlac in Crowland said, as the swallows sat upon his knee, “He who leads his life according to the will of God, to him will the wild deer and the wild birds draw more near.”
The religious “hermits,” so prevalent at that period, were men who chose a more or less solitary life, quite as much, I suspect, on account of their love of nature as from purely devotional motives, and this was particularly true of those in Great Britain, exhibiting the characteristic British fondness for animal life. There was an early St. Bartholomew, for example, who in the sixth century or thereabout dwelt in seclusion on one of the Farne Islands off the northeastern coast of England, and made friends of the gulls and cormorants of the place. One of these he had tamed to eat out of his hand, and once, when Bartholomew was away fishing, a hawk pursued this poor bird into the chapel and killed it. Brother Bartholomew came in and found the hawk there with bloody talons and a shame-faced appearance. He caught it, kept it two days without food to punish it, then let it go. At another time, as he sat by the shore, a cormorant approached and pulled at his skirt, then led him to where one of its young had fallen into a crevice of the rocks whence the good man rescued it.
One of these rocky islets in the North Sea became so famous during the next century that it has been known ever since as Holy Isle, and the ruins of its monastery and cathedral still remain and may be seen from the railway train as it passes along the brink of the lofty coast a little south of Berwick-on-Tweed. This was the seat of the renowned Bishop Cuthbert of whom many quaint stories are told, apart from the record of his religious work. They attribute to his influence the extraordinary gentleness and familiarity characteristic of the eider duck, which is known to this day in Northumbria as Cuthbert’s bird. It was he, according to a narrative of a monk of the 13th century, who inspired these ducks with a hereditary trust in mankind by taking them as companions of his solitude when for several years he resided alone on Lindisfarne. There is good reason to accept this and similar traditions as largely true, for a like ability in “gentling” birds and other wild animals is manifested to-day by some persons of a calm and kindly sort.
Early in the eighth century a monk of intensely ascetic disposition, named Guthlac, retired to a solitary hermitage on an island in the dismal morasses of Lincolnshire, which afterward, if not then, was called Croyland or Crowland. He was sorely tempted by the Devil we are informed, and had many battles with “demons”—native British refugees hiding in the fens; but in the intervals of his fasting and fighting he got acquainted with the wild creatures about him. “The ravens, the beasts and the fishes,” says the record, “came to obey him. Once a venerable brother named Wilfred visited him, and ... suddenly two swallows came flying in ... and often they sat fearlessly on the shoulders of the holy man Guthlac, and then lifted up their song, and afterward they sat on his bosom and on his arms and his knees.... When Guthlac died angelic songs were heard in the sky, and all the air had a wondrous odor of exceeding sweetness.”
St. Kentigern, when a schoolboy, was wrongly accused of having twisted off the head of his master’s pet robin. He proved his innocence by putting the head and body together, whereupon the robin came to life and attended Kentigern until he became a great and good man. His master was St. Servan, and the robin was one that used to eat from his hand and perch on his shoulder, where it would twitter whenever Servan chanted the Psalms.
Here we encounter the mystical kind of story with which those old chroniclers like to embellish their biographies of holy men, and there was no limit to their credulity. Such is the tale of Carilef, a French would-be hermit of Ménàt, in Auvergne, who thought he was guided to set up a religious station because a wren had laid an egg in a hood that he had left hanging on a bush—a very wrenlike proceeding; and that was the foundation of the monastery about which the city of St. Calais grew in later times. Several other incidents of this kind are on record, showing that the value placed on any action by a bird that could be construed as a divine message. It is written that Editha, one of the early queens of England, persuaded her husband to found a religious house near Oxford on account of the omens she interpreted from the voice and actions of a certain magpie. Similarly the site for the abbey of Thierry, near Rheims, in France, was indicated to St. Theodoric, in the sixth century, by a white eagle circling around the top of the hill on which it subsequently was erected; and this miraculous eagle was seen year after year in the sky above it.
About that time Kenelm, son and heir of Kenulph, king of Wessex, was seven years old. His sister, who wanted to succeed to the throne in his place, procured his murder. The instant this was accomplished the fact was notified to the Pope, according to the Chronicles of Roger de Wendover, by a white dove that alighted on the altar of St. Peter’s, bearing in its beak a scroll on which was written
In Clent cow-pasture, under a thorn,