How deeply the spirit of religious enthusiasm had penetrated among the people we see in the story of S. Godric. Godric was born in the last years of the Conqueror or the earliest years of the Red King at Walpole, a village in the north-western marshlands of Norfolk; thence his parents, Ælward and Ædwen, seem to have removed to a place on the river Welland, near Spalding in Lincolnshire. They were apparently free rustics of the poorest class, simple, unlearned, upright folk, who taught their three children to say the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, and brought them up in the fear of God; other education they could give them none, and of worldly goods just as little. In the dreary fenland round the shores of the Wash agriculture and industry were almost unknown, and the population subsisted chiefly on whatever they found left behind by the waves on the long reaches of shining sand that lay exposed whenever the tide was out. As a boy Godric once wandered thus nearly three miles out to sea in search of food for himself and his parents; as he was retracing his steps, laden with part of a large fish which he had at length found dead upon the sand, he was overtaken by the returning tide; press onward as he might, the waves came surging higher and higher, first to his knees, then to his waist, then to his shoulders, till to the boy’s excited fancy their gurgling rose even above his head, and when at last he struggled to land with his burthen, it seemed to him that only a miracle had brought him through the waters in safety. Presently he began an independent life as a wandering chapman, trudging from village to village and selling small wares to country-folk as poor as himself. The lad was gifted with a wisdom and seriousness beyond his age; after some four years of this life he became associated with some merchants in the neighbouring towns; with them he visited the castles of the local nobles, the markets and fairs of the local trading centres, and at length made his way as far as S. Andrews in Scotland, and after that to Rome. He next, entering into partnership with some other young men, acquired a fourth share in the profits of one trading-vessel and half the ownership of another. Very soon his partners made him captain of the ship. In the long, blank days of his boyhood by the shore of the Wash he had learned to discern the face of both sea and sky; and his sturdy frame, steady hand, and keen observant eye, as well as his stedfast thoughtful temper, fitted him for a skilful seaman no less than for a successful merchant. The young sailor’s heart, however, was not wholly set upon money-getting. As he tramped over the fens with his pack upon his back he had been wont to soothe his weariness with the holy words of prayer and creed learnt at his mother’s knee; as he guided his bark through the storm, or outran the pirates who were ever on the look-out for such prey, he did not miss the lesson specially addressed to those who “go down to the sea in ships.” Wherever his business took him—Scotland, Britanny, Flanders, Denmark—he sought out the holy places of the land and made his offerings there. One of the places he visited most frequently was S. Andrews; and on his way back from thence he rarely failed to turn aside to S. Cuthbert’s old home at Holy Isle and his yet more lonely retreat at Farne, there to spend hours in ecstatic meditation upon the hermit-life which he was already longing to imitate. At last he took the cross and went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On his return, weary of independence, he became steward to a rich man who intrusted him with the whole management of his household; soon, however, he grew so disgusted with the thievery among the servants, which he saw but could not prevent, and with the master’s indifference to it, that he threw up his situation and went off on another pilgrimage, first to S. Gilles in Provence and then to Rome. He came home to his parents, but he could not stay; he must go back yet a third time, he told them, to the threshold of the Apostles; and this time his mother accompanied him. At a period when religious men of greater experience in this world’s affairs were pouring out heart-rending lamentations over the corruptions of Rome, it is touching to see that she still cast over this simple English rustic the spell which she had cast of old over Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop. It was in the land of Wilfrid and Benedict, in the wild Northumbria, with its long reaches of trackless moor and its mighty forests, scarcely penetrated save by the wild beasts, that Godric at last found refuge from the world. He sought it first at Carlisle, then a lonely outpost on the western borders of the moors, just beginning a new life after its conquest by William Rufus. His hopes of remaining there in obscurity were, however, defeated by the recognition of a kinsman, doubtless one of the Red King’s colonists, and he fled yet further into the wilderness. Weeks and months of lonely wandering through the forest brought him unexpectedly to an aged hermit at Wolsingham; there he remained nearly three years, tending the old man until his death; then a vision of S. Cuthbert sent Godric off again, first on another journey to Holy Land, and then to a hermitage in Eskdale near Whitby. Thence the persecution of the lord of the soil drove him to a surer refuge in the territory of S. Cuthbert. He settled for a while in Durham and there gave himself up to practical works of piety, frequenting the offices of devotion, giving alms out of his penury to those who were yet poorer than himself, and constantly sitting as a scholar among the children in the church of S. Mary. His kinsman at Carlisle had given him a Psalm-book; whether he ever learned actually to read it is not clear; but he already knew by heart a considerable part of the Psalter; at Durham he learned the whole; and the little book, which he had carried in all his wanderings, was to the end of his life his most cherished possession. When asked in later years how one of his fingers had grown crooked, he answered with a smile that it had become cramped with constantly grasping this book. Meanwhile he was seeking a place of retirement within easy distance of the chief object of his devotion—S. Cuthbert’s shrine. His choice was decided by the chance words of a shepherd to his comrade: “Let us go water our flocks at Finchale!” Godric offered the man his sole remaining coin—a farthing—to lead him to the spot, and saw at once that he had reached the end of his wanderings.

Even to-day the scene is wild and solemn enough, to the traveller who, making his way from Durham over the lonely country-side, suddenly dips down into a secluded hollow where the ruins of Finchale Priory stand on a low grassy ledge pressed close between the rushing stream of Wear and the dark wooded hills which, owing to the sharp bend made by the river, seem to close round it on every side. But in Godric’s day the place was wilder still. The road which now leads through the wood was a mere sheep-track worn by the feet of the flocks as they made their way down to the river; the site of the priory was a thicket of briars, thorns and nettles, and it was only on a narrow strip of rocky soil hanging over the water’s edge and thinly covered with scant herbage that the sheep could find a foothold and the hermit a place for his dwelling. His first abode was a cave scooped in the rock; later on he seems to have built himself a little hut with an oratory attached. A large stone served him at once for table and pillow; but only when utterly worn out with a long day’s toil in clearing away the thickets and preparing the soil for cultivation would he lie down for a few hours of quiet vigil rather than of sleep; and on moonlight nights the rustics of the country-side woke with a start at the ring of the hermit’s axe, echoing for miles through the woodland. The spirit of the earlier Northumbrian saints seems to breathe again in Godric’s ceaseless labour, his stern self-mortification, his rigid fasts, his nightly plunges into the Wear, where he would stand in the hollow of the rocks, up to his neck in the stream, singing Psalms all through the winter nights, while the snow fell thick on his head or the waters froze around him. With the fervour of the older asceticism he had caught too its poetic tenderness. As he wandered through forest after forest from Carlisle to the Tees he had found like S. Guthlac of old that “he who denies himself the converse of men wins the converse of birds and beasts and the company of angels.” Noxious reptiles lay passive beneath his feet as he walked along and crawled harmlessly about him as he lay on the bare ground at night; “the hissing of a viper scared him no more than the crowing of a cock.” The woods of Finchale were thronged with wild beasts of every kind; on his first arrival he was confronted by a wolf of such enormous size that he took it for a fiend in wolf’s shape, and the impression was confirmed when at the sign of the Cross the animal lay down for a moment at his feet and then slunk quietly away. The toads and vipers which swarmed along the river-side played harmlessly about the floor of his hut, and basked in the glow of his fire or nestled between his feet, till finding that they disturbed his devotions he gently bade them depart, and was at once obeyed. A stag browsing upon the young shoots of the trees in his little orchard suffered him to put a halter about its neck and lead it away into the forest. In the long hard frosts of the northern winter he would roam about seeking for frozen or starving animals, carry them home in his arms and restore them to warmth and animation at his fire. Bird and beast sought shelter from the huntsman in the hermit’s cell; one stag which he had hidden from the followers of Bishop Ralf came back day after day to be petted and caressed. Amid the silence of the valley, broken only by the rustling of the wind through the trees, the ripple of the stream over its rocky bed, and the chirping of the birds who had probably given their name to the “Finches-haugh,” strains of angel-harps and angel-voices sounded in the hermit’s ears; and the Virgin-Mother came down to teach him how to sing to her in his own English tongue. As the years went on Godric ceased to shrink from his fellow-men; his mother, his sister, came to dwell near him in religious retirement; a little nephew was admitted to tend his cow. Some of the younger monks of Durham, among them the one to whom we owe the record of Godric’s life, were the devoted attendants of his extreme age; while from the most distant quarters men of all ranks flocked to seek counsel and guidance in every variety of circumstances, temporal and spiritual, from one whom not only all Durham but almost all England looked upon as a saint and a prophet.[199]

It was in 1122—two years after the wreck of the White Ship—that Godric settled at Finchale, and he dwelt there sixty years. He is the last of the old English saints; his long life, beginning probably before the Conqueror’s death and ending only seven years before that of Henry II., is a link between the religious life of the earlier England which had passed away and that of the newer England which was arising in its place. The spiritual side of the revival was in truth closely connected with its national side. All the foreign influences which the Norman conquest had brought to bear upon the English Church had failed to stamp out her intensely national character; nay, rather, she was already beginning to lead captive her conquerors. One of the most striking signs of the times was the renewal of reverence for those older English saints whose latest successor was striving to bury himself in the woodlands of S. Cuthbert’s patrimony. Normans and English hushed their differences before the grave of the Confessor; Lanfranc was forced to acknowledge the sanctity of Ælfheah. At Canterbury itself the memory not only of Lanfranc but even of Anselm was still eclipsed by that of Dunstan. The very changes introduced by Norman prelates or Norman patrons, their zeal for discipline or their passion for architectural display, worked in the same direction. It was in the old minster of S. Werburg that Earl Hugh of Chester had placed the Benedictine colony whose settlement helped to bring about the appointment of Anselm as primate; it was in honour of another early Mercian saint, Milburg, that Roger of Shrewsbury reared his abbey at Wenlock. Bishop Richard of London planted the Austin canons at Chiche over the shrine of S. Osyth; Bishop Roger of Salisbury planted them at Oxford over that of S. Frideswide. The foundation of a bishop’s see at Ely brought a fresh lustre to the glory of S. Etheldreda; and the matchless church at Durham on which two of the very worldliest and worst of Norman prelates, William of S. Calais and Ralf Flambard, lavished all the splendour that art could devise or wealth procure, was one vast monument to the honour of S. Cuthbert. Literary activity was re-awakened by a like impulse. Two successive precentors of Canterbury, Osbern and Eadmer, had already worked up into more elaborate biographies the early memorials of S. Dunstan. Eadmer’s best inspiration came to him indeed from a nearer source; his most valuable work is the history of his own time, which he grouped, as in a picture, around the central figure of his own master, Anselm. It was doubtless from that master that he had learnt a breadth of sympathy which extended far beyond his local associations at Canterbury. The saints of the rival archbishopric, Wilfrid and Oswald, found in him a new biographer. In the northern province, Simeon and his fellow-monks were busy at Durham with the story of their own church and its patron, Cuthbert. In the south, again, Faricius, the Italian abbot of Abingdon, was writing a life of S. Ealdhelm; while almost every church of importance in central and southern England was throwing open its archives to the eager researches, and contributing its memorials of early Mercian and West-Saxon saints to swell the hagiological collections of a young monk at Ealdhelm’s own Malmesbury.

There was one cathedral monastery in the west of England where the traditions of a larger historical sentiment had never died out. The scriptorium at Worcester had been for more than a century the depository of the sole contemporary edition of the English Chronicle;[200] and there alone the national history continued to be recorded in the national tongue down to the early years of Henry I. In the middle of his reign the monks of Peterborough, probably in consequence of the loss of their own records in a fire which destroyed their abbey in 1116, borrowed a copy of the Chronicle from Worcester, and wrote it out afresh for their own use, with additions from local history and other sources. It is only in their version that the earliest Chronicle of Worcester has been preserved to us. But they did more than transcribe the story of the past. When the copyist had brought his work down to the latest event of his own day—the sinking of the White Ship in 1120—another scribe carried on the annals of Peterborough and of England for ten more years, in the native speech of the land; and when he laid down his pen it was taken up by yet another English writer whose notices of contemporary history, irregular and fragmentary though they are, still cast a gleam of light across the darkness of the “nineteen winters” which lie between the death of the first King Henry and the coming of the second.[201]

Precious as it is to us, however, this English chronicle-work at Peterborough was a mere survival. Half its pathetic interest indeed springs from the fact that it stands utterly alone; save in that one abbey in the Fens, English had ceased to be a written tongue; the vernacular literature of England was dead. If the reviving national sentiment was to find a literary expression which could exercise any lasting and widespread influence, the vehicle must be not English but Latin. This was the work now taken up by the historical school of Worcester. Early in the twelfth century a Worcester monk named Florence made a Latin version of the Chronicle. Unhappily, he infused into his work a violent party spirit, and overlaid the plain brief statements of the annals with a mass of interpolations, additions and alterations, whose source it is impossible to trace, and which, adopted only too readily by later writers, have gone far to bring our early history into what until a very recent time seemed well-nigh hopeless confusion. But the very extent of his influence proves how true was the instinct which led him—patriot of the most narrow, insular, exaggerated type, as the whole tone of his work shows him to have been—to clothe the ancient vernacular annals in a Latin dress, in the hope of increasing their popularity. If English history has in one way suffered severely at his hands, it owes him a debt of gratitude nevertheless upon another ground. While the last English chronicle lay isolated and buried in the scriptorium at Peterborough, it was through the Latin version of Florence that the national and literary tradition of the school of Worcester made its way throughout the length and breadth of the land, and inspired a new generation of English historians. Simeon of Durham, copying out and piecing together the old Northumbrian annals which had gone on growing ever since Bæda’s death, no sooner met with the chronicle of Florence than he made it the foundation of his own work for the whole space of time between Ælfred’s birth in 848 and Florence’s own death in 1118; and from Simeon it was handed down, through the work of another local historian, to be incorporated in the great compilation of Roger of Howden.[202] Henry of Huntingdon, who soon after 1125, at the instigation of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, began to collect materials for a history of the English, may have learnt from the same source his method of dealing with the English Chronicle, though he seems, naturally enough, to have chiefly used the copy which lay nearest to his own hand at Peterborough. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of England, a finer and subtler intellect than that of either Florence or Simeon or Henry had caught the historical impulse in an old West-Saxon monastery.

William of Malmesbury was born some three or four years before the Conqueror’s death,[203] in or near the little town in Wiltshire from which his surname was derived. One of his parents seems to have been Norman, the other English.[204] They early destined their son to a literary career; “My father,” he says, “impressed upon me that if I turned aside to other pursuits, I should but waste my life and imperil my good name. So, remembering the recommendation to make a virtue of necessity, I persuaded myself, young as I was, to acquire a willing taste for that to which I could not in honour show myself disinclined.” It is plain that submission to the father’s wishes cost no great effort to the boy. As he tells us himself, “Reading was the pleasure whose charms won me in my boyhood and grew with my growing years.”[205] His lot was cast in a pleasant place for one of such a disposition. Fallen though it was from its ancient greatness, some remnants of its earlier culture still hung about Malmesbury abbey. The place owed its rise to an Irish recluse, Maidulf, who, in the seventh century sought retirement from the world in the forest which at that time covered all the northern part of Wiltshire. Maidulf, however, was a scholar as well as a saint; and in those days, when Ireland was the light of the whole western world, no forest, were it never so gloomy and impenetrable, could long hide an Irish scholar from the eagerness of the disciples who flocked to profit by his teaching. The hermitage grew into a school, and the school into a religious community. Its second abbot, Ealdhelm, is one of the most brilliant figures in the history of early West-Saxon learning and culture. The architecture of Wessex owed its birth to the churches which he reared along the edge of the forest-tract of Dorset and Wiltshire, from the seat of his later bishopric at Sherborne to his early home at Malmesbury; its Latin literature was moulded by the learning which he brought back from Archbishop Theodore’s school at Canterbury; and the whole ballad literature of southern England sprang from his English songs. The West-Saxon kings, from Ine to Eadgar, showered their benefactions upon the house of one whom they were proud to call their kinsman. It escaped as by a miracle from the destruction of the Danish wars; and in the Confessor’s reign its wealth and fame were great enough to tempt the diocesan bishop, Herman of Ramsbury, into a project for making it the seat of his bishopric. Darker times began with the coming of the first Norman abbot, Turold, whose stern and warlike character, more befitting a soldier than a monk, soon induced the king to transfer him to Peterborough, as a check upon the English outlaws and their Danish allies in the camp of refuge at Ely. His successor at Malmesbury, Warin, alienated for his own profit the lands and the treasures which earlier benefactors had lavished upon the abbey, and showed his contempt for the old English abbots by turning the bones of every one of them, except Ealdhelm, out of their resting-places on either side the high altar, and thrusting them into a corner of one of the lesser churches of the town, with the mocking comment: “Whosoever is mightiest among them may help the rest!” William’s boyhood, however, fell in happier days. About the time of his birth Warin died, and the next abbot, Godfrey, set himself to a vigorous work of material, moral and intellectual reform which must have been in full career when William entered the abbey-school.[206] The bent of the lad’s mind showed itself in the subjects which he chose for special study out of the general course taught in the school. “Logic, which serves to give point to our discourse, I tasted only with my ears; to physic, which cures the diseases of our bodies, I paid somewhat closer heed. But I searched deeply into the various branches of moral philosophy, whose dignity I hold in reverence, because it is self-evident to those who study it, and disposes our minds to virtuous living;—and especially into history, which, preserving in a pleasing record the manners of times gone by, by example excites its readers to follow that which is good and shun that which is evil.”[207] Young as he was, his studious habits gained him the confidence of the abbot. Godfrey’s darling scheme was the formation of a library; and when at length he found time and means to attempt its execution, it was William who became his most energetic assistant. “Methinks I have a right to speak of this work,” he tells us with pardonable pride, “for herein I came behind none of my elders, nay, if it be not boastful to say so, I far outstripped them all. I rivalled the good abbot’s own diligence in collecting that pile of books; I did my utmost to help in his praiseworthy undertaking. May those who now enter into our labours duly cherish their fruits!”[208]