Baring-Gould’s sources: Anglican and Monastic Martyrologies, Molanus and the Bollandists. Authorities: — A life by Reginald of Durham, written at the request of S. Ailred of Rievaulx, whilst S. Godrick was still alive, and presented to S. Ailred. It must have been written before 1166, the year in which S. Ailred died. This life, from an early copy in the British Museum, has been published by the Surtees Society, Durham, 1845. Another life, also by a contemporary, Galfred monk of Finchale, derived mostly from Reginald. The following life is condensed from the charming sketch of S. Godrick by Mr. C. Kingsley in “ The Hermits.”] In a loop of the river Wear, near Durham, there settled in the days of Bishop Flambard, between 1099 and 1128, a man whose parentage and history was for many years unknown to the good folks of the neighbourhood. He had come, it seems, from a hermitage in Eskdale, in the parish of Whitby, whence he had been driven by the Percys, lords of the soil. He had gone to Durham, become the doorkeeper of S. Giles’s Church, and gradually learnt by heart (he was no scholar) the whole Psalter. Then he had gone to S. Mary’s Church, where, as was the fashion of the times, there was a children’s school; and, listening to the little ones at their lessons, picked up such S. Godrick.
…hymns and prayers as he thought would suffice his spiritual wants. And then, by leave of the bishop, he had gone away into the woods, and devoted himself to the solitary life in Finchale.
Buried in the woods and crags of the “Royal Park,7' as it was then called, which swarmed with every kind of game, there was a little flat meadow, rough with sweet-gale and bramble and willow, beside a teeming salmon-pool. Great wolves haunted the woods, but Godrick cared nought for them; and the shingles swarmed with snakes, — probably only the harmless collared snakes of wet meadows, but reputed, as all snakes are by the vulgar, venomous; but he did not object to become “ the companion of serpents and poisonous asps.7' He handled them, caressed them, let them lie by the fire in swarms on winter nights, in the little cave which he had hollowed in the ground and thatched with turf. Men told soon how the snakes obeyed him; how two especially huge ones used to lie twined about his legs; till after many years, annoyed by their importunity, he turned them all gently out of doors, with solemn adjurations never to return, and they, of course, obeyed.
His austerities knew no bounds. He lived on roots and berries, flowers and leaves; and when the good folk found him out, and put gifts of food near his cell,. he carried them up to the crags above, and, offering them solemnly up to the God who feeds the ravens when they call on him, left them there for the wild birds. He watched, fasted, and scourged himself, and wore always a hair shirt and an iron cuirass. He sat, night after night, even in mid-winter, in the cold Wear, the waters of which had hollowed out a rock near by into a natural bath, and afterwards in a barrel sunk in the floor of a little chapel of wattle, which he built and dedicated to the blessed Virgin Mary. He tilled a scrap of ground, and ate the grain from it, mingled with ashes. He kept his food till it was decayed before he tasted it; and led a life, the records of which fill the reader with astonishment, not only at the man’s iron strength of will, but at the iron strength of the constitution which could support such hardships, in such a climate, for a single year.
A strong and healthy man must Godrick have been, to judge from the accounts (there are two, both written by eye-witnesses) of his personal appearance — a man of great breadth of chest and strength of arm; black-haired, hooknosed, deep-browed, with flashing grey eyes; altogether a personable and able man, who might have done much work and made his way in many lands. But what his former life had been he would not tell. The prologue to the Harleian manuscript (which the learned editor, Mr. Stevenson, believes to be an early edition of Reginald’s own composition) confesses that Reginald, compelled by Ailred of Rievaulx, tried in vain for a long while to get the hermit’s story from him. “You wish to write my life?” he said. “Know then that Godrick’s life is such as this: — Godrick, at first a gross rustic, an unclean liver, an usurer, a cheat, a perjurer, a flatterer, a wanderer, pilfering and greedy; now a dead flea, a decayed dog, a yile worm; not a hermit, but a hypocrite; not a solitary, but a gad-about in mind; a devourer of alms, dainty over good things, greedy and negligent, lazy and snoring, ambitious and prodigal, one who is not worthy to serve others, and yet every day beats and scolds those who serve him; this, and worse than this, you may write of Godrick.” “Then he was silent as one indignant,” says Reginald, “and I went off in some confusion,” and the grand old man was left to himself and to his God.
The ecclesiastical Boswell dared not mention the subject again to his hero for several years, though he came often from Durham to visit him, and celebrate mass for him in his little chapel. After some years, however, he approached the matter again, and the old man began to answer questions, and Reginald delighted to listen and note down till he had finished, he says, that book of his life and miracles; 1 and after a while brought it to the saint, and falling on his knees, begged him to bless, in the name of God, and for the benefit of the faithful, the deeds of a certain religious man, who had suffered much for God in this life, which he (Reginald) had composed accurately. The old man perceived that he himself was the subject, blessed the book with solemn words, and bade Reginald conceal it till his death, warning him that a time would come when he should suffer rough and bitter things on account of that book, from those who envied him. That prophecy, says Reginald, came to pass; but how, or why, he does not tell.
The story which Godrick told was wild and beautiful; and though we must not depend too much on the accuracy of the old man’s recollections, or on the honesty of Reginald's report, who would naturally omit all incidents which were made against his hero's perfection, it is worth listening to, as a vivid sketch of the doings of a real human being, in that misty distance of the Early Middle Age.
He was born, he said, at Walpole, in Norfolk, on the old Roman sea-bank, between the Wash and the deep Fens. His father's name was ^Edlward; his mother’s, ^Edwen — “ the Keeper of Blessedness," and “ the Friend of Blessedness/' as Reginald translates them — poor and 1 The earlier one; that of the Harleian MSS., which (Mr. Stevenson thinks) was twice afterwards expanded and decorated by him. pious folk; and, being a sharp boy, he did not take to field-work, but preferred wandering the Fens as a pedlar, first round the villages, then, as he grew older, to castles and to towns, buying and selling — what, Reginald does not tell us: but we should be glad to know. One day he had a great deliverance. Wandering along the great tide-flats near Spalding and the old Well-stream, in search of waifs and strays, of wreck or eatables, he saw three porpoises stranded far out upon the banks. Two were alive, and the boy took pity on them (so he said) and let them be: but one was dead, and off it (in those days poor folk ate anything) he cut as much flesh and blubber as he could carry, and toiled back towards the high- tide mark. But whether he lost his way among the banks, or whether he delayed too long, the tide came in on him up to his knees, his waist, his chin, and at last, at times, over his head. The boy made the sign of the cross, and struggled on valiantly a full mile through the sea, like a brave lad, never loosening his hold of the precious porpoise-meat till he reached the shore at the very spot from which he had set out.
As he grew, his pedlar journeys became longer. Repeating to himself, as he walked, the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer — his only lore — he walked for four years through Lindsey; then went to S. Andrew’s, in Scotland; after that, for the first time, to Rome. Then the love of a wandering sea life came on him, and he sailed with his wares round the east coasts; not merely as a pedlar, but as a sailor himself, he went to Denmark and to Flanders, buying and selling, till he owned (in what port we are not told, but probably in Lynn or Wisbeach) half one merchant ship, and the quarter of another. A crafty steersman he was, a wise weather-prophet, a shipman stout in body and in heart.
But gradually there grew on the sturdy merchantman the thought that there was something more to be done in the world than making money. He became a pious man. He worshipped at S. Cuthbert [bishop of Lindisfarne (d. 687)]’s hermitage at Fame, and there, he said afterwards, he longed for the first time for the rest and solitude of the hermitage. He had been sixteen years a seaman now, with a seaman’s temptations — it may be (as he told Reginald plainly) with some of a seaman's vices. He may have done things which lay heavy on his conscience. But it was getting time to think about his soul. He took the cross, and went off to Jerusalem, as many a man did then, under difficulties incredible, dying, too of ten, on the way. But Godrick not only got safe thither, but went out of his way home by Spain to visit the sanctuary of S. James of Compostella. Then he appears as steward to a rich man in the Fens, whose sons and young retainers, after the lawless fashion of those Anglo-Norman times, rode out into the country round to steal the peasants’ sheep and cattle, skin them on the spot, and pass them off to the master of the house as venison taken in hunting. They ate and drank, roystered and rioted, like most other young Normans; and vexed the staid soul of Godrick, whose nose told him plainly enough, whenever he entered the kitchen, that what was roasting had never come off a deer. In vain he protested and warned them, getting only insults for his pains. At last he told his lord. The lord, as was to be expected, cared nought about the matter. Let the lads rob the English villains: for what other end had their grandfathers conquered the land? Godrick punished himself, as he could not punish them, for the unwilling share which he had had in the wrong. It may be that he, too, had eaten of that stolen food. So away he went into France, and down the Rhone, on pilgrimage to, the hermitage of S. Giles, the patron saint of the wild deer; and then on to Rome a second time, and back to his poor parents in the Fens.
And now follows a strange and beautiful story. AH love of seafaring and merchandise had left the deephearted sailor. The heavenly and the eternal, the salvation of his sinful soul, had become all in all to him; and yet he could not rest in the little dreary village on the Roman bank. He would go on pilgrimage again. Then his mother would go likewise, and see S. Peter’s church, and the pope, and all the wonders of Rome. So off they set on foot; and when they came to ford or ditch, Godrick carried his mother on his back, until they came to London town. And there HSdwen took off her shoes, and vowed out of devotion to the holy apostles Peter and Paul to walk barefoot to Rome and barefoot back again. Now just as they went out of London, on the Dover road, there met them in the way the loveliest maiden they had ever seen, who asked to bear them company in their pilgrimage. And when they agreed, she walked with them, sat with them, and talked with them with superhuman courtesy and grace; and when they turned into an inn, she ministered to them herself, and washed and kissed their feet, and then lay down with them to sleep, after the simple fashion of those days. But a holy awe of her, as of some Saint or Angel, fell on the wild seafarer; and he never, so he used to aver, thought of her for a moment save as a sister. Never did either ask the other who they were, and whence they came; and Godrick reported (but this was long after the event) that no one of the company of pilgrims could see that fair maid, save he and his mother alone. So they came safe from Rome, and back to London town; and when they were at the place outside Southwark, where the fair maid had met them first, S. Godrick.
she asked permission to leave them, for she “must go to her own land, where she had a tabernacle of rest, and dwelt in the house of her God.” And then, bidding them bless God, who had brought them safe over the Alps and across the sea, and all along that weary road, she went on her way, and they saw her no more Then with this fair mysterious face clinging to his memory, and it may be never leaving it, Godrick took his mother safe home, and delivered her to his father, and bade them both after awhile farewell, and wandered across England to Penrith, and hung about the churches there, till some kinsmen of his recognised him, and gave him a psalter (he must have taught himself to read upon his travels), which he learnt by heart. Then, wandering ever in search of solitude, he went into the woods and found a cave, and passed his time therein in prayer, living on green herbs and wild honey, acorns and crabs; and when he went about to gather food, he fell down on his knees every few yards and said a prayer, and rose and went on. After awhile he wandered on again, until at Wolsingham, in Durham, he met with another holy hermit, who had been a monk at Durham, living in a cave in forests in which no man dare dwell, so did they swam with packs of wolves; and there the two good men dwelt together till the old hermit fell sick, and was like to die. Godrick nursed him, and sat by him, to watch for his last breath. For the same longing had come over him which came over Marguerite d’Angouleme when she sat by the dying bed of her favourite maid of honour — to see if the spirit, when it left the body, were visible, and what kind of thing it was: whether, for instance, it was really like the little naked babe which is seen in mediaeval illuminations flying out of the mouths of dying men. But, worn out with watching, Godrick could not keep from sleep. All but desparing of his desire, he turned to the dying man, and spoke, says Reginald, some such words as these: — “O spirit! who art diffused in that body in the likeness of God, and art still inside that breast, I adjure thee by the Highest, that thou leave not the prison of this thine habitation while I am overcome by sleep, and know not of it.” And so he fell asleep: but when he woke, the old hermit lay motionless and breathless. Poor Godrick wept, called on the dead man, called on God; his simple heart was set on seeing this one thing. And behold, he was consoled in a wondrous fashion. For about the third hour of the day the breath returned. Godrick hung over him, watching his lips. Three heavy sighs he drew, then a shudder, another sigh: and then (so Godrick was believed to have said in after years) he saw the spirit flit.
What it was like, he did not like to say, for the most obvious reason — that he saw nothing, and was an honest man. A monk teased him much to impart to him this great discovery. Godrick answered wisely enough, that “no man could perceive the substance of the spiritual soul.”
Another pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre did Godrick make before he went to the hermitage in Eskdale, and settled finally at Finchale. And there about the hills of Judaea he found hermits dwelling in rock-caves as they had dwelt since the time of S. Jerome [translator of the Bible into Latin (d. 420)]. He washed himself, and his hair shirt and little cross, in the sacred waters of the Jordan, and returned, after incredible suffering, to become the saint of Finchale.
At Finchale S. Godrick died on the octave of the Ascenfor in that year Easter Day fell on April 5th. His hermitage became, in due time, a stately priory, with its community of monks, who loved the memory of May 2i.] S. Godrick.
their holy father Godrick. The place is all ruinate now; the memory of S. Godrick gone; and not one in ten thousand, perhaps, who visit those crumbling walls beside the rushing Wear, has heard of the sailor-saint, and his mother, and that fair maid who tended them on their pilgrimage.
