Mary Wellesley has narrated this article for you to listen to.
At a time when so many of us are experiencing some measure of isolation, it is hard to fathom the choice to live in extreme confinement in the middle of the urban bustle. But hermits were once unremarkable features of England’s cities.
The 13th-century traveller entering London from the north, at Cripplegate, would have walked within yards of a hermit’s cell. There were also cells at Aldgate, Bishops-gate, Temple Bar and Cornhill, as well as many others beyond the city limits.
These hermits — more properly called anchorites or anchoresses — permanently enclosed themselves in cells attached to churches in order to live a life of prayer and contemplation. (The word comes from the Greek anachorein, meaning ‘to retire or retreat’.) In their cells, anchorites lived a life of extraordinary restriction. They had a small window which looked on to the church, another which led on to a servant’s parlour (through which they could receive food and get rid of waste) and a third on to the churchyard or street, from which they could dispense spiritual counsel. They were otherwise confined to a single room for what could be decades.
Life as an anchorite began with a death. After processing from the church as the choir sang ‘In paradisum deducant te angeli’ — traditionally sung as a body is conveyed to a grave — the recludensus (novice recluse) would arrive at the cell and climb into a ready-dug grave, where they were sprinkled with earth — ashes to ashes, dust to dust — before the door of the cell was bolted. When they died, they would likely be buried in this very grave.
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