BCD Special Report on
Historic Churches
19
th annual edition
39
The chancel of St Nicholas Church, Compton, Surrey: the upper part of this unique two-tier chancel is reached from a stair inside the anchorhold on the right (south side).
The window of the anchorhold on the north side can be seen bottom left, next to a chair.
Constructing the past
Drawing on evidence available to her in the
mid-1980s, based partly on the invaluable
tabulated lists of cells in Rotha Mary Clay’s
The Hermits and Anchorites of England (1914),
Ann K Warren in her Anchorites and their
Patrons in Medieval England (1985) identified
at least 780 recorded English recluses on 601
sites.� Warren also proposed that more English
women than men were enclosed at every stage
of the period, detailing 414 female solitaries,
201
males and 165 of unknown gender. Warren
located anchorholds in all but four counties of
medieval England (Buckinghamshire, Rutland,
Cumberland and Westmorland), noting that
some counties demonstrated evidence of strong
anchoritic identities, including Oxfordshire,
Sussex, Worcestershire and Hampshire,
during the 12th and 13th centuries, and
Lincolnshire, Middlesex (including London)
and Norfolk, throughout the Middle Ages.
Some counties may have demonstrated marked
anchoritic links only at certain times, as with
Yorkshire, where anchoritism appears to have
declined by the end of the 15th century.
The vocation began as a largely rural
phenomenon, and for most of the medieval
period rural anchorholds predominated.
However, the number of English urban
anchorholds steadily increased until the
16
th century by which time, as Roberta
Gilchrist argues, the anchorhold had become
‘
an integral element of the ecclesiastical
topography of medieval towns’.⁴
Yet detailed information about the
gendered identity, geographical distribution
and chronological development of English
anchoritism is still emerging. Warren’s and
Clay’s statistical picture is already changing as
new sites and solitaries are discovered. Edward
A Jones, at the University of Exeter, is currently
revising Clay’s 1914 lists of solitaries, and his
investigations have resulted in the publication
of updated lists for medieval Bedfordshire,
Hertfordshire and Huntingdonshire which,
when combined, feature 50 solitaries compared
with Clay’s 24.⁵ How the new data will
contribute to our understanding of anchoritism
is, as yet, unknown, but it need not imply
radical change in anchoritism’s gendered,
geographical or chronological make-up.
Warren’s original depiction of the vocation
as ‘a wide-ranging and far-reaching religious
phenomenon: many anchorites all over the
country… Not one in every parish, but in
many’, may yet remain true, even if the vocation
appears to have been more widespread than
either Clay or Warren could have imagined.⁶
Our knowledge about anchorites is based
on two broad kinds of evidence: archaeological
and documentary. Neither kind of evidence
affords us the objective ‘truth’ about how
anchorites actually lived, but instead offers us
a series of ideological pictures, or subjective
‘
truths’ about the vocation. Some of these
pictures do indeed construct the medieval
anchorhold as a solitary death cell, in which
the recluse endures simply as a living corpse,
locked up in death-like darkness. Yet others
reveal the less critically prominent, but equally
valid, depiction of a busy woman who willingly
interrupts her devotions to be of spiritual
service to a steady stream of visitors. As the
vocation was never standardised and never
constituted a religious order in itself (although
members of religious orders could, and did,
become recluses), it would therefore be unwise
to make wide-sweeping generalisations about
anchoritism on the basis of individual cells,
An illustration of the anchorhold at Hartlip, Kent
from Rotha Mary Clay’s
The Hermits and Anchorites
of England
,
published in 1914 (Photo: PM Johnston)
