The Hermits by Charles Kingsley — Read

A PERSONAGE quite as interesting, though not as famous, as Cuthbert or Guthlac, is St. Godric; the hermit around whose cell rose the Priory of Finchale. 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 St. Giles's church, and gradually learnt by heart (he was no scholar) the whole Psalter. Then he had gone to St. 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 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," 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 Godric 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. " 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.