The Anchoress of Shere, page 6
Christine spent more and more time with her priest, who himself struggled to read, comprehend, learn and then explain the Ancrene Riwle, the guidance for a solitary life of contemplation. Initially, he described her future life as climbing four rungs of a ladder. The first involved lessons on the Holy Scriptures and the writings of the holy fathers, beginning with the lives of the saints. Then she would be taught to meditate on these lessons. Prayer would be enhanced by this lengthy meditation. And the final rung was contemplation, a state to which the priest had never himself aspired. He felt acutely that he lacked what St. Gregory called the “art of arts”-that of guiding souls. He knew he could barely guide himself; Christine would eventually need to be instructed by a much higher authority than his own.
They discussed the means by which one enters a state of true contemplation, the highest form of union with God that the soul on earth can attain, the wondrous and mysterious act that involved the total occupation of the mind and the will with the thought of God. Christine had to substitute the love of self with the love of God, only then was union between God and her soul possible in this mortal life. Father Peter explained all this as he tried earnestly to grapple with the most powerful but enigmatic tenet of Catholic theology.
An anchoress, he insisted, must return Godwards truly to fulfil the purpose of her creation. She might achieve mystical ecstasy only by contemplating the three levels of the knowledge of God, via His creation of nature, by reading His scriptures, and by understanding God as Himself, in His manhood and Godhead.
The priest warned Christine that the path would be very hard and that Christ was a jealous master. And there would be many difficulties and temptations beyond her studies and the conflicts of her inner life. A woman searching for the truth on her own was anathema to the Church hierarchy, because men ruled the Church, men decided on the paths to salvation. Individual pursuit of God undermined the very foundations of Christendom, the centralised control of Rome. Female saints there were, he said, but usually they had been canonised long after their martyrdom. Respected nuns, usually of noble birth, there were also, but Christine refused to consider a communal route to God.
In the beginning the priest tried to overcome the girl’s self-abasement about her lack of schooling, but soon her quick mind outpaced her tutor’s. A little defensively, he parried her more penetrating questions by asserting the authority of more learned men over her intuitive insights.
Christine asked, “Is it not possible to learn from the Holy Ghost, and to confirm, in dedication, prayer and good works, a knowledge which the layman might know and yet the priest does not-what the fishermen of Galilee did know and the doctor of theology in Oxford today might not? Is it not possible that lovers of eternity can be taught by the doctor within? I have been taught that St. Francis mistrusted learning as a source of pride; is that not so, Father?”
“Is that not your own pride speaking, Christine?” he replied rather hastily.
Christine pressed her tutor on the central Christian principle of free will. She understood that man could choose between good and evil. God allowed evil, so that mankind could be tested, the priest explained. But was there really free will, if so much was predetermined, so many prophecies to fulfil, she asked. “What if Joshua had chosen to ignore the trumpets at the walls of Jericho?” she asked again. “Or if Abraham and Isaac had raised holy arguments against human sacrifice? Could the Holy Mother have refused to go to Bethlehem?”
Father Peter struggled to refute her logic. Sometimes, though, he laughed at her innocent humour. Once he explained that man was a little lower than the angels. Immediately she said, “Then the angels should reform themselves, and quickly too.”
At other times he realised that Christine was deliberately teasing him. When they were discussing abstinence, she asked, “Why did God believe the only humans worthy of salvation in the Flood were a family of winemakers?”
Yet the priest was shaken, nonetheless, by her rapid advances in both vocabulary and perception. They confirmed the power of her vision, perhaps, but he knew that if such changes were discussed in the parish she could be accused of witchcraft, and so might he. Occasionally she claimed to hear voices, and once or twice he reprimanded her, gently to be sure, for referring to herself in the third person. Sometimes he was not sure whether her fervour bordered on madness, but her calmness of spirit sometimes calmed his, too. Frequently he fretted about her, realising that much of what she said to him was arguably heretical. He thus encouraged her enclosure in a place where he could protect her from herself and, more importantly, from her Church.
“Remember how often do shrews find themselves on the ungodly end of the ducking stools,” he warned. “Remember how Mistress Le Walshe from Gomshall was taken by the bailiff and her tongue cut from her mouth for speaking out against the Church. She was fortunate. Think on them who have burned in the pit for saying that the Holy Scriptures should be put into our vulgar speech, not Latin.”
Christine always listened attentively to the priest’s strictures, but knew without doubt that she was embarked on a righteous path.
For nearly two years Christine prepared for her seclusion, assisted by the advice and prayers of Father Peter. As before, she continued to help in the fields and around her father’s house, but she laughed no more with other maidens, nor did she dance with the young men on feast days. Every day she attended church to learn scripture, at first by rote. Slowly she learned her letters in English, and even more slowly began to read a little Latin. Father Peter was not himself a scholar and had to work diligently to school himself for his lessons with Christine.
Her education was augmented by occasional retreats at a Dominican friary at Guldenford. It had been founded by Eleanor of Provence, widow of Henry III, in memory of her young grandson, who had died in the royal castle by the bridge across the golden sands which gave the town its name. Because there were no self-governing nunneries in any of the Hundreds of Surrey, Queen Eleanor had requested that the friary offer guidance to pious women, and so a small convent was established nearby. Father Peter was acquainted with the Abbess Euphemia and introduced Christine to her. It did not take long for the abbess to recognise the piety and intelligence of the humble village girl and Christine was offered a place in the convent, where the sisters soon came to accept that her vocation was that of a solitary.
Christine learned dutifully the offices and devotions of the Church and Father Peter explained in detail the long and careful sequence of prayers. He rehearsed her nearly every day in the timetable of the devotions she would have to perform when she entered her cell: “When you rise at dawn, make the sign of the Cross, saying the Paternoster, then begin at once the Veni Creator Spiritus, kneeling at your bench and bowing forward. Stay thus throughout this hymn and for the versicle ‘Send Forth Thy Spirit.’ Next, repeat the Paternoster and a Credo while you are dressing…”
And so her daily programme of devotions was planned, interspersed by observation of the Mass and occasionally the sacrament of communion.
Father Peter explained to Christine how lenient and at the same time how strict an anchoress’s observations could be. Certain high-born women had built elaborate shelters, almost tiny houses, adjoining their churches. They might have one or two maid-servants and could entertain visitors. Some even kept pet cats, he said. Others gossiped with their friends through a grille which faced the street.
Christine, however, resolutely chose one of the most austere rules that Christendom had concocted: no meat or fat unless gravely ill; no visitation through her grille except on strictly spiritual matters, although she was permitted to speak to family members on mundane issues of daily sustenance; but no other contact except for food, water, change of vestment or participation in communion. The priest would shave her head four times a year. But she foreswore the hedgehog skins, spiked belts and thorn adornments to wear next to her flesh or sleep on, as some zealots chose. She refused to scourge herself with nettles or whips to drive away temptation. God, she knew, was love, not pain. She had known pain enough; it was His love she sought.
Christine chose to clothe herself in a simple cap with a white veil instead of a wimple, and a plain dress of coarse flax. Her family would provide her food and clothes, and some church alms would be granted to sustain her. A small cell was built on St. James’s dank north wall where the sun never shone, and William helped with such woodwork as was necessary. The squint and quatrefoil were placed in the wall, with a few stones left aside for the enclosure ceremony.
It would be some decades before Guldenford would be designated as a suffragan or subsidiary bishopric, and therefore the dean did not have sufficient authority to approve the enclosure. So the Bishop of Winchester’s final approval was sought, and granted: “On the fourteenth day of the Kalends of August in the year of our Lord 1329, and in the seventh year of our consecration…I have sought fit to grant licence to the said Christine that she may be enclosed in the church at Shere in the manner of an Anchoress, so that, aside from public and worldly sights, she may be enabled to serve God more freely in every way, and, having resisted all opportunity for wantonness, may keep her heart undefiled by this world.”
He attached his bishop’s seal. And the next day, the day after her eighteenth birthday, Christine was sealed within the northern wall for life.
The words did not flow with ease, and Duval struggled with the muse for weeks. His writing was sometimes becoming a task to hate, not a pleasurable outlet for his passions, as in the past.
Duval’s congregation in Guildford was becoming more disenchanted, complaining that he was cold and distracted even when he finally stirred himself to visit a sick or troubled member of his flock, and his penances imposed during confession raised more than a few hackles. They had become onerous, almost bizarre. The bishop summoned him twice to counsel him: “a self-improvement programme” was the bishop’s precise phrase. Bishop Templeton had recently been an enthusiastic participant in a church administration course in New York, and so he talked sociology, not theology; management, not morality. The prelate was a passionate advocate of modernising to preserve the best of the old traditions. Duval suspected that the bishop’s real love was not God but sport; that he worshipped at the altar of the Marylebone Cricket Club. And Duval despised him for it, even though he could accept Lord Mancroft’s famous argument that the English, not being a spiritual people, had invented the game to give themselves at least some conception of eternity.
The bishop was a short, portly man, and Duval interpreted his superior’s dedication to the manly world of sport, albeit as a passive spectator, as a symptom of the small- man complex; “a Wisden Napoleon” Duval was pleased to observe in his diary. The priest found Templeton’s obsessions trifling and endured the counselling sessions with poor grace. Templeton, he thought, might have made a good, self-indulgent Anglican bishop, but he rated him poorly as a Catholic. His superior talked about theological possibilities, not faith; religion had become mere philosophy. The bishop would thus never comprehend his subordinate’s sense of spiritual mission, even if Duval deigned to try to explain it.
Nothing mattered to Duval except Christine, and she was slipping away from him. Yet there was little he could do. Duval felt utterly compelled to recreate her history, and that compulsion spurred on his faltering steps towards his literary antiphon.
1330
Christine’s first winter in her anchoress’s cell was the coldest Surrey had ever known. The oldest cottager in Shere, Ranulf the Miller, stiff with rheumatism at sixty-eight, swore to that. Yet despite the severity of the season, Sir Richard was not generous in granting permission for the villagers to gather kindling in the Hurtwood. Some of the sheep which had been brought from the North Downs perished from the cold, even when they were allowed to graze in the water-meadows of the valley. In January and February snow fell a foot deep on the hills and the Tillingbourne froze over. Even Christine accepted an extra coverlet and hide boots from her father, once Father Peter had given his leave.
William could see his daughter succumbing to the cold, and shared his concerns with the priest.
“The Holy Spirit can warm the heart, but not always the feet,” Father Peter told William. “She is attendant to all her devotions, but her health is not as strong as her will.”
“Cannot God’s mercy be extended to my child?” pleaded William. “The mercy of just one visit to our hearth, where fire and meat can heal her soonest? Margaret, my daughter at home, cannot bear to see her sister freezing in the wall.”
“Leave she cannot, William,” said Father Peter earnestly. “To permit her to leave her cell-unless to see a doctor when she is nearest death or for me to give a final sacrament-is beyond me, and the bishops. Were she to leave, only our Holy Father the Pope could grant her rights of return. You know that she cannot break her solemn vows. Would you have her excommunicated and her soul consumed in the fires of Hell? But she should take meat.” Father Peter’s face betrayed his concern for his charge. “She fasts without my leave and I have told her this.”
William replied sadly, “My wife or I do attend her every day after Matins. She takes her drege, the best mix of barley and oats that her mother can make. Some cheese, too, and pease porridge. And buttermilk she enjoys. Her salted beef she refuses. Fruit she asked for in the summer…such unhealthy food…and now she begs us bring roasted nuts. Speak to her, Father, on this matter. She will parley but little with me except to know a word or two of her brother and sister. I speak of matters spiritual, as is right, but sometimes her voice is weak…” William broke off, his anxiety about his daughter and yet his desire to do right by the Church all too evident.
The priest patted William’s hand. “I pray for her each day, Will, but she is in God’s heart. I must confess to you that she is much near to Him. I could not reach that grace that she possesses.”
“But, Father, must she die of cold to prove her grace?”
“If she dies, Will, no purgatory waits for her. See the Doom painting, the Final Judgement, painted there above our church door? Ascend she will to God’s right hand. She will be free of our earthly cares.”
“Aye, Father,” said William, “and free of one mighty care-Mistress de Kempis of Peaslake.”
Father Peter smiled. Anna de Kempis, a wealthy widow, was renowned in the villages of the Hurtwood, and beyond, because she claimed to have the “gift of tears,” the ability to feel and share Christ’s final agonies on the Cross. At any time this gift might be bestowed, and she would howl and scream and writhe on the floor. Her frequent holy fits did not endear Mistress de Kempis to others. She had recently journeyed to a holy shrine in France and, it was said, nearly all her fellow pilgrims tarried in Dover for a week awaiting another ship to avoid the screamer. And when she was not travelling, she sought out holy men and women in her locality.
“Anna de Kempis is touched by God even when she roars. It is not for us to judge His ways,” Father Peter said mildly.
“Forgive my blasphemy, Father.” William humbly lowered his head. “But I judge her touched by the moon. She wails and splutters to my Christine, and quotes scripture by the hour at her grille. The Devil can tempt us in holy guise, for the fallen angel knows his Bible well. This brings harm to Christine’s mind and her devotions, I fear. How can she contemplate when the howlin’ of Mistress de Kempis fills church and village? This is purgatory at our door!”
“Hush, Will.” Father Peter’s hand now returned to his distraught parishioner. “Do you want to be dragged to the bishop’s court or be burnt, when livin’, in the pit for heretics? Go speak to Christine, while I attend to Mass. It is too cold to speak for long in this yard.”
William stomped his feet to regain some warmth and trudged through the snow to the north wall of the church. Stopping at the bulge in the wall which was the cell, he tapped on the small trapdoor.
“’Tis I, William. Please slide the grille.”
Christine pushed the grille open and looked through the black cloth with a white cross in the centre which protected her from the prying eyes of those who sought her counsel.
“Pull the curtain aside, Christine,” William said, a little more sharply than he had intended. “I need to see your face. Plainly. A father can ask this of his own blood.”
The curtain was opened and William stared for a moment, looking for signs that her health might be fading. Gently he spoke: “Pale you are, my girl. Take this, some meat, seasoned by your mother. Father Peter has told me you are in need of this.”
“Thank ’ee, my father. Under your instruction will I eat of it, though the smell is overripe for me. How goes it in our house?”
“Your brother is strong as the miller’s ox, naught touched by cold,” William said proudly. “Your sister is intended for domestic service in the manor next spring when she reaches her sixteenth year…”
Christine felt the very worst profanities rise in her throat, but she swallowed hard. “Father, no.” Christine put her face-her eyes wide in terror-as close to her father’s as she could. She wanted to tear down the grille and shake him. “Margaret must never labour in Sir Richard’s house!”
William was bewildered by her fury. “Why, my child? It is the only means of climbing from her station. She is to work at day and come to us at nights. Not inside service-that I do not like. Else she must go out of our village to another demesne. Better she is in my sight.”
“Father, please heed me close.” Christine was near panic. “Sir Richard is wicked…I have prayed for him to repent in all my prayers…but do not tempt him with my sister.”
William regarded her quizzically. “Christine, will you or will you not tell me more of that night, at the very least to safeguard your sister?”
Christine could not stop shaking, but she forced herself to speak calmly. “Father, that is my life before I was enclosed. I will not speak, even to dearest thee, on this count. God knows all, but do not willingly let a lamb go to the wolf. Keep Margaret away from Vachery Manor!”
