Saint Godric
Join me today to meet a wanderer and a saint at the end of his long, strange life.
Name: Godric of Finchale
Life: c. 1065 - 1170
Status: Saint
Feast: May 21
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By the time he turned 30, Father Reginald of Durham was a very accomplished man.
Reginald had become a priest. He could read and write multiple languages. He had developed his own rather convoluted voice as a Latin stylist. He had found his way to a centre of learning in early medieval England, the Benedictine priory at Durham in the Northeast of England. The Benedictines had an excellent collection of books, both the writings of the Church Fathers and also a good selection of the pagan classics from the ancient world. The friars of Durham weren’t just readers, they were writers too. Reginald hoped one day to be among them.
But now he had been assigned as a guardian, helper, nurse and - if such a thing could be believed - biographer for an ornery practically illiterate peasant living alone in the wilderness.
The peasant’s name was Godric. Godric had been a hermit for longer than Reginald had been alive. The Benedictines at Durham had gradually learned of his existence. People said that he was a man of God, and that he could heal and see into the future. When the first prior tried to get to know him, Godric told the prior that staying alone was the plan. There was zero chance of Godric joining the Benedictines.
The prior, as it turned out, was something of a diplomat. If Godric wouldn’t join the Benedictines, perhaps the Benedictines could in some way include him. The Benedictines began providing Godric with a habit to wear. Benedictines began to visit Godric to spend time with him and try to learn from him. They discovered that, for someone who had lived alone for decades, he had a lot of skills related to other people. He was excellent at reading people, for one thing. Godric had a record of miraculous healings, but he also had an impressive knowledge of conventional medicine.
When the hermit first arrived he had been physically powerful, a barrel-chested man with endless energy. The Benedictines watched as Godric began to slow down. That was no surprise, since Gordic was coming up on his hundredth birthday. Now Godric was sick, spending much of his time in bed. It was a sickness that would dog him for the remaining eight years of his life.
The prior had realized that if no one told Godric’s story, it would die with him. And so the prior had appointed the young scholar Reginald to go, help the old man, befriend him, learn his story, and write it down.
And that was how Reginald found himself leaving the scholarly environment of the monastery take care of a dying, barely literate peasant in the wilderness.
Godric had a little cottage, and these days, he spent most of his time there in bed. Reginald found himself slipping into the role of nurse, even servant, keeping the old man alive, and listening to his rambling stories.
And as the old hermit talked, Reginald found himself being taken back to a world that had ceased to exist long before he was born. For Godric had been born into an England which was still Saxon.
In a way, young Godric had been as ambitious as young Reginald. Godric was born to a poor peasant family. Everyone expected him to follow his father into agriculture. There was no chance of his receiving much of an education. But Godric had other plans. He was going to become a noble, and he knew just the way to do it.
It began with him learning to deal. Whenever merchants came to Godric’s village, he watched them, trying to figure out their trade. As soon as he was old enough, Godric became a peddler. He hoisted a backpack filled with goods and walked through wind and rain and snow to sell from village to village and even door to door. The hard work made him tough. Peddlers weren't particularly respected. Their work was dangerous. There were bandits and wild animals on the roads. But Godric had a plan, and this was step one.
Godric didn’t want to be a peddler for the rest of his life, so he saved his money. Eventually he had enough that he could become a slightly more respectable merchant, selling his wares in cities. And then, finally, after years of work, he was able to buy a share in a merchant ship. Some people bought shares and let others do the dangerous work of actually sailing around Europe. Godric was not that kind of merchant. He taught himself to sail, to work on the ship and to pilot it. He went to modern Scotland, Denmark, Italy, France, and the Christian holdings in the Holy Land.
Soon Godric owned half a ship. Then he had his own ship. Some writers have suggested that Godric used his ship for more than trade, that he dabbled in piracy. We know there was an English Godric known as a pirate, but then Godric was a common name and it may well be a different man. However he made his money, our Godric had almost succeeded in claiming his place among the nobles of England - or so he thought.
The trouble was that all around him, things were changing. Godric was a Saxon, born in a time when Saxons ruled England. In 1066, when Godric was very young, the armies of Duke William of Normandy had come from the East. William had crushed Harold Godwinson, the last Saxon king.
England had been invaded before, but this was something different. The new King William had no intention of fitting into the country he had conquered. William’s goals became clearer as time went on: he was going to replace the Saxon aristocracy with his own people.
The Norman conquest would transform England forever. To this day we can find the marks where the new hierarchy burned itself into our language, so that in English we often have two words, the Saxon and the Norman word for the same thing, and the Norman one indicates a higher status. A poor Saxon might have a cook, but a Norman lord had a chef. Saxons lived in houses, but Normans had mansions. No Norman lady would sweat, but she might perspire.
And the changes that the Normans brought put a stop to Godric’s plans. The Saxons came from a world where wealth and legitimacy were often found by trading (or raiding) by ship. In Saxon England, a merchant who sailed out in a ship that he owned on more than three occasions thereby became a thegn, a minor noble. But by the time Godric was in position to become a thegn, that kind of nobility was being phased out in favour of the Norman nobility.
For Godric, who had worked with a singleminded focus his whole life, the realization that he would not become a thegn must have been crushing. He was never going to be a lord in his homeland.
In the midst of his disappointment, Godric began to think about what mattered to him.
Whenever Godric had free time, he had enjoyed visiting holy places. Of course by now he had seen the major pilgrim destinations, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, and of course Jerusalem. But Godric had also visited many smaller shrines and memorials of the saints. Oddly enough, the place that fascinated Godric most was close to home. It was the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. It had been the home of one of the greatest saints of the English people: Cuthbert.
Five hundred years before, Cuthbert had evangelized England, wandering through the land performing wonders. He had lived as a hermit, close to nature and a friend to animals, especially birds. Eventually, Cuthbert had become bishop at Lindisfarne.
Godric had enough money to travel if he wanted to. It seemed to him that some of the best things he had done were his pilgrimages. And so, for some time, he lived as a pilgrim, following the trade routes he knew well through the medieval world. But as he travelled, he found that Cuthbert was more and more on his mind.
The more Godric thought and asked for the intercession of the saints, the more another life-plan began to take shape. Godric thought he was being called to be a hermit, just as Cuthbert had been. Godric found a teacher, a hermit who would let him live nearby, but then the man died. Now, Godric was uncertain of his calling.
And that was when he had the dream.
In Godric’s dream, Saint Cuthbert appeared to him. The saint had a message: he had the plan for what Godric was going to do next.
Following Cuthbert’s instructions, Godric went on one last pilgrimage to Jerusalem. This time he lingered in the city, working at the Hospital that would, in a few years, give rise to the warrior order of the Hospitallers. Perhaps now that Godric had finally gotten the guidance he was looking for, he found it hard to leave Jerusalem for what he knew would be the last time.
Eventually, Godric returned to England. He was looking for the place he would settle as a hermit. Finally he found it: Finchale. He would be able to live relatively undisturbed. And he was only a few miles out from Durham, the final resting place of Saint Cuthbert’s body.
Godric built his solitary hut. He prayed. He recited the psalms. He began to compose hymns, writing some of the earliest English hymns to survive in words and music.
The more Godric followed Cuthbert’s plan, the more he found himself changing and becoming, well, a little like the saint he so admired. The locals began to come to Godric for advice and healing. And as time passed, Godric found himself slipping into harmony with his surroundings. He became a protector of animals. In one story, Godric stops a hunting party from killing a stag, and the grateful animal continues to come and visit him. And not just stags. Godric is often drawn with snakes at his feet, because even snakes were said to become friendly and docile around him.
Years passed, then decades. After a long time, the Benedictines at Durham began to pay attention to the stories of the holy hermit whom even the animals respected. About ten years after that, a child named Reginald was born. Reginald grew up, receiving one of the best educations available, and eventually became part of the community at Durham. By now, Godric was in his 90s. Young Reginald was assigned to shadow him and learn the story of his life.
At first, I have to think that Reginald resented his assignment. He was an educated man, a scholar. He didn’t want to nurse an old peasant. It didn’t help that Godric really was beginning to lose his mind. The things he said didn’t always make sense.
On one occasion, a noble came to ask Godric’s advice. Godric gave it and then began to speak about the royal court. But Godric got the names all wrong, not even knowing who was king.
It was embarrassing, especially for Reginald, who happened to be there. When the noble was leaving, Reginald took him aside and explained that Godric didn’t always remember things very clearly. Reginald told the noble that Godric had probably been trying to say something about the royals of Scotland, not of England. After the noble was gone, Reginald turned on the old man, telling him he should be more careful not to embarrass himself.
But then, as time passed, news filtered in of shocking changes at court. Godric had perfectly described the court as it was going to be. Reginald began to take the old man more seriously. More and more, he saw past the gruff exterior, and Reginald came to think he really was living with a saint.
Reginald found himself doing more and more to help Godric. It was increasingly clear that Godric wasn’t going to recover from his illness. But Reginald also realized that Godric was given to visions, seeing heaven and hell and things in between. Reginald’s biography would end up including stories of important conversations, but also people satisfying their curiosity by asking Godric the oddest things. One man wondered what it was like to die and have a soul leave the body.
Godric thought about it and told the man to think of a bean. The godly man was like a bean that had ripened in the shell. When it is time to leave, the shell lets the soul slip out easily. Those who are tied up in sin do not slip out so easily, they are unripe, still stuck to their lives. Or to put it a different way, death was like a filter which could be passed through by those who had prepared their souls for it. Philosophers had long taught that philosophy is preparation for death. Godric didn’t know it, but he had just given a Christian explanation of this doctrine.
Godric’s time was drawing to an end. And as that end approached, Reginald found that he had grown tremendously fond of the old hermit.
This made Reginald’s secret all the more difficult to keep.
Reginald had never figured out how to tell Godric that he was writing his biography. Godric knew that Reginald did a lot of writing, but Reginald had vaguely explained that he was writing theological things. By now Reginald’s biography was a 500 page doorstopper, and he was being eaten up by guilt.
So Reginald decided to cheat a little.
Instead of asking for permission, he decided to get Godric to bless his work. Reginald told Godric that he was writing a book about a holy man, and he wanted Godric’s blessing for the endeavour. At first Godric was unwilling, but when Reginald kept badgering him he agreed. Reginald gave him the manuscript, confident that Godric could not read well enough to figure out that it was about him.
Finding a shadow of his old strength, the old man lifted up the pages, and blessed them, asking for God’s blessing and the prayers of the saints. Then he blessed the author.
Reginald breathed a sigh of relief. His trick had worked.
But then Godric looked him in the eye and told Reginald not to publish a word of his biography until after Godric was dead and buried.
The day of Godric’s death was not far off. He had lived a very strange life. He was a self-made man who had looked for a new destiny with the saints. And when a vision of Saint Cuthbert had made that destiny clear, Godric had held onto it with all his strength.
Now Saint Godric was dead. Reginald prepared his massive biography, misleadingly called The Little Book of the Life and Miracles of Saint Godric, Hermit of Finchale. Reginald had arrived as a cocky young scholar. But by the end of his time with Godric, he understood that things were not so simple as he had once thought. Reginald was not really surprised when reports of miracles through the intercession of Godric began to roll in. He still missed the old man.
And maybe that was why Reginald embarked on his next writing project.
Reginald began to collect the stories of the miracles of Saint Cuthbert.
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This was such a blessing TY.