Saint Guthlac
The Saint in the barrow
Join me today to meet a saint who sought out the most evil place he could find to make it his home.
Name: Guthlac, Guthlake, Guthlac of Crowland
Life: 673 - 714 AD
Status: Saint
Feast: April 11
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Fall was on the way when Guthlac arrived at the cursed island.
It was August 25, the feast of the apostle Saint Bartholomew, and the final year of the 7th century AD. Guthlac would be here all winter, and many winters after that. The fishermen had tried to warn him.
They were in the fens, the vast swamplands that once existed in the East of England. The Angles and Saxons who had invaded England found the place unsettling. They had long ago driven the Britons West into modern Wales, but some of their old enemies still lived here, hidden in the fens. And who knew what else might crawl out of the dark water. A century before, so it was said, something had come howling out of the fens of the North.
a fiend out of hell, descended from Cain’s clan … Grendel was the name of this grim demon haunting the marches, marauding round the heath and the desolate fens (Seamus Heany translation)
It had taken the hero Beowulf to stop Grendel. Beowulf had pursued Grendel back to the dark waters, and plunged into them himself to face Grendel’s mother. Fens were dangerous. But even in the English fens, one island stood out. No one had ever been able to settle on the island of Crowland, or Croyland, a little North of modern Peterborough. That place was evil. It was where Guthlac was determined to go.
Guthlac had not always been a monk. Guthlac was a descendent of kings, tracing his ancestry back to Icel, son of Eomer. Icel had led his people, the Angles, West across the sea to carve out a new kingdom. The Angles had settled on the East Coast of England, giving their name to the region they settled, Anglia, but also to the island as a whole, Angle-land.
Guthlac grew up in a Christian family. But the stories of the heroes set his imagination aflame. There were men like Beowulf, and among the great men of the past were many of his own ancestors. As he entered his teenage years, Guthlac yearned to pile up glory for himself as his ancestors had done, so that poets would sing his name for centuries too. And so he went to make his name in war.
Finding a war was not too difficult. The Angles and Saxons had been fighting the Celtic Britons for a very long time. The Britons had been mostly pushed into modern Wales, but the borders were not yet firm. King Offa had not yet built the long earthen wall, Offa’s Dyke, that separates England from Wales. Warriors could still seek glory in the contested lands to the West, along the modern Welsh border, and that was where Guthlac was headed.
Guthlac turned out to be good at war. Soon he was having enough success that his warband filled up with men who were not his relatives. Any noble might bring his kin to the battlefield, but a great leader attracted those who fought for gold or glory. Now in his early twenties, Guthlac was getting both.
We don’t know the details of Guthlac’s war. The Britons of this time were not passive victims, and led out by men like Saint Tewdrig they won battles as well as lost them. We know that they captured Guthlac at least once. Somehow Guthlac made his escape. We also know that he wreaked bloody vengeance on those who had captured him, raiding and burning until his enemies begged for peace.
when he had achieved the glorious overthrow of his persecutors, foes and adversaries by frequent blows and devastations, at last their strength was exhausted after all the pillage, slaughter, and plundering which their arms had wrought, and being worn out, they kept the peace. (Bertram Colgrave translation, slightly modernized)
Guthlac’s earliest biographer, Brother Felix, is noticeably uncomfortable in telling this part of the story. He goes out of his way to show that Guthlac was not such a bad man as you might think, insisting that Guthlac returned a third of what he plundered to the people he had just raided. Guthlac, however, was fully aware that many of the things he did were wrong. The more interesting detail, I think, is that Guthlac himself believed that he was doing evil things.
Guthlac was 24 years old. He had fought the enemy to a standstill and built up a warband. This could be the beginning of a great career, one that might see him become a powerful lord or even a king. And yet Guthlac couldn’t stop thinking about a verse from the Gospel according to Matthew. It was something that Jesus had said in the troubling passage we call the Olivet Discourse, which many believe to be a description of the doom that was soon to come upon the inhabitants of Judea. The Romans would destroy Jerusalem and expel the inhabitants, unintentionally spreading Christianity through the empire. But for those who were there, it would be a terrible time. Jesus had told His followers to be ready.
Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a sabbath. (Matthew 24:20)
The words had stuck in Guthlac’s mind. Perhaps it was because he was a raider. The skillful raider waited until his enemies were comfortable and immobile, when weather or circumstance made it hard for them to escape. That was when he struck. But as Guthlac thought about his own life, it occurred to him that he was as complacent as the men he raided. He assumed there would be plenty of time to get right with God when he was an old man. But would there be? Death was a raider too, and Guthlac had done many things that pressed down on his conscience.
One day, Guthlac found he could not go on. He handed command to one of his captains and left the warband that he had built. Guthlac rode East. At Repton, North of modern Birmingham, Guthlac found a monastery. He asked to be admitted as a novice.
Guthlac was not yet the man he wanted to be. But in the characteristics of the monks around him, he could see the traits he wished he had. And so Guthlac’s method, as his biographer notes, was to regard every monk as a teacher. Everyone had at least one trait that Guthlac wanted to learn. Some monks could teach him humility. Others could teach obedience, or abstinence, or easygoingness, or an open-hearted approach to life.
The experience was humbling. In these dark ages, monasteries were the only centres of learning. They had preserved the memory of how to read and write, and monks copied and recopied the precious Latin texts that were their links to the teachings of the Church and the wisdom of pagan Greece and Rome. Guthlac learned to read.
As Guthlac read, he encountered another kind of heroism. He read about the desert fathers, the first hermit-monks who had sought God out in the deserts of Egypt. Deserts were dangerous, filled with bandits and wild animals. Jesus Himself had said that evil spirits wander through desert places. And yet this had been the battleground that the desert fathers had chosen. Guthlac began to feel the tug of a similar calling. But where was he going to find a desert in England? As he turned the matter over in his mind, Guthlac realized that he did know of a desolate, haunted place. It was the fens.
Guthlac spoke to his superiors about this calling. They gave him their blessings. And so Guthlac left the monastery and travelled to the villages of the fishermen who worked in the fens. They told him about the island of Crowland. He wouldn’t be the first man to try to stay there. But Crowland was an evil place, and it never stayed occupied for long. And so it was that, on the feast of Saint Bartholomew in the year 699, a fisherman dropped Guthlac off on the the island of Crowland.
Guthlac had an immediate sense that this was where he was supposed to be. He set out to explore the island. It didn’t take Guthlac long to find something strange. It was a barrow.
The barrow was an artificial hill that had been raised over a tomb. Indo-European people had been burying their lords in barrows for thousands of years. The Celts thought such mounds were, sometimes, places where our world connected to the other world of the fae. And to make matters worse, Guthlac found that this barrow had been desecrated. Grave robbers had dug into the barrow, looted the tomb, and thrown away the bones of whatever ancient king had rested here. Now the barrow had a passage dug into it, and at the centre was a large stone sarcophagus. If any place was cursed, this would be it.
But Guthlac had come to live in a bad place. He prayed. And since he had arrived on Saint Bartholomew’s day, he decided to enlist the help of the saint as well, asking for the saint’s patronage in what he would do next. Guthlac built his hermit’s hut in the sarcophagus, using the stone and the barrow as preexistent materials. He knew that this place would test him. Even so, when the first test arrived it was so subtle that it caught Guthlac by surprise.
As Guthlac lived his simple, hermit life, the realization began to dawn on him that he had done everything wrong. He was in the wrong place. He had never been called to this. And anyway it was a waste of time. God would never forgive the sins of his bloody past. What had he been thinking? His sins were beyond forgiveness. Guthlac wrestled with these thoughts of despair until, one day, he realized they were not really his thoughts. He prayed, and asked Saint Bartholomew to pray along with him. The feelings of despair disappeared as quickly as they had come.
Over the next years, Guthlac would wage a quiet war for holiness and would face a series of demonic attacks. All of them were strange. On one occasion, the demons appeared as wild animals. On another, they appeared as an army of his old enemies, the Britons, their ranks fading away as Guthlac prayed. But the encounter for which Guthlac would be best known well into the Middle Ages was an all out assault.
On this occasion, Guthlac was in his hermitage when vast numbers of evil things began to crawl and flap toward him. Brother Felix, his biographer, describes the scene:
they were ferocious in appearance, terrible in shape with great heads, long necks, thin faces, yellow complexions, filthy beards, shagey ears, wild foreheads, fierce eyes, foul mouths, horses’ teeth, throats vomiting flames, twisted jaws, thick lips, strident voices, singed hair, fat cheeks, pigeon breasts, scabby thighs, knotty knees, crooked legs, swollen ankles, splay feet, spreading mouths, raucous cries. (Bertram Colgrave translation)
Guthlac felt himself grabbed and dragged, then lifted up and carried through the air. Guthlac knew that this was an attempt to force him to leave Crowland, so he replied with the words of Psalm 16:
[The Lord] is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. (Psalm 16:8)
The army of demons responded by giving Guthlac a vision of hell gaping before him, and telling him that they could easily take him there with them. This was what Guthlac had feared years ago as a warlord. But since then, he had made preparations. And he had found allies. The former raider held his ground.
But as they said these and many other things like them, the man of God despised their threats, and with unshaken nerves, with steadfast heart and sober mind he answered them: ‘Woe unto you, you sons of darkness, seed of Cain, you are but dust and ashes. If it is in your power to deliver me into these tortures, lo! I am ready; so why utter these empty threats from your lying throats?’
Guthlac had called their bluff. And help was on the way. In Guthlac’s vision, Saint Bartholomew appeared, coming to his assistance. A later tradition has it that Saint Bartholomew gave Guthlac a whip, and told him to use it on any demons who troubled him afterwards.
And so Guthlac remained in his hermitage. As he overcame these tests and temptations, the area around him began to change. Visitors began to describe a man who lived in the rhythms of nature. Guthlac told them that any man who loved God would soon find that animals loved him too, for all of nature was oriented toward its Creator. Well, almost all of nature. Brother Felix devotes a long section to telling the story of Guthlac’s only remaining enemies on the island.
there were in this same island two jackdaws whose mischievous nature was such that whatever they could break, drop into the water, tear in pieces, steal or defile they would destroy, damaging everything without any respect. For they ventured into houses with, as it were, daring familiarity, and seized everything they could find inside and out, like shameless robbers.
As Guthlac’s fame grew, more visitors came to what had once been the cursed island of Crowland. They asked for Guthlac’s help and his advice. And even though they were the ones coming to ask for help from him, visitors often found the hermit patiently waiting by the shore when their boat came into sight.
Guthlac cast out demons. He healed the sick. He was humble, and gentle, though visitors were sometimes disconcerted when he spoke to them about things they had done while they were still far way.
Guthlac’s gift of supernatural insight had more mundane uses as well. When visitors left their possessions unattended only to be robbed by the jackdaws, Guthlac would resignedly think it over and then announce where the sneaky corvids had hidden the things this time.
A small community was forming around Guthlac. Soon his fame had spread beyond the surrounding area. The Church began to take note. Someone asked Guthlac if he had given any thought to succession. Of course, Guthlac said. The next leader would be Cissa. The questioner had never heard of a Christian named Cissa. Guthlac explained that Cissa wasn’t a Christian - yet.
Guthlac had set out to find glory, then given up on that path. Now fame had come to him. Nobles came to the island to ask for advice. The lord Aethelbald, in hiding from the evil king Ceolred, came to Guthlac to find out what to do next. Ceolred’s descent into madness and self-destruction was still a few years in the future, but Guthlac reassured and encouraged Aethelbald. He needed to hang on, and he would be king in due time. The Church sent a bishop to Crowland to ordain Guthlac a priest. The bishop happened to arrive just in time to let Guthlac celebrate Mass on the feast of Saint Bartholomew.
In the year 714, when Guthlac was in his early forties, he became very sick. One of the monks asked him what was wrong. Guthlac knew that there would be no recovery. Brother Felix records Guthlac’s gentle, half-teasing response.
My son, the cause of my sickness is that my spirit is leaving this body; and the end of my sickness will be on the eighth day when, having finished the course of this life, I must be released and be with Christ; for it is fitting that I should put off the burden of the flesh and follow the Lamb of God.
Guthlac prepared his monks with instructions for what would happen after his death. As soon as he was dead, he said, one of them would have to make a journey. The monk would need to find Guthlac’s sister, who would arrange for the burial. This would set into motion a series of events. Miracles would soon be reported. Guthlac’s body would remain incorrupt. A pagan named Cissa would indeed be baptized, and would arrive at Crowland to become the next leader of the monks there. Aethelbald would be crowned king, as Guthlac had predicted, and he would remember the community on Crowland and honour Guthlac’s memory. The little community would power along with not only Saint Bartholomew, but now also Saint Guthlac praying for it. And before long it would be a big community, and the Abbey of Crowland built on the cursed island would become one of the great monasteries of the middle ages.
All this was in the future as Guthlac’s illness came into its eight day. One of his monks, outside, was startled to see the hermitage suddenly illuminated, as light poured out of the door and windows. There was a sound of singing on the breeze. The monk understood. He climbed into the little boat and began his journey.
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"Guthlac was a descendent of kings, tracing his ancestry back to Icel, son of Eomer."
Getting some serious Lord of The Rings vibes from this one...
Very epic story. I'd never heard of St. Guthlac before this.
Another excellent story