What if the purest form of solitude in the medieval world wasn't a cave in the desert, but a room attached to a church, with three windows, one of them facing the street?
And what if the person inside that room was, by the letter of the rite, dead?
That's the question Daniel sent in. He's been chewing on our hermit episode. He says we mentioned that the closest thing to hermitism in its purest form, the version the popular imagination actually reaches for, is the anchorite, and he wants the full picture. What exactly was an anchorite, and how did that life differ from other forms of seeking solitude. How was it practiced in the Middle Ages, what did the ritual of enclosure actually involve, and what did the daily life look like. Which specific denominations practiced it. Where it was most common geographically. And when and where the last known explicit practice took place.
Five questions.
Five. And here's the thing sitting underneath all of them. The ritual sounds like a horror premise. Sealed into a wall. And the actual record is stranger and more interesting than the myth, because the myth is mostly wrong.
Start with the word.
Anchorite comes from the Greek anachoreo. I withdraw. I retire. That's it. That's the whole job description in one verb.
And that's where the confusion starts, because a hermit withdraws too. The desert fathers withdrew. Anthony goes out into the Egyptian desert in the third century, Hilarion of Gaza takes the same impulse into Palestine, and that's the root system for all of it. But the anchorite adds one thing the hermit never had to sign up for, and it's the structural fact this entire episode hangs on. The vow of stability of place.
Which means what, exactly.
It means the anchorite is permanently enclosed. In theory, never to leave. A hermit could in principle pick up and move. The anchorite couldn't. The cell wasn't a base. The cell was the whole map.
So the difference isn't intensity. It's geography. A hermit's solitude travels with him. An anchorite's solitude has an address.
And there's a second feature, which is the one that gives the whole thing its charge. The rite of consecration borrowed the funeral liturgy. After enclosure, the anchorite was considered dead to the world. A kind of living saint. The ceremony didn't soften that. It leaned into it.
Dead to the world, and then consulted by kings.
Both. That's not a contradiction, that's the design. We'll get there. And there's a third thing people don't know. Anchorites answered to no ecclesiastical authority except bishops. In a period where almost everybody's spiritual life was nested inside a chain of superiors, that's an unusual degree of autonomy.
No abbot, no prior, no mother superior.
None of that. The bishop and the anchorite, direct line. Which is part of why the practice never hardened into an order. There was no chain of command to standardize it.
And one more framing piece. Anchoritism was never a formal religious order. Never standardized. There's no rule, no founder, no motherhouse. Members of religious orders could and did become recluses.
Which is why the evidence is so scattered. You're not tracking an institution. You're tracking a practice that shows up wherever a bishop, a benefactor, and a willing candidate all line up.
So the arc is the ritual first. Then the inside of the cell. Then who did this, where, and how long it lasted.
That vow of stability is the key to all of it. So let's walk through what actually happened on the day someone was enclosed.
Walk me through it. The bishop shows up, and then what.
In Germanic-speaking areas from at least the tenth century, the bishop says the Office of the Dead as the anchorite enters the cell. That's the funeral office. For a living person. It signifies death to the world and rebirth to spiritual life. And if the anchorite is being walled up, the bishop might press his seal into the wall. Stamping it with his authority.
The bishop literally seals the tomb.
With his own signet. And the death imagery is not subtle anywhere in this rite. There's a fifteenth-century account that recommends the postulant crawl into a mock grave and be sprinkled with ashes. You get down in the hole, somebody puts ash on you, and then you get up and go live in a wall.
I want to be clear about something, because I think this is where the popular version goes wrong. This was voluntary.
Completely voluntary. Solemn, not punitive. Nobody was sentenced to this. The fifteenth-century Pontifical of Bishop Lacy calls for the door to be built up. The sixteenth-century Pontifical of Archbishop Bainbridge directs that the door be firmly shut from the outside. And notice the difference in those two instructions. Built up is masonry. Firmly shut is a door that closes.
So sometimes it's brick, sometimes it's just a latch.
Sometimes the exterior door was bricked in. Sometimes it was simply shut firmly from outside. The lurid version, walled up alive like Fortunato in the Poe story, is not what the documents describe. Real anchorholds had doors. Some had gardens. They had servants and steady visitors. The enclosure was comparative, not total.
What's the documentary spine here? How far back does the ceremony itself go?
The earliest surviving English enclosure ceremony is in a twelfth-century pontifical. The latest is in a printed sixteenth-century manual. So you've got a documented arc of roughly four centuries in England alone, for the rite itself.
And enclosure wasn't automatic. There's a process.
There's a whole process. Prior permission. An investigation into the candidate's spiritual reliability. Proof of financial security, because somebody has to feed this person for the rest of their life. And a built or chosen anchorhold. That's the bureaucratic reality sitting behind the dramatic image. You don't just decide on a Tuesday that you'd like to be walled into a church.
There's a committee.
There's a committee, and the committee wants to know who's paying for the bread.
What happens if the money runs out? Say the benefactor dies, or the estate goes sideways.
Then the anchorite is in real trouble, and there are cases of exactly that. The whole arrangement depended on a living endowment, usually land or rents set aside for the anchorhold's support. If that income failed, the recluse had no fallback. No order to appeal to, no motherhouse to take them in. Just a bishop who might or might not intervene.
So the financial vetting wasn't a formality.
It was the load-bearing wall of the whole vocation. Which is a strange thing to say about a life defined by prayer, but it's true. The spiritual reliability check got the attention. The solvency check kept the person alive.
Alright. Inside the cell. Dimensions first.
Typically at most twelve to fifteen feet square. That's the upper end. The smallest known cells are much tighter. There's one at Leatherhead at two point four meters square with a window fifty-three centimeters across. And then there's Compton in Surrey, which is two meters by one point three, with a sleeping loft. That cell was occupied from 1185 to the early fourteenth century.
Two meters by one point three. Say that again.
Two meters by one point three. With a loft, so you're sleeping above the floor space.
That's a closet with a mezzanine.
It's a closet with a mezzanine, and somebody lived in it for over a hundred years. Not the same person. The cell.
Right. The cell outlasted the occupants.
Which is its own kind of fact about the vocation. Now here's the part I want to spend real time on, because it's the thing that makes the whole enclosure legible. The three windows.
Go.
Three windows, and each one has a different job. The first is a squint, sometimes called a hagioscope, facing the altar. That's how the anchorite views Mass and receives the Eucharist. The second window is for servants, to pass food in and remove waste. The third, often street-facing and covered with translucent cloth, is for light.
So one window for God, one for the body, one for the world.
And that layout is not incidental. It's the design. A cell with a window onto the altar, a window for servants, and a window onto the street is not a tomb. It's a switchboard.
That's the image. Hold that.
Now daily life. Frugal meals. Bread, vegetable stew, fish. Days in contemplative prayer, interceding for other people. Chamber pots. They were allowed peat fires and oil lamps, so it's not pitch dark and freezing. Some had small gardens.
How much of the day is actually structured prayer?
The daily devotions prescribed in Ancrene Wisse, early thirteenth century, would take about four hours. And that's on top of listening to church services through the squint and private prayer. So you're not filling the day. The day is already full.
Four hours of prescribed devotion before you get to the voluntary kind.
And you're not doing it alone in the sense people assume. Anchorites had up to two servants. Aelred of Rievaulx wrote a rule for his sister that recommends an older woman as companion and doorkeeper, and a young maid as servant. Julian of Norwich had maidservants named Sara and Alice.
So the anchoress has staff.
The anchoress has staff, and the staff have a job description, and the job description includes managing the traffic at the windows.
Which brings us to the paradox, because I don't think people see this coming. The anchorhold is at the very center of the community.
It's attached to the church. It's in the middle of the town, increasingly, as time goes on. And anchorites gave spiritual advice through the squint. They gained reputations for wisdom. People came to them. Tom Licence put it about as well as it can be put. It was an unwise recluse that entered her cell to achieve peace and quiet.
If you wanted quiet, you picked the wrong vocation.
You picked the wrong vocation, and you picked it in public, with a bishop's seal on the wall.
So the death to the world is liturgical. It's not social.
That's the distinction I'd hold onto. Ritually dead. Socially central. Both true at once.
Now the question of who was doing this, and where, and for how long.
Denominations first, and I want to be honest here, because Daniel's question implies more breadth than the record supports. Anchoritism is a Christian practice rooted in that third and fourth century desert tradition. Anthony the Great, 251 to 356. Hilarion of Gaza, 291 to 371, who's the founder of anchoritic life in Palestine. In the medieval period, anchorites were overwhelmingly Catholic. Tied to the pre-Reformation Western Church.
And today?
In the Catholic Church, eremitic and anchoritic life is a recognized form of consecrated life. It's governed by Canon 603 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. Evangelical Lutheranism also recognizes heremitic life as a form of consecrated life. And the Camaldolese, a Benedictine offshoot founded by Saint Romuald, maintained the eremitic and reclusive tradition into the modern era. That order matters later in this episode.
But if somebody's looking for a distinct Protestant anchoritic enclosure tradition, it isn't there.
I couldn't find one, and I looked. The Camaldolese are Catholic, not a separate denomination. So the honest answer to the denominational question is: Catholic, essentially, with one Lutheran recognition of heremitic life and no separate Protestant enclosure tradition to point at.
Geography.
Anchoritism occurred all across Western Europe. But England is the best-documented and most concentrated region, and the numbers there are remarkable. Written evidence supports seven hundred and eighty anchorites on six hundred sites between 1100 and 1539. Ann Warren's more precise figure is seven hundred and eighty recluses on six hundred and one sites.
Seven hundred and eighty people over four centuries.
And here's the most striking fact in the whole dataset. The gender split. Four hundred and fourteen female solitaries. Two hundred and one males. A hundred and sixty-five of unknown gender.
Women outnumber men two to one in the raw count, and that's with the unknowns dragging it down.
The female-to-male ratio ran as high as four to one in the thirteenth century. It drops to two to one in the fifteenth. And the peak number is around two hundred anchorites recorded in thirteenth-century England.
Four to one. That's not a rounding error, that's a demographic signal.
It's a women's vocation, statistically. Which raises the obvious question of why, and the answer people give is interesting. For elite women, an anchorhold was a cell of one's own. Reading, writing, manuscript illumination. Freedom from childbirth and household drudgery. You give up the world and you get a room and a library and control of your own hours.
And the first book written by a woman in English came out of one of those cells.
Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. Out of an anchorhold.
Where were the cells concentrated inside England?
Anchorholds were found in all but four counties. Buckinghamshire, Rutland, Cumberland, and Westmorland. Strong anchoritic identities in Oxfordshire, Sussex, Worcestershire, and Hampshire in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Lincolnshire, Middlesex, London, and Norfolk throughout. Yorkshire declined by the end of the fifteenth century. And there's a rural-to-urban shift across the whole period. The vocation began largely rural but became increasingly urban. By the sixteenth century, Roberta Gilchrist's phrase, the anchorhold was an integral element of the ecclesiastical topography of medieval towns.
It moved from the countryside into the high street.
It moved into the high street, which fits everything we said about the visitors and the counsel and the traffic at the squint. The more central the town, the better the anchorhold worked.
Beyond England?
Germany, where there's a whole documented institution of recluses in southern Germany. France, via Gougaud's work on hermits and recluses. The Low Countries. Italy. And Ireland. There's an anchorite cell at Fore Abbey in Westmeath.
Which sets up Ireland for the last question.
It does. Now, the last known explicit practice. And I want to say up front that there is no single, universally agreed last anchorite. The answer depends entirely on your definition.
Give me the definitions.
In England, the tradition effectively ended with Henry the Eighth's Dissolution of the Monasteries, 1536 to 1539. But there's a specific human case that sits right at the edge of it. Isolde Heton, enclosed at Whalley in Lancashire in 1437. She was the last anchoress of Whalley. And the anchorage was closed by the King in 1443, after she left her cell to intervene in her son's marriage.
She came out.
The Whalley monks complained that she departed contrary to her own oath and profession, and that she was not willing to be restored again. So she left, and she stayed left.
The vow of stability, broken, over a wedding.
And it's not the only case. Christine Carpenter fled her cell in 1332 and petitioned the Pope to be re-enclosed. So the ideal and the practice diverge more often than the ideal suggests.
Ireland pushes the date later.
Ireland pushes it into the seventeenth century. Patrick Begley, sometimes given as Beglin, an Irish anchorite, lived in a cell at Fore Abbey in the seventeenth century. One of the latest recorded.
And then there's the one that breaks the frame.
And then there's Nazarena of Jesus. Born Julia Crotta, 1907 to 1990. An American. She entered the Camaldolese monastery of Sant'Antonio Abate in Rome on the twenty-first of November, 1945. And she remained a recluse in a cell for forty-five years, until her death on the seventh of February, 1990.
Forty-five years.
Pope Paul the Sixth blessed her through the grille in 1966. Pope Francis visited her cell on the twenty-first of November, 2013.
So the practice doesn't stop. It thins out until it's one woman in Rome.
That's the honest framing. Anchoritism as a mass medieval phenomenon ends at the Reformation. But as a licit vocation it never fully closed. Canon 603 still permits eremitic life today. The practice faded rather than stopped on a specific date.
Which is a less satisfying answer than a date, and a truer one.
And it's where the story gets strange. Which is, I think, where Hilbert has been sitting on something.
Hilbert: I measured one once. Well, I helped measure one. I was working as an assistant to a historic building surveyor, briefly, and one of the jobs was a suspected anchorhold in a church wall. A squint I could put my hand through. A cell I could not stand up in. I wrote the dimensions down twice because I didn't believe them the first time.
What were they?
Hilbert: Small. That's what I remember. Small, and the wrong shape for a room, and the right shape for something else.
The three windows.
Hilbert: The three windows are the whole design. I'd agree with everything you said about the ritual and the daily life. The one thing I'd correct is the popular image. The anchorite as someone who never saw another human being. That's wrong, and you can prove it from the architecture. A window onto the altar, a window for servants, a window onto the street. That's not a tomb. That's a switchboard.
That's the second time today somebody's said switchboard.
Hilbert: It's the right word. And here's the part I actually came out to say. The squint window at the site I surveyed was worn smooth on the inside edge. Not the inside face. The edge. And it wasn't worn by the anchorite.
Who wore it?
Hilbert: The people outside. Generations of them, leaning in to talk. You can see it in the stone. The wear pattern is on the wrong side of the wall. The visitors did that.
So the building records the traffic.
Hilbert: The building records the traffic. The vow was stability of place. It was never isolation from people. People wore a groove in the stone proving it.
That's a physical fact we could not have gotten from the documents.
Hilbert: It's on the wrong side of the wall. That's all I've got.
That wear pattern on the wrong side of the wall is the whole episode in one detail, isn't it.
It is, and it kills the most common wrong belief about this entire subject dead. The version people carry around is the Poe version. Walled up alive, sealed away, never seen again. And the record says the opposite. Real anchorholds had doors. Some had gardens. They had servants, and steady visitors, and a bishop's seal on the wall instead of a sentence.
The anchorite was ritually dead to the world and simultaneously the most consulted person in the parish. And that's not a contradiction to resolve. That's the point. The enclosure was comparative, not total.
Which is also the honest answer to when it ended. It faded rather than stopped. England's tradition ended at the Dissolution. Ireland's ran into the seventeenth century with Patrick Begley at Fore Abbey. And Canon 603 still permits eremitic life today, with Nazarena of Jesus dying in her cell in Rome in 1990 after forty-five years.
Leave it there. A cell with three windows. One facing the altar, one for the servants, one onto the street. And one of them worn smooth from the outside.
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This has been My Weird Prompts. Our producer is Hilbert Flumingtop. We'll be back soon.
