In his sociological study of hermits in English society between 950 and 1200, Tom Licence has explored a large amount if material, some of it known but looked at from a new perspective, much of it less well-known and therefore the more worthy of exploration. There is a useful glossary of terms likely to be unfamiliar to students (for whom these studies were originally meant), a select bibliography and excellent footnotes.

The tradition of the solitary life predates Christianity, but the Christian form of it began to be recorded in the first three centuries ad. It was then a new way of interpreting and living out the Gospel, and it became well-known and even popular. In the next centuries up to and including today, there have been any number of hermits, many more than are known about since this way of life is essentially publicity-shunning. There have frequently been what Jean Leclercq called ‘explosions of hermits’, times when attention was paid to these people and their way of life. For these periods in particular there are records of those who knew them or knew about them which can be consulted as well as anything that they themselves wrote. This book explores such an ‘explosion’, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in England, using accounts of well-known hermits such as Christina of Markyate, Godric of Finchale and Wulfric of Haslbury, as well as more obscure people like the hermits Aelfgyth, Ealdwine, Aelfwi and Reinfrid.

This fine study begins with a brief introduction to the earlier tradition, a necessary preface but one which must seem to those of us who work in the area to be scanty and not well-supported from ancient or modern sources. To mention this merely shows the prejudices of this reviewer, since this is not the area about which Licence is writing. He begins the central part of his account of hermits in northern Europe in the eleventh century, a place and a period far from the eastern deserts of the early Church. He is writing as a social historian looking with interest at the reaction to hermits of those who were committed to following different kinds of Christian vocation, and he has provided useful insight into records of this with accounts of hermits in Germany and Anglo-Saxon England. He continues his analysis of Anglo-Saxon hermits and takes issue with the view that they provided a link between Normans and Saxons. Then he looks at practical matters such as the income of hermits, and explores the reasons why they were appreciated by others, as intermediaries between heaven and earth as well as being seen as impartial counsellors and advisors.

There is little that is new here for those who are interested in the hermits’ own inner motivation and what it shows about the relationship between God and man, but it would be unfair to judge the book on what it does not set out to do. There is a great deal here for the social historian who approaches accounts of this style of life obliquely, examining how the rest of society related to solitaries. Licence discusses (pp. 14–16) the confusion of terminology used – hermit, anchorite, recluse, solitary and monk – and shows rightly that the basic term is ‘monos’ (monk), the one who is alone without a partner before God, something common to all these life styles. It is perhaps remarkable that life-long continence, as a distinctive form of the Christian commitment to chastity, is not discussed here, though it is surely the defining factor in all monastic living. It is this sense of extreme asceticism lived out at a fundamentally solitary level which has made it seem, at times, to be the ‘best’ way of Christian living. Its ideology spread most notably to the priesthood in the eleventh century. This respect for the ascetic way of living, based on the life-long commitment to celibacy, influenced the style of other Christian ways of life so that it became the terminology used for praising those who lived a non-solitary form of life. Thus a secular lord such as Gerard of Aurillac, or a politically-minded archbishop such as Thomas Becket, could both be referred to as ‘hermits’, not because they lived alone but for their ascetic approach to a life based on celibacy.

How far the claim of the eleventh- and twelfth-century ascetics that they were re-enacting the monastic lives of the desert Fathers is justified is a matter for conjecture and further exploration. Licence comments shrewdly on this as being ‘the old paradox whereby radical innovation masquerades as a return to first principles’ (p. 111). Our knowledge of the past depends on written texts supplemented by archaeological finds, not the sure memory of trained minds which was the usual way of transmission in earlier times. Such oral tradition is a source not immediately accessible then or now. Therefore how the eleventh- and twelfth-century solitaries knew about this way of life remains to be fully explored and it is possible that it will turn out to be simply a reaction of human beings to the call of God, which falls naturally into similar patterns whatever the social, religious and educational background may have been.

Tom Licence's excellent study of reactions to hermits in this neglected period has given us an invaluable book in its own right, a seminal study of lasting value.