Anchorite

Based on Wikipedia: Anchorite

Buried Alive for God

Imagine choosing to be sealed inside a tiny stone room, never to leave again. Not as punishment, but as the highest spiritual calling you could pursue. In medieval England, hundreds of people did exactly this. They were called anchorites, and their story is one of the strangest chapters in Christian history.

The bishop would arrive to perform a ceremony that closely resembled a funeral. Prayers for the dead would be recited. The anchorite would lie prostrate, sometimes covered with a funeral pall. And then, in some cases, the door to their cell would be bricked up and sealed with the bishop's own stamp.

From that moment forward, they were considered dead to the world—yet very much alive, praying ceaselessly for everyone around them.

What Exactly Was an Anchorite?

The word comes from the ancient Greek "anakhōréō," meaning "I withdraw" or "I retire." An anchorite was someone who, for religious reasons, withdrew completely from ordinary society to devote their entire existence to prayer and contemplation.

You might think this sounds like a hermit, and you'd be close. But there's a crucial difference. Hermits could wander. They lived apart from society, certainly, but they might move from place to place, living in caves or remote huts. Anchorites made a vow of stability of place—permanent enclosure in one location, typically a small cell attached to a church. They weren't just retreating from the world. They were anchoring themselves to a single spot until death.

The opposite of an anchorite would be a pilgrim—someone whose spiritual practice involved constant movement, journeying to holy sites. The anchorite's holiness came from staying absolutely still.

The Cell: A Stone Womb

These cells, called anchorholds, were remarkably small. Most measured only twelve to fifteen feet square—roughly the size of a modern parking space. Within this cramped space, the anchorite would spend years, sometimes decades.

Three windows punctuated the walls, each serving a specific purpose.

The first window faced the church altar. Called a "hagioscope" or "squint," this small shuttered opening allowed the anchorite to watch Mass being celebrated and to receive the Eucharist. Through this window, they remained connected to the sacramental life of Christianity without ever setting foot in the church proper.

The second window faced outward, toward the street. Covered with translucent cloth, it admitted light into the otherwise dark cell. But it served another purpose too—this was where ordinary people came seeking spiritual advice. The anchorite, dead to the world yet listening through their window, became a kind of oracle. Their reputation for wisdom grew precisely because they had renounced everything that usually corrupts judgment: ambition, politics, social maneuvering, the endless distractions of daily life.

The third window was purely practical. Through it, servants would pass food and water in, and remove the chamber pot used for bodily waste.

Some anchorholds were more generous, with a few small rooms or even an attached garden. But many were starkly simple—a stone box for a human being who had chosen to become a living saint.

Why Would Anyone Do This?

To understand the appeal, you have to enter the medieval Christian worldview. Life on Earth was considered a brief test, a proving ground for the eternal life to come. Every moment spent in prayer was an investment in eternity. Every worldly pleasure was a potential trap, pulling the soul away from God.

For the truly devoted, the problem with ordinary monastic life—already quite strict by modern standards—was that it didn't go far enough. Monks and nuns still had each other's company. They still engaged in work, conversation, the politics of community living. The anchorite wanted to strip away every possible distraction, every last thread connecting them to earthly concerns.

There was also a communal dimension that might seem paradoxical. By withdrawing completely, the anchorite became the spiritual heart of their community. Medieval theologians sometimes compared the anchorhold to a womb—a place of gestation from which the community's spiritual potential could be reborn. The anchorite prayed constantly for their neighbors, for travelers, for the sick and dying. They interceded with God on everyone's behalf.

This wasn't seen as selfish isolation. It was the most generous thing a person could do: devote every waking moment to spiritual labor for others.

A Surprisingly Female Profession

Here's something that often surprises modern readers: anchorites were predominantly women. From the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, female anchorites consistently outnumbered males. In the thirteenth century, the ratio was sometimes four to one.

This matters because medieval society offered women precious few paths to independence and spiritual authority. A woman could be a wife, a widow, or a nun—and in each case, she remained under male authority. But an anchoress answered only to the bishop who had consecrated her. She owned her cell. She set her own daily schedule. She could accept or refuse visitors.

More remarkably, she could become an authority figure in her own right. People came to her window seeking wisdom and guidance. Her opinions mattered. Her prayers were considered especially powerful.

The anchorhold offered women something revolutionary: a room of one's own, centuries before Virginia Woolf would articulate why that mattered.

Julian of Norwich: The Most Famous Anchoress

The best-known anchorite in history was a woman we know only as Julian of Norwich. We don't even know her birth name—she took the name Julian from the church to which her cell was attached, Saint Julian's Church in Norwich, England.

In 1373, when she was about thirty years old and desperately ill, Julian experienced a series of intense visions centered on the crucified Christ. She recovered from her illness and spent the next twenty or more years contemplating what these visions meant. Eventually, she wrote them down in a work called Revelations of Divine Love.

This book contains one of the most startling theological claims in Christian history. Julian declared that she had asked God about sin and evil, and God had answered: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

That phrase has echoed through the centuries. T.S. Eliot quoted it in his Four Quartets. It offers a vision of ultimate cosmic optimism—the idea that no matter how terrible things appear, God's plan will ultimately bring everything to a good end.

Julian also described God using maternal language, speaking of "Christ our Mother" who feeds us spiritually as a human mother feeds her infant. This imagery was not entirely new in Christian mysticism, but Julian developed it with unprecedented depth.

She lived in her anchorhold for at least twenty years, possibly much longer, dying sometime after 1416. Her cell was destroyed during Henry VIII's dissolution of religious houses, and the church itself was gutted by German bombs during World War II. Both have since been rebuilt, and pilgrims still visit the site of Julian's cell today.

The Daily Rhythm

What did an anchorite actually do all day?

Several medieval rule books survive that describe the expected routine. The most famous is called Ancrene Wisse—Middle English for "Guide for Anchoresses"—written in the early thirteenth century for a group of three sisters who had become anchoresses.

The set devotions outlined in this text would have taken about four hours each day. This included reciting the Divine Office (a series of prayers said at specific hours), meditating on Scripture, and engaging in private prayer. On top of this, anchoresses were expected to listen to the church services happening on the other side of their wall.

The remaining hours were filled with more prayer, devotional reading, and whatever simple work the anchoress might do—perhaps embroidery or spinning. The Ancrene Wisse strictly forbade teaching children, running a school, or operating a business, which suggests that some anchoresses had tried to do exactly these things.

Meals were sparse. The rule books recommended eating primarily bread and vegetables, avoiding meat entirely. The goal was to keep the body alive while preventing it from making demands that might distract from prayer.

Servants and Visitors

Despite their withdrawal from society, anchorites were not entirely alone. Most had servants who handled practical necessities. Aelred of Rievaulx, a twelfth-century abbot who wrote a rule book for his sister when she became an anchoress, suggested keeping only two companions: an older woman to serve as doorkeeper and companion, and a young maid for domestic work.

Julian of Norwich had several maidservants over the years, including women named Sara and Alice. These servants were essential—someone had to obtain food, prepare it, and handle the chamber pot. But their presence also created potential problems. The rule books worried constantly about servants gossiping, or visitors staying too long, or the anchorhold becoming a social gathering spot rather than a place of solitary prayer.

Some visitors were welcome. People seeking spiritual counsel could speak to the anchoress through her window. This was considered one of the anchorite's important functions—sharing whatever wisdom they had gained through their intense prayer life. But the rules cautioned against excessive conversation, especially with men, and absolutely forbade physical contact of any kind.

Those Who Couldn't Leave

Once enclosed, anchorites were expected to remain in their cells until death. The vow was considered absolutely binding. Medieval sources record cases of anchorites who refused to leave even when their towns were being attacked.

When pirates or raiders came and set fire to churches, some anchorites stayed in their cells and burned to death rather than break their vow of enclosure. They believed that leaving would damn their souls far worse than any physical suffering.

This seems extreme, even horrifying, to modern sensibilities. But it reveals how seriously medieval Christians took the concept of a sacred vow. An anchorite who left their cell was not just breaking a promise—they were betraying a covenant with God, abandoning the spiritual post where they had been stationed to pray for all humanity.

Not everyone maintained such absolute commitment. The historical record includes Christine Carpenter of Shere, who was enclosed as an anchoress in 1329, left her cell at some point, and then petitioned in 1332 to be enclosed again. Her petition was granted, suggesting that the Church preferred to rehabilitate repentant anchorites rather than condemn them forever.

The End of English Anchoritism

Between 1536 and 1539, King Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the monasteries—the closure of all Catholic religious houses in England. This swept away not only the great abbeys and convents but also the tiny anchorholds attached to parish churches.

The anchoritic tradition in England, which had flourished for over four hundred years, simply ended. Written records document at least 780 anchorites at 600 different sites between 1100 and 1539. The actual number was probably higher, since medieval record-keeping was inconsistent.

A few physical traces survive. At Chester-le-Street in County Durham and at Hartlip in Kent, you can still see the remains of medieval anchorholds. These small stone structures, now empty and silent, once contained people who had chosen the most radical form of Christian devotion their culture could imagine.

The Tradition's Origins and Legacy

Anchoritism didn't begin in medieval England. The earliest recorded anchorites lived in the third century, in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine. Saint Anthony the Anchorite, who lived from 251 to 356, has traditionally been called the "Father of Monasticism." He withdrew into the Egyptian desert, living first in a tomb, then in an abandoned fort, seeking union with God through solitude and ascetic discipline.

His example inspired countless others. Hilarion, who lived in Gaza from 291 to 371, is credited with founding anchoritic life in Palestine. The tradition spread throughout the Christian world, adapting to different cultures and climates. The desert caves of Egypt became the stone cells of English parish churches.

After the Reformation largely ended the practice in Protestant countries, a few individuals kept the tradition alive in Catholic regions. Patrick Begley was an Irish anchorite who lived in a cell at Fore Abbey in the seventeenth century. Much more recently, an American woman named Nazarena of Jesus entered a Camaldolese abbey in Rome in 1945 and remained there in anchoritic enclosure until her death in 1990.

The Catholic Church still recognizes anchoritic life as a valid form of consecrated living. Canon 603 of the current Code of Canon Law mentions hermits and anchorites alongside monks and nuns as forms of dedicated religious life. Whether anyone is living as an enclosed anchorite today is difficult to know—by their very nature, such people avoid publicity.

What the Anchorites Can Teach Us

The anchorites seem impossibly foreign to modern sensibilities. We value mobility, connection, experience, variety. The idea of voluntarily confining oneself to a single small room for life strikes most of us as somewhere between incomprehensible and horrifying.

Yet there's something in their story that speaks to perennial human concerns. The desire to escape distraction. The longing for deep focus. The sense that our attention is fragmented by too many demands, pulled in too many directions at once.

The anchorites took these concerns to an absolute extreme. They didn't just limit their distractions—they eliminated everything except prayer and contemplation. They didn't just simplify their lives—they reduced existence to its barest essentials.

Whether we admire this or not, we can recognize the underlying impulse. In a world that demands we be everywhere at once, responsive to every notification, available at all hours, there's something almost refreshing about people who said: no. I will be in one place. I will attend to one thing. I will go deep rather than wide.

The anchorites made a wager that most of us would never make—that the inner life matters more than the outer one, that stillness can be more productive than motion, that saying no to everything else is the only way to say yes to what matters most.

Their cells are empty now, their bones long turned to dust. But the questions they asked with their lives—about what deserves our attention, about whether depth or breadth matters more, about what we might gain by radical subtraction—these questions haven't gone away. They might even be more urgent than ever.