But we have not yet done with the traces of these more distant practices. The various religious wanderers or solitary recluses, though belonging to a system long faded from our English life, find a perpetual epitaph in the directories of to-day. Thus we have still our ‘Pilgrims,’ or ‘Pelerins’ (‘John Pelegrim,’ A., ‘William le Pelerin,’ E.), as the Normans termed them. We may meet with ‘Palmers’ (‘Hervey le Palmer,’ A., ‘John le Paumer,’ M.) any day in the streets of our large towns, names distinctly relating the manner in which their owners have derived their title. The pilgrim may have but visited the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury; the latter, as his sobriquet proves, had, forlorn and weary, battled against all difficulties, and trod the path that led to the Holy Sepulchre— The faded palm-branch in his hand Showed pilgrim from the Holy Land.[184] The ‘Pardoner,’ with his pouch choked to the full (‘Walter le Pardoner,’ M.) with saleable indulgences, had but come from Rome. He was an itinerant retailer of ecclesiastic forgivenesses, and was as much a quack as those who still impose upon the credulity of the bucolic mind by selling cheap medicines. As Chaucer says of him— With feigned flattering and japes, He made the parson and the peple his apes. ‘Hermit’ I have failed to find as at present existing, though ‘Hermitage’ or ‘Armitage’ (‘John Harmaytayge,’ W. 3), as local names expressive of his abode, are by no means unfamiliar. Our ‘Anchors’ and ‘Ankers,’ however, still live to commemorate the old ancre or anchorite; he who, as his sobriquet implied, was wont to separate himself from the world’s vain pleasures and dwell in seclusion and solitude. In the ‘Romance of the Rose’ it is said— Sometime I am religious, Now like an anker in an house. Piers in his ‘Vision,’ too, speaks of— Ancres and heremites That holden them in their celles. ‘Hugh le Eremite’ or ‘Silvester le Hermite’ are early forms of the one, while in the other case we find the aspirate added in ‘John le Haneker.’ The modern dress of this latter, however, presents the usual early and more correct spelling.[185] What a vision is presented for our notice in these various sobriquets. It is the vision of a day that has faded, a day with many gleams of redeeming light, but a day of ignorance and lethargy; a day which, after all, thank God, was but the precursor of the brighter day of the Reformation, when the Church, true to herself and true to her destiny, threw off the shackles and the fetters that bound her, and began a work which her greatest foes have been compelled to admit she carried through amid opposition of the deadliest and most crushing kind.