Sometimes we meet with a curious little house built of stone or timber, erected along the great highways, near some bridge or ford, wherein a "holy hermit" once dwelt, and served his generation by directing travellers to the nearest monastery or rectory, and spent his days in seclusion and prayer. Such indeed is the traditional idea of the hermit's life; but the real hermit of the Middle Ages did not always live a very lonely or ascetic life. He was supported by the alms of the charitable and did no work, but lived an idle life, endured no hardships, and escaped not the scoffs of the satirical. _Piers Ploughman_ tells us of workmen--"webbers and tailors, and carters' knaves, and clerks without grace, who liked not long labour and light wages; and seeing that lazy fellows in friars' clothing had fat cheeks, forsook their toil and turned hermits. They lived in boroughs among brewers and begged in churches." They had a good house, with sometimes a chaplain to say daily Mass for them, a servant or two to wait on them, and plenty of food and drink provided by a regular endowment or the donations of the charitable. They did not shut themselves up in their cells and hold no intercourse with their fellow-men; and herein they differed from the recluses who were not supposed to go outside the doors of their anchorages. Both males and females were enrolled as recluses, but only the latter seem to have taken upon themselves the vows of complete seclusion. Several of these hermitages remain. There is one at Little Budworth, in Cheshire, in the park of Sir Philip Egerton. Warkworth has a famous one, consisting of a chapel hewn out of the rock, with an entrance porch, and a long, narrow room with a small altar at the east end, wherein the hermit lived. At Knaresborough, Yorkshire, there is a good example of a hermitage, hewn out of the rock, consisting of a chapel, called St. Robert's Chapel, with groined roof, which was used as the living-room of the hermit. This chapel was the scene of Eugene Aram's murder. At Wetheral, near Carlisle; Lenton, near Nottingham; on the banks of the Severn, near Bewdley, Worcestershire, there are anchorages, and also at Brandon, Downham, and Stow Bardolph, in Norfolk. Spenser in the _Faery Queen_ gives the following description of a hermit's cell:-- "A little lowly hermitage it was, Down by a dale, hard by a forest's side, Far from resort of people that did pass In traveill to and froe; a little wyde There was an holy Chappell edifyde, Wherein the hermite dewly wont to say His holy things, each morne and eventyde; Hereby a chrystall streame did gently play, Which from a sacred fountaine welled forth alway."