Edward III gives to “three hermits and eight anchorite recluse persons within the city of London and in the suburbs thereof, to wit to each of them, 13s. 4d. in aid of their support.”[163] Welcomed on his landing, in 1399, by a seaside hermit called Matthew Danthorp, “in quodam loco called Ravenserespourne” (Ravenspur), Bolingbroke, {143} soon to be King Henry IV, grants him and all the hermits his successors a variety of favours, including the right to any waif or wreck cast by the sea on the sand for two leagues about his hermitage: “Cum wrecco maris, et wayfs et omnibus aliis proficuis et commoditatibus super sabulum per duas leucas circa eundem locum contingentibus imperpetuum,” in spite of any statute to the contrary.[164] Less brilliant fortunes and less holy a fame usually fell to the lot of English hermits of the fourteenth century. Those like Rolle of Hampole, doing ceaseless penance, consumed by divine love, were rare exceptions; they lived by preference in cottages, built at the most frequented parts of the highway, or at the entrance to bridges.[165] They throve there, like Godfrey Pratt,[166] on the charity of the passers-by; the bridge with its chapel was in itself almost a sacred building; the presence of the hermit sanctified it still further. He attended to the keeping in order of the building, or was supposed to do so, and was willingly given a farthing.[167] A strange race of men, which in that century of disorganization and reform, when everything seemed either to die or undergo a new birth, multiplied in spite of rules and regulations. They swelled the number of parasites of the religious edifice, cloaking under a dignified habit a life that was less so. These evil growths {144} clung, like moss in the damp of the cathedral, to the fissures of the stones, and by the slow work of centuries threatened the noble structure with ruin. What remedy was there? To mow down the ever-growing weeds was scarcely possible; a patient hand, guided by a vigilant eye, was needed to pluck them out one by one, and to fill up the interstices: saints can do this, but saints are rare. Episcopal prescriptions might often seem to do great work; a mere seeming. Though the heads were beaten down, the roots remained, and the lively parasite struck yet deeper into the heart of the wall. [Illustration 30. A HERMIT TEMPTED BY THE DEVIL. (_From the MS. 10 E. IV; English; Fourteenth Century._)]