CHAPTER XIV. THE RECLUSE. In the days of Bishop Goldwell, and towards the end of the existence of the palace of Wyke's Bishop, there lived a man who came from a far country, and took up his solitary abode at the head of the little stream which rose from the side of the hill, in the valley of Utford. He had existed twenty years in that secluded spot, and was never known to shave his head or trim his beard in the course of that period. In an age when superstition reigned supreme, and the poor dejected sinner knew not how to worship God in spirit and in truth, without flying from the face of men, and seeking something in solitude; in an age when the ministers of Rome taught that penance was meritorious, the self-immolating sacrifice of solitude became the surest way to obtain the crown of the saint; and many were the conscience-smitten convicts who were urged to depart from every tie of life, and give themselves up to the sternest impositions of devotion. They would retire from the world, live in a cave, kneel a certain number of hours on a hard stone before a cross in the wall of their cells, eat just enough coarse bread to keep life from departing, and drink of the water from some fountain sacred to their fancy. Amongst the ignorant, these men were looked upon with the most profound veneration, were esteemed paragons of excellence; the most virtuous, the most pious saints upon earth. Their names were handed down to posterity, their deeds mentioned with respect, whilst they themselves deceived their own hearts with the ideas of their own fancies for divinity. At the period of this narrative there existed a devotee of this kind, who went by the title of St. Ivan. He boasted his descent from Hurder the Dane; and, because his father, grandfather, or great-grandfather had been stolen, when a child in his mother's arms, and carried away by the chieftain, Hurder, during a Danish incursion, he called himself of Danish extraction. There was an Ivan de Linton, who originally built the chapel of Wyke's Bishop, and appointed priests to chaunt a requiem therein, for his father's soul, who was saved in the battle with the Danes upon Rushmere Heath, and died in a cottage or cave where an old man lived, at the Ufford Dell. A wild descendant of this Ivan came from Cambridgeshire, and became the St. Ivan celebrated for his solitary eccentricity. He was a physician in the latter part of the reign of Henry V.; so that he must have been an old man when he retired from the world. For twenty years he administered advice to all who came to him, and, as he recommended abstinence for a certain number of hours previously to his consideration of plethoric diseases, he obtained wonderful celebrity for the cure of the Holy Waters from St. Ivan's Spring. Thus the spot was called, and, to this day, bears the name on the Holy Wells.