The anchorite’s cell was not always of the same shape or form. Sometimes it was partly or wholly underground; sometimes a grated window communicated with the outside and enabled the occupier to see and to be seen; sometimes the grated window was too high for the anchorite to see his visitors or to be seen by them. In the nunnery of Marmoustin at Tours there was an anchorite’s cell in which the occupant was totally secluded; at Royston there was a subterranean cell to which there was an approach from the outside and an opening on the top. The approach was probably blocked up when the recluse entered the cell and all communications were through the upper opening. At Bengeo, Herts. (see Appendix VII.), the anchorite’s cell consisted of a wooden hut placed against the north-east end of the chancel. It was eight feet long and six feet high; there was a recess in the wall for the anchorite’s bed and seat; there was an entrance into the church; perhaps the anchorite was a chantry priest. [Illustration: ALL HALLOWS, LONDON WALL] Sometimes there were two ankresses living in the churchyard, but not in the same cell. Henry the Fourth before his accession to the throne endowed an anchorite’s cell in a village of Lancashire. The ankress very often took care of the church and kept it clean. As regards London, the bequests to anchorites are numerous. We read of ankresses at St. Michael’s and St. Giles, Cornhill; at St. Giles, St. Benedict, and St. Mary Manny, we read of a lady getting so many square feet of ground for the purpose of building an anchorite’s cell; we read of anchorites at St. Albans, St. Giles, and Westminster Abbey. One of the earliest Old English works is the _Ancren Reiwle_ or Rule for Anchorites. It was written for three ladies who had resolved upon adopting the recluse life in a village in Dorsetshire. The author is doubtful. It was perhaps Richard Poor, Bishop successively of Chichester, Salisbury, and Durham, in which case it is older than 1237, the year of Richard Poor’s death; or else by Simon of Ghent, a native of London, Archdeacon of Oxford, 1284, Bishop of Salisbury, 1297. He died in 1315. The dates are of importance, because the recluse life would not seem to have become common before the middle of the thirteenth century, and it would further seem to have fallen into disuse by the end of the fourteenth century. The work itself seems to show that these ladies were adopting a new thing, or at least an unusual thing. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, we must remember that in every Monastic House, and in most churches, the cell of the anchorite was built against the chancel wall with an opening to allow the occupant to “see God,” _i.e._ to witness the elevation of the mass every day; that at all hours of the day and night were to be heard the prayers, the praises, the ejaculations, the groans of the man or woman thus buried alive.