The little Church of St Julian (in use at this day) still keeps from
Norman times its dark round tower of flint rubble, and still there
are traces about its foundation of the anchorage built against its
south-eastern wall. "This Church was founded," says the History of
the County, "before the Conquest, and was given to the nuns of Carhoe
(Carrow) by King Stephen, their founder; it hath a round tower and
but one bell; the north porch and nave are tiled, and the chancel is
thatched. There was an image of St Julian in a niche of the wall of
the Church, in the Churchyard." Citing the record of a burial in "the
churchyard of St Julian, the King and Confessor," Blomefield observes:
"which shews that it was not dedicated to St Julian, the Bishop, nor St
Julian, the Virgin."
The only knowledge that we have directly from Julian as to any part
of her history is given in her account of the time and manner in
which the Revelation came, and of her condition before and during and
after this special experience. She tells how on the 13th day of May,
1373,[1] the Revelation of Love was shewed to her, "a simple creature,
unlettered," who had before this time made certain special prayers from
out of her longing after more love to God and her trouble over the
sight of man's sin and sorrow. She had come now, she mentions, to the
age of thirty, for which she had in one of these prayers, desired to
receive a greater consecration,--thinking, perhaps, of the year when
the Carpenter's workshop was left by the Lord for wider ministry,--she
was "thirty years old and an half." This would make her birth-date
about the end of 1342, and the old Manuscript says that she "was yet in
life" in 1442. Julian relates that the Fifteen consecutive "Shewings"
lasted from about four o'clock till after nine of that same morning,
that they were followed by only one other Shewing (given on the night
of the next day), but that through later years the teaching of these
Sixteen Shewings had been renewed and explained and enlarged by the
more ordinary enlightenment and influences of "the same Spirit that
shewed them." In this connection she speaks, in different chapters, of
"fifteen years after and more," and of twenty years after, "save three
months"; thus her book cannot have been finished before 1393.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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