The abbot, too, sometimes gave license to the monks to go and see their friends, or to pass two or three days at one or other of the manors of the house for recreation; and sometimes he took a monk with him on his own journeys. In a MS. romance, in the British Museum (Add. 10,293, f. 11), is a representation of a monk with his hood on, journeying on horseback. We give here, from the St. Alban's Book (Nero, D. vii.), a woodcut of an abbot on horseback, with a hat over his hood--"an abbot on an ambling pad;" he is giving his benediction in return to the salute of some passing traveller. Hermitages or anchorages sometimes depended on a monastery, and were not necessarily occupied by brethren of the monastery, but by any one desirous to embrace this mode of life whom the convent might choose. The hermit, however, probably, usually wore the habit of the order. The monastery often supplied the hermit with his food. In a picture in the MS. romance, before quoted (Add. 10,292, f. 98), is a representation of a knight-errant on horseback, conversing by the way with a clerk, who is carrying bread and wine to a hermitage. The woodcut with which we conclude, from the Harleian MS., 1,527, represents the characteristic costume of three orders of religious with whom we have been concerned--a bishop, an abbot, and a clerk. [Illustration: _Bishop, Abbot, and Clerk._] THE HERMITS AND RECLUSES OF THE MIDDLE AGES. CHAPTER I. THE HERMITS. We have already related, in a former chapter (p. 3), that the ascetics who abandoned the stirring world of the Ægypto-Greek cities, and resorted to the Theban desert to lead a life of self-mortification and contemplation, frequently associated themselves into communities, and thus gave rise to the coenobitical orders of Christendom. But there were others who still preferred the solitary life; and they had their imitators in every age and country of the Christian world. We have not the same fulness of information respecting these solitaries that we have respecting the great orders of monks and friars; but the scattered notices which remain of them, when brought together, form a very curious chapter in the history of human nature, well worthy of being written out in full. The business of the present paper, however, is not to write the whole chapter, but only to select that page of it which relates to the English solitaries, and to give as distinct a picture as we can of the part which the Hermits and Recluses played on the picturesque stage of the England of the Middle Ages.