spiritual father of the University of Cambridge in the old world;
and therefore of her noble daughter, the University of Cambridge, in
the new world which fen-men sailing from Boston deeps colonized and
Christianized 800 years after St. Guthlac's death.



ST. GODRIC OF FINCHALE



A personage quite as interesting, though not as famous, as Cuthbert
or Guthlac, is St. Godric; the hermit around whose cell rose the
Priory of Finchale. In a loop of the river Wear, near Durham, there
settled in the days of Bishop Flambard, between 1099 and 1128, a man
whose parentage and history was for many years unknown to the good
folks of the neighbourhood. He had come, it seems, from a hermitage
in Eskdale, in the parish of Whitby, whence he had been driven by
the Percys, lords of the soil. He had gone to Durham, become the
doorkeeper of St. Giles's church, and gradually learnt by heart (he
was no scholar) the whole Psalter. Then he had gone to St. Mary's
church, where (as was the fashion of the times) there was a
children's school; and, listening to the little ones at their
lessons, picked up such hymns and prayers as he thought would
suffice his spiritual wants. And then, by leave of the bishop, he
had gone away into the woods, and devoted himself to the solitary
life in Finchale. Buried in the woods and crags of the "Royal
Park," as it was then called, which swarmed with every kind of game,
there was a little flat meadow, rough with sweet-gale and bramble
and willow, beside a teeming salmon-pool. Great wolves haunted the