accounts (there are two, both written by eye-witnesses) of his
personal appearance--a man of great breadth of chest and strength of
arm; black-haired, hook-nosed, deep-browed, with flashing grey eyes;
altogether a personable and able man, who might have done much work
and made his way in many lands. But what his former life had been
he would not tell. Mother-wit he had in plenty, and showed insight
into men and things which the monks of Durham were ready enough to
call the spirit of prophecy. After awhile it was whispered that he
wrought miraculous cures: that even a bit of the bread which he was
wont to eat had healed a sick woman; that he fought with daemons in
visible shape; that he had seen (just as one of the old Egyptian
hermits had seen) a little black boy running about between two monks
who had quarrelled and come to hard blows and bleeding faces because
one of them had made mistakes in the evening service: and, in
short, there were attributed to him, during his lifetime, and by
those who knew him well, a host of wonders which would be startling
and important were they not exactly the same as those which appear
in the life of every hermit since St. Antony. It is impossible to
read the pages of Reginald of Durham (for he, the biographer of St.
Cuthbert, is also the biographer of St. Godric) without feeling how
difficult it is to obtain anything like the truth, even from eye-
witnesses, if only men are (as they were in those days) in a state
of religious excitement, at a period of spiritual revivals. The
ignorant populace were ready to believe, and to report, anything of
the Fakeer of Finchale. The monks of Durham were glad enough to
have a wonder-working man belonging to them; for Ralph Flambard, in
honour of Godric, had made over to them the hermitage of Finchale,
with its fields and fisheries. The lad who, in after years, waited
on the hermit, would have been ready enough to testify that his
master saw daemons and other spiritual beings; for he began to see