at least, may be gathered from the involved bombast of Reginald.

Another pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre did Godric make before he
went to the hermitage in Eskdale, and settled finally at Finchale.
And there about the hills of Judaea he found, says Reginald, hermits
dwelling in rock-caves, as they had dwelt since the time of St.
Jerome. He washed himself, and his hair shirt and little cross, in
the sacred waters of the Jordan, and returned, after incredible
suffering, to become the saint of Finchale.

His hermitage became, in due time, a stately priory, with its
community of monks, who looked up to the memory of their holy father
Godric as to that of a demigod. The place is all ruinate now; the
memory of St. Godric gone; and not one in ten thousand, perhaps, who
visit those crumbling walls beside the rushing Wear, has heard of
the sailor-saint, and his mother, and that fair maid who tended them
on their pilgrimage.

Meanwhile there were hermits for many years in that same hermitage
in Eskdale, from which a Percy expelled St. Godric, possibly because
he interfered with the prior claim of some protege of their own; for
they had, a few years before Godric's time, granted that hermitage
to the monks of Whitby, who were not likely to allow a stranger to
establish himself on their ground.

About that hermitage hung one of those stories so common in the
Middle Ages, in which the hermit appears as the protector of the
hunted wild beast; a story, too, which was probably authentic, as
the curious custom which was said to perpetuate its memory lasted at
least till the year 1753. I quote it at length from Burton's