For women as well as men entered these living tombs; and there spent
their days in dirt and starvation, and such prayer and meditation
doubtless as the stupified and worn-out intellect could compass;
their only recreation being the gossip of the neighbouring women,
who came to peep in through the little window--a recreation in which
(if we are to believe the author of "The Ancren Riwle") they were
tempted to indulge only too freely; till the window of the recluse's
cell, he says, became what the smith's forge or the alehouse has
become since--the place where all the gossip and scandal of the
village passed from one ear to another. But we must not believe
such scandals of all. Only too much in earnest must those seven
young maidens have been, whom St. Gilbert of Sempringham persuaded
to immure themselves, as a sacrifice acceptable to God, in a den
along the north wall of his church; or that St. Hutta, or Huetta, in
the beginning of the thirteenth century, who after ministering to
lepers, and longing and even trying to become a leper herself,
immured herself for life in a cell against the church of Huy near
Liege.

Fearful must have been the fate of these incluses if any evil had
befallen the building of which (one may say) they had become a part.
More than one in the stormy Middle Age may have suffered the fate of
the poor women immured beside St. Mary's church at Mantes, who, when
town and church were burnt by William the Conqueror, unable to
escape (or, according to William of Malmesbury, thinking it unlawful
to quit their cells even in that extremity), perished in the flames;
and so consummated once and for all their long martyrdom.

How long the practice of the hermit life was common in these islands