is more than my learning enables me to say. Hermits seem, from the
old Chartularies, {331} to have been not unfrequent in Scotland and
the North of England during the whole Middle Age. We have seen that
they were frequent in the times of Malcolm Canmore and the old
Celtic Church; and the Latin Church, which was introduced by St.
Margaret, seems to have kept up the fashion. In the middle of the
thirteenth century, David de Haigh conveyed to the monks of Cupar
the hermitage which Gilmichael the Hermit once held, with three
acres of land. In 1329 the Convent of Durham made a grant of a
hermitage to Roger Eller at Norham on the Tweed, in order that he
might have a "fit place to fight with the old enemy and bewail his
sins, apart from the turmoil of men." In 1445 James the Second,
king of Scots, granted to John Smith the hermitage in the forest of
Kilgur, "which formerly belonged in heritage to Hugh Cominch the
Hermit, and was resigned by him, with the croft and the green
belonging to it, and three acres of arable land."

I have quoted these few instances, to show how long the custom
lingered; and doubtless hermits were to be found in the remoter
parts of these realms when the sudden tempest of the Reformation
swept away alike the palace of the rich abbot and the cell of the
poor recluse, and exterminated throughout England the ascetic life.
The two last hermits whom I have come across in history are both
figures which exemplify very well those times of corruption and of
change. At Loretto (not in Italy, but in Musselburgh, near
Edinburgh) there lived a hermit who pretended to work miracles, and
who it seems had charge of some image of "Our Lady of Loretto." The
scandals which ensued from the visits of young folks to this hermit
roused the wrath of that terrible scourge of monks, Sir David
Lindsay of the Mount: yet as late as 1536, James the Fifth of