A tunica of russet furred with calaber

 

The religious life of the best known anchorites may just have overlapped in the 1390s.  Margaret Kirkby of Hampole was coming to the end of her life.  Julian of Norwich was being enclosed.

We know Margaret’s name because the mystic Richard Rolle had been her spiritual director and addressed his writing On the Contemplative Life to her by name.

We don’t know Julian’s name, so she has acquired that of the church to which her cell was attached, and where her reflection on her visions (or ‘shewings’) led to her writing Revelations of Divine Love.

In modern times Julian’s growing fame (as the first female English author) has eclipsed Margaret’s (as the preserver of Rolle’ story and writings).

But I discover that at this time there was an anchorite living less than 300 yards from my home.

I have been reading the Will of Geoffrey Lescropp (as it records his name) or le Scrope (as it is now more commonly written).  His name is pronounced ‘scroop’.

He was a Canon of Lincoln Cathedral and his Will was written ‘in my lodgings within the close’ shortly before he died in 1382.

He was well very connected.  His father had been Lord Chief Justice and his brother was made a Baron.  He also had an ordained nephew who was later to be Archbishop of York and still later to be executed for rebellion. 

The family will have known Bishop Henry Burghersh well.  Influence would have been behind the Bishop giving Geoffrey his canonry when aged only 25.  Both of Geoffrey’s parents’ coats of arms are certainly among those on the monuments in the chantry in the Cathedral which the Bishop founded.

One of his sisters married Sir Andrew Luttrell, whose father had commissioned the Luttrell Psalter, the greatest of the works of art and devotion created in Lincolnshire.

His bequests are sumptuous.  They include ‘my white silk cope with an orphry of blue velvet with the likeness of the apostles woven in gold’, left to the Cathedral alongside commissioning a silver gilt image of the Holy Trinity for a niche above the high altar.

There were also a bequest for each member of his large household.  Four of his servants were employed together: William the cook, Maurice of the kitchen, John the page of the kitchen and little William of the kitchen.  The last received 6s 8d.

And I find that he leaves money to five different anchorites, the first of whom (‘the anchorite of Hampole’) must be Margaret Kirkby.

The one I notice most is ‘the anchorite of the church of the Holy Trinity of Lincoln’.  This church stood on the terrace cut into the hillside at the foot of the Greestone Steps where school buildings and some cottages now stand.

He probably knew her well, and was certainly aware of her needs, as she is the only one of the five to whom he makes an additional more personal bequest.  He leaves her ‘a tunica of russet furred with calaber with a double hood and an armilausa of the same suit furred with grice’. 

So the tunicawas lined with squirrel fur, the armilausa (sleeveless, so perhaps it would have been a gilet today) with the soft underfleece of a pig once debristled.  Plain and warm, as guidance of the time suggested, although the furs feel as if they would have been expensive.

The picture of the rood is from St Peter in Eastgate where I went to a concert recently.  In the years since I last went in the remaining furnishings have been swept away to make a suitable setting for more puritan worship.