Anchorites were men and women who lived permanently enclosed in a cell attached to a church. In medieval England most of the known ones were women. The best known of them is Julian of Norwich, who wrote one of the most quoted lines in English religious writing from behind a wall. Almost everything popular retellings say about how she entered that cell is reconstruction, not record.
The Horror
In May 1373, at about thirty years old, Julian was gravely ill in Norwich. She received a series of visions, and she recovered on May 13. Those are the documented events. They are known from her own writing, not from any account of her enclosure.
The popular version of her story then runs as follows. A bishop reads the Office of the Dead over a living woman, she is given the last rites, dust is scattered over her, and a mason bricks up the door while she sings. Part of this is grounded in how anchorites were enclosed. The rite of consecration closely resembled the funeral rite, and in some places the bishop recited the Office of the Dead as the anchorite entered the cell and sometimes sealed the wall with his seal. But there is no surviving record of Julian’s own enclosure, and the rite attributed to her is a reconstruction. The last rites she received in 1373 were given because she was thought to be dying, which is a separate matter. It is also unconfirmed that she was an anchoress at the time of the visions, and her age on entering the cell is not recorded.
What can be documented is the cell. The anchorite’s cell had a window facing the sanctuary, a small shuttered opening through which she could see the altar, hear Mass and receive the Eucharist. A second window let in the people who looked after her physical needs. A third, often facing the street and covered with cloth, let in light. Wills from 1394 to 1416 name an anchoress called Julian at St Julian’s, Conisford, in Norwich. Around 1414 Margery Kempe wrote that she visited “Dame Jelyan” for spiritual counsel.
Enclosure was meant to be permanent. Some anchorites who thought of leaving feared damnation, and some refused to flee looters and died when their churches were burned. Women outnumbered men among them, about four to one in the thirteenth century and two to one in the fifteenth. Records support about 780 anchorites at 600 sites between 1100 and 1539, though the true number may be higher.
Julian’s name is itself uncertain. It may come from the church, or it may have been her Christian name. Whether she had been a nun first is unconfirmed, and the theory that she was a widowed mother who was never a nun is a scholarly view, not settled fact.
The Legend
Several details in popular retellings are not documented: that she was sprinkled with dust, that her property was distributed and her will read, that she sang as the last brick was laid, that the cell measured twelve feet by twelve, and that she was shut in for over forty years. The claim that she wrote from her cell while plague carts passed her window is also unconfirmed. The Black Death reached Norwich in 1348, when she was about six, and the visions came a generation later. The popular image of her living with a cat is linked to the rules for anchorites and is not documented for her.
The Modern Relic
Julian wrote two texts about her visions. The Short Text was written soon after, and the original is lost. The surviving copy is a fifteenth-century manuscript in the British Library. The Long Text was written decades later, probably from the 1390s, and revised into the 1410s or 1420s. It was first printed in 1670 under the title XVI Revelations of Divine Love. In it, Jesus says “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Her works are the earliest surviving English-language works attributed to a woman. “First book in English by a woman” goes slightly further than the evidence, because some anonymous works may have had female authors. She is last recorded in a bequest of 1416.
St Julian’s Church was destroyed by a direct hit on June 27, 1942, apart from the north wall. It was rebuilt and reopened in 1953. The cell itself had been demolished at the Reformation, so what stands now is a chapel built where it was. The church is open daily.
